Victoria Film Festival 2020

Page 44

Canadian Premiere

ALICE

Director: Josephine Mackerras France | 2019 | 103 min Grand Jury Award I SXSW Best Film I Raindance Film Festival Sat February 8 I 9:00 pm I Capitol 6 Wed February 12 I 9:00 pm I SilverCity 3

We first meet Alice in her cozy domestic life with her husband Francois, an adoring father to their toddler Jules. Francois, a writer who quotes romantic poems on cue, appears to be very much in love with his wife. One morning however, he leaves the house looking stressed, and later that day Alice finds her credit cards don’t work. After a visit to her bank, the young woman learns the awful truth: her husband has not only burned through their finances because of a prostitution addiction, but he also stopped paying their mortgage more than a year earlier. The bank gives Alice an ultimatum: if she doesn’t come up with 8,000 euros in two weeks, and maintain a

payment plan for the foreseeable future, she and her son will be evicted. Desperate and trying to understand her husband’s choices, Alice goes undercover to visit the service he used — only to be offered a job. What sets Alice apart is that rather than becoming a tale of degradation, the film is a refreshing take on betrayal and desperation, bringing humour and distance to the most difficult of life’s scenarios. First-time feature filmmaker Josephine Mackerras’s direction and on-point acting delivered by Emilie Piponnier who plays Alice, make the film a pearl that’s difficult to forget. - Kinga Binkowska

P R E SEN T ED BY: CLICK HERE for French Translation

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