EMPORTE-MOI
SET ME FREE |
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Director:
Léa Pool
Screenplay: Léa Pool with Nancy Huston and Monique H. Messier.
Cast: Karine Vanasse, Pascale Bussières, Miki Manojlovic, Nancy
Huston, Alexandre Mérineau.
Awards: Best Screenplay, Chicago Int’l Film Festival (1999);
Best Canadian Film, Toronto Film Critics Association Awards & Toronto
International Film Festival (1999).
Running time: 94'
Year of production: 1999
Rating: Not rated
Gauge: 35mm (color and B & W)
Distributor: Artistic License
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"Propelled
by a captivating, wrenching performance by Karine Vanasse as Hanna,
adrift in a sea of powerful emotions in Montreal in 1963, the heartfelt
Set Me Free is simultaneously an insightful family portrait, a homage
to the French New Wave and a testament to the potential of film to
shape and redeem life." Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York
Times. |
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Growing
up in a working-class district of Montréal in 1963, Hanna (Vanasse),
the 13-year-old daughter of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father,
finds herself classed an outsider by the narrow provincial standards
of her peers. At home she struggles to cope with the explosive, often
destructive, relationship between her parents, a relationship she
fails to understand and gradually realizes she is powerless to change.
At the cinema she finds solace in the figure of the philosophical
prostitute Nana, in Godard's film Vivre sa vie. Empowered by the notion
of existential freedom embodied by the heroine, Hanna sets out to
refashion her life. She embarks on a relationship with another outcast
in her class, Laura, but soon finds herself sharing Laura's affection
with her own brother in a tentative ménage à trois.
Unsatisfied, she turns to the adult world, only to feel betrayed both
by her favorite teacher and by a casual encounter in the street. Finally,
Hanna takes up a super-8 camera and begins to reconstruct her world
on film. Pool draws on her own childhood, including a volatile relationship
with her father, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, to imbue her film with
authentic detail and emotional truth.
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| PHOTO Courtesy
of Artistic License |
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