Les innocentes

This is cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s third collaboration with Anne Fontaine and her first film using digital recording technology. As in Des hommes et des dieux (director: Xavier Beauvois), here Champetier is devoting herself to capturing the monastic-spiritual domain. The fictional plot is based on real events from the final phase of the Second World War. Both German and Soviet soldiers have committed murders and rapes in a Polish convent. A young sister in the Red Cross, Mathilde Beaulieu, helps the Benedictine nuns to give birth to the children that have resulted – even though this means violating religious prohibitions. She questions the nuns’ obedience and seeks instead to give life meaning again in tumultuous times. Filmed in an abandoned old baroque church and partly using existing sets, as well as ones built for the film, Les innocentes is a nocturnal work that radiates from within the darkness. In the bluish-grey of the half-shadows, candles and oil lamps but also faces come all the more into their own. The many long shots exert a pull and make it possible to comprehend the struggle between doubt and faith. The camera brings out all the expressiveness of the protagonists’ looks and skin because this, Champetier is saying, is where the sisters reveal their unveiled selves.