I saw this film yesterday, with my husband and our HPV-vaccine injured daughter. It filled my eyes with tears and my heart with anger. It is just the same story with all the HPV-vaccine youngsters all around the world that got harmed and no one is helping them
Déçue que Sidse Babett ne soit pas la gagnante. Elle a rendu le personnage d'Irène émouvante et attachante et j'ai vraiment aimé ce film. J'espère que les danois pourront le voir trés vite.
Laurent Weil : Hello everyone and welcome in "Rencontres de cinéma" which will today focus on Emmanuelle Bercot's new film "La Fille de Brest" after "Elle s'en va" and "La Tête Haute", here is "La Fille de Brest". The true story of the pulmonologist of Brest hospital, Irène Frachon, who revealed the Mediator scandal. A medicine that would at first be used against diabetes, then as an appetite suppressant and whose secondary effects led to the death of hundreds of people, deaths due to cardiovascular complications. Almost 'alone against all', Irène Frachon will lead an incredible fight, comparable to Erin Brokovich's. Irène Frachon embodied here with strength and conviction by the Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen - notably seen in Borgen and Westworld and mainly next to Fabrice Luchini in "L'Hermine". "La Fille de Brest", a movie that strikes like a thunderclap. Thank you very much to you both for being with us today as your new film "La Fille de Brest" is coming out. Beyond the story, beyond the scandal, isn't it above all the character of Irène Frachon that you found interesting? Emmanuelle Bercot : Yes, completely. This case, this story which is exciting, thrilling, whatever, I wouldn't have made a film on it without Irène Frachon's personality. It's really her, this exceptional woman and also this very colourful temperament which offset the gravity of the case that made me want to do the movie. I read the book I was offered to adapt and I said "No. As a citizen I am appalled, I am taken by what I'm reading but I don't do such movies." The producers insisted on me meeting Irène and they were right because it's when I met her that everything shifted. Laurent Weil : It's funny you say "I don't do such movies", you mean not about this story or this kind of cinema? E.B.: This story was calling for it to be a thriller, it's a genre I never worked on and maybe it indeed scared me. I really didn't feel in familiar territory. L.W.: Sidse, were you also scared when Emmanuelle offered you to work on this film? S.B.K.: Scared? Yes. L.W.: By the depth of the subject, by the depth of Irène Frachon's character? S.B.K.: No, more by the idea of playing a French person that everyone - well I had the impression that the French all had an image of this lady in mind. And also it's quite a responsibility to play someone who's still alive. But I met her very quickly after I was offered to work on the project and she's also a very generous woman and I really had the impression that she gave me the right to do what I wanted. The idea that we take her story, that there is more light put on this subject, from there: everything's fine. L.W.: Did you try to look like her or not at all? S.B.K.: No. I didn't try to look like her. On the other hand there were several points on which she inspired me. And I was more trying to find a parallel version of her rather than a pure imitation. L.W.: It's a true great film but I understand your trouble because as it's a true story, as it's still a burning subject - that's even what is said at the end of the movie, the mediator is still a topical matter - so of course you don't want to betray anything but it's also for the cinema. E.B.: In her way to tell her story - Irène - she talks a lot about the fact that she felt she was in a movie, that reality was going beyond fiction, that she pinched herself in the morning thinking "It can't be true, it's crazy, I'm in a thriller, what's happening? Am I going to wake up?". And I thought - as I really wanted to paint her portrait and above all tell the story from her point of view, with her from the beginning to the end so that the spectator is with her from one end to another - well telling this story as a thriller was actually doing justice to the way she lived it because that's how she felt it and it enabled me to do cinema. L.W.: And does it change, working with a foreign actress? E.B.: Yes, it changes everything. Nothing's the same. She's a great actress and she's got a huge intelligence which is not given to everybody but let's say we also have it here, we can also come across that, but she's got - I think by her educational background, her experience, an Anglo-Saxon method which implies that she works enormously, that she worked like crazy to have a fluent flow in French and I wanted her to speak really fast and she really was into it with me. We would meet up in the morning, we'd search, discuss a lot. It's a luxury I am not necessarily used to. S.B.K.: I enjoyed integrating "norfenfluramine" in my language, approaching the word, chewing it, eating it. And at some point I had said it so many times that it came out naturally. It did something for my character, it helped me create something. E.B.: And she adores her job. L.W.: Because the film is serious, because the story is so dramatic, because it's about death and an appalling scandal, I find that you very often defuse these scenes with humour, with a little pirouette. I don't know if it's you Sidse, the human being or the actress, but I think it serves the film a lot. S.B.K.: Well, it's already in the writing. I laughed a lot while reading it. L.W.: Yes because there is some humour. S.B.K.: There is. Everything's written with humour and with a lot of - I would say, humanity. It's written like a real character with many angles but there were also things that were created by, by.. I made some little jokes but inbetween the takes, I would never have thought, in my life, to do that as Irène Frachon and she said "That's what you're going to use now." L.W.: Irène Frachon - it's really 'alone against all'. Did you too, at some point before, during, after the shooting feel 'alone against all'? E.B.: It's funny that you ask this but - relatively speaking because we don't save lives - but when I make a movie I have the feeling that it's a war and that I am the war chief and that all the others, the actors, the technicians are my army. I am lucky enough to have really good soldiers who always have my back, they don't let me down. But I wage a war every morning. And it's funny because Michel Hazanavicius - whom you know - has seen the movie and beside what he thinks about it, the first thing he told me was: "You actually made a film about you." We have to be fighters otherwise we cry, we go home, we give up everything after the second day. We constantly fight for a film, right? L.W.: Generally when we have operations, it's often shot from a distance, anyway not - forgive my saying - but not directly with them "getting their hands dirty". Was it necessary for the veracity of the statement to shoot these operation scenes as if you really were in the middle of it? E.B.: It's a way to do justice to the victims and not to let the spectator in the abstract that a medicine destroys heart valves "oh that's a shame." L.W.: You show them. E.B.: We show them in the flesh, in the organs of the victims and sometimes the consequences of all that at the cost of their lives. And I wanted the spectators to be able - if they have the courage to watch it because some find it hard - but that they can also feel it, physically, organically that it was why Irène Frachon had fought like this because she saw her patient, mother of three, butchered on an autopsy table and she found herself with the heart of her patient in her hands. L.W.: For you she's a modern times heroin, Irène Frachon? How would you define her? S.B.K.: Yes, exactely, a heroin. I watched "Elle s'en va" before meeting Emmanuelle and I saw a portrait of an extraordinary woman. E.B.: These are two women's portraits and they are very vigorous and solar women. Who don't have the same concerns but yes they are two portraits of beautiful women. L.W.: Thank you very much to you both.
She doesn't have a very French accent and definitely not the Brest accent. She obviously speaks excellent French with no grammar or vocabulary mistakes.
Oh god, I desperately need to see this film. Can I watch it online or buy it? Will they release it on DVD? I live in Turkey so I don't think that I'll be able to watch the film at the cinema. I guess it's a festival film. Is it?
