Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2022: #42. Ursula Meier’s La ligne

Published on January 11, 2022

La ligne

Excluding her docu features, Ursula Meier is now at the three feature film mark with La ligne (The Line) – a project that began lensing in Switzerland around this time last year. Co-written by Stéphanie Blanchoud, Antoine Jaccoud and Meier (with additional help from Robin Campillo and Nathalie Najem), this stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, India Hair, Benjamin Biolay and Blanchoud as Margaret — this reunites the filmmaker with with her cinematographer Agnès Godard. Meier moves from shipwrecked family in 2008’s Home to disproportionately supporting one’s sibling in 2012’s L’enfant d’en haut to a film that pokes the family tree with a stick.

Gist: After violently attacking her mother Christina during an argument, Margaret is arrested by the police and ordered not to go within 200 metres of the family home. “Locked out”, Margaret (Blanchoud) will never stop trying to make amends for her actions and this imaginary line will crystallize all the tensions in this dysfunctional family.

Release Date/Prediction: We think it might be a return to the Berlinale competition.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).