User Score
0 votes
At the tip of Brittany, the island of Ouessant—a grassy heathland swept by sea winds—is the last land before America. Given its geographical situation, it is a place that opens wide the doors of imagination. A Girl from Ouessant is an invented and, at the same time very documented, cartography of the island. This methodical statement starts as the diary of Éléonore Saintagnan, the resident artist-filmmaker at the Créac’h semaphore station, an ideal site for observing the surrounding area. Then, the account shifts towards a playful mise en scène, peopled with sailors’ wives, kelp burners, stories of little black sheep or countless shipwrecks… Drawing on the regional archives filmed in black and white dating from a time when the island lived mainly from fishing, the game begins.
Director
Status
Released
Original Language
FR
In 1953, a sensitive French boy finds out from a neighbor that his family's Jewish. François Grimbert becomes a physician, and gradually peels the layers of his buried family history which resulted in his difficult upbringing, raised as Catholic by his "Aryan" appearing parents. His athletic father labored to stamp out stereotypical Jewish characteristics he perceived in his son, to keep the family's many secrets, as most relatives fought in World War II, and later were hauled off to labor and death camps by the Gestapo.
