Winner of France's Jean Vigo Award for the year's most remarkable debut, La France mixes genres – period romance, war movie and pop album – to confoundingly pleasurable effect.
A heady experiment full of soul... This is something new, not to be missed.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2008
La France 2007
Winner of France's Jean Vigo Award for the year's most remarkable debut, the elegantly assured La France mixes genres - period romance, war movie and pop album - to confoundingly pleasurable effect. As WWI rages, Camille (Sylvie Testud) receives a letter from her husband at the front, telling her that she will never see him again. Determined to prove him wrong, she sets off, disguised as a boy, to find him. She falls in with a lost regiment she meets in a forest, and their strange, detached war-weary world becomes the landscape of her romantic quest. In the film's most amazing invention, the action pauses while the men gather to sing their hearts out - to tunes that might have been written 45 years later. — BG. "Sublime... a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the chapel of pop." — Kimberly Chun, San Francisco Bay Guardian.