Back to Normandy

Retour en Normandie, France 2007

Admirably direct with its storytelling but enormously rich in its resonance, Nicolas Philibert's follow-up to To Be and To Have sees him embark on a geographical and chronological journey that embraces both the political and personal. In 1975, Philibert assisted director René Allio on a film inspired by Michel Foucault's book, Moi, Pierre Rivière…, about a murder that took place in the 1830s; his work included finding and persuading local farming folk to act in the film. Three decades on, he returned to Normandy to catch up with those people. From this simple conceit, Philibert develops an extraordinary wealth of interrelated themes, including memory, history, crime, madness, family ties and rural life, in a film that's wonderfully warm, wise, funny and philosophical. A work of great understatement, modesty and discretion, it is also, by the end, extremely moving. – Northwest Film Forum