The Innocents

This film is a sort of fairy tale for the two young screenwriters Alice Vial & Sabrina B. Karine: remarked at the International Screenwriters’ Festival in 2011, Le Groupe Ouest awarded them a prize and a fortnight later they were invited to take part in Le Groupe Ouest Annual Selection. With a group of six writers, the program consisted of four writing coaching sessions in-residency in Plounéour-Brignogan-Plages, Nord-Finistère, on their feature film project: “Les Innocentes” at that time called “Au nom de la mère”. For nine months, they were coached in situ, on line, then in situ again, near the seagulls, the sea breeze, and debriefings at the Café du Port with their tutors, Marcel Beaulieu and Yann Apperry..

Working together their story began to take the form of some gigantic battle: “Poland, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a French Red Cross nurse discovers in a convent near Warsaw, that raped by Russian soldiers, some thirty nuns are about to give birth,…”. They were told a « true » story but were unable to find the slightest reliable trace of it. The facts had been hidden, given the taboos at the time… They had to re-invent everything, to immerse themselves in the drama, to bring it to life and unearth its intimate substance. A year at Le Groupe Ouest enabled them to lay a solid enough foundation for Isabelle Grellat (Mandarin Cinéma), who had discovered them at the International Screenwriters’ Festival, and excited by the challenge, decided to come on board as producer. The first challenge was to find a director who could take on such a project.

But Alice and Sabrina need to delve further into their titanic project, to refine it. Le Groupe Ouest introduced them to its long-standing partner, the TorinoFilmLab. Selected for the TorinoFilmLab, Alice and Sabrina returned in 2012 to work on the beaches of Le Groupe Ouest, this time with a Dutch consultant, Anita Voorham. It felt like the final lap. The two screenwriters worked like slaves, aware of the importance of their subject and its powerfully feminine perspective of the horror of war.

The arrival of film-director, Anne Fontaine on the project announced the home run. A little more tweaking enabled the director to appropriate the script in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, and Alice and Sabrina were to discover this disconcerting but magnificent part of the screenwriter’s job: handing the baby over. Movie making is team work so we might as well get used to it, they said. At the first screenings, the two young women were staggered : the film was there, it was indeed the story they’d patiently sculpted for five years, it was real, palpable, its sensibility intact. The directing and the photography was outstanding.

In January 2016, the film was presented at Robert Redford’s Sundance. “Les Innocentes” is the first European film since 2003 to be among the 2016 revelations shown in world premieres.

Synopsis

Poland, December 1945.
A Polish nun asks Mathilde Beaulieu, a young Red Cross intern in charge of caring for French survivors before they are repatriated, to help her.
At first reticent, Mathilde finally accepts to follow the nun to her convent, where thirty Benedictine nuns live cut off from the world. She discovers that several of them who had been raped by Soviet soldiers are due to give birth.
Little by little, complex relationships form between Mathilde, an atheist and rationalist, and the nuns, commited to the rules of their vocation, which danger, the clandestinity of the treatment, and new dramas will complicate even further.

Alice Vial & Sabrina B. Karine working in Plounéour-Brignogan in 2011 | © Brigitte Bouillot