Mouchette

Director: Robert Bresson

1967 / 81min / 35mm

Bresson was an artist preoccupied with faith and redemption, to be sure, but he also looked long and unblinkingly at suffering and despair as few filmmakers ever had or would. His second Bernanos adaptation, beginning a long engagement with the question of suicide, tells the story of a neglected and impoverished girl (Nadine Nortier) hemmed in on all sides by her brutal provincial milieu. In Bresson’s hands her sorrow becomes sacred, though perhaps no moment is more heartbreaking than her brief glimpse of joy at a country fair.

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of The Year Begins in Silence