Augustine – Alice Winocour
Buzz: Selected as a Special Screening status for this year’s Critics’ Week, it was no secret to us that Alice Winocour was going to premiere her directorial debut at a festival that has strongly supported her as a screenwriter. Scribe for 2009′s Ordinary People, we dug her outline for 2008′s Home, which was a flawed directing outing for Ursula Meier. With a strong trio of players in Vincent Lindon, Soko and Chiara Mastroianni, we certainly think that this might announce the arrival of a new French helmer worth keeping tabs on.
Gist: Paris, winter 1885. At the Pitié -Salpêtriere Hospital, Professor Charcot is studying a mysterious illness : hysteria. Augustine, 19 years old, becomes his favorite guinea pig, the star of his demonstrations of hypnosis. The object of his studies will soon become the object of his desire…
"Attenberg formed abruptly as a film that observes the human species as little animals who are scared of their reproductive system... Observing them in the manner of nature documentaries. Sir David Attenborough's documentaries move me to tears. I consider them highly poetic, scientific melodramas."
