The Innocents — U.S. Trailer

source:   musicboxfilms.com, youtube.com

added: Fri, Jun 17th '16

With her 2013's provocative drama "Adore," which starred Naomi Watts and Robin Wright as two mothers who have affairs with each other's 20-year-old sons, French filmmaker Anne Fontaine didn't shy away from a controversial subject. She is once again tackling a difficult topic in her latest critically acclaimed WWII film "The Innocents," which concerns a young French Red Cross doctor who is called in to help several pregnant and traumatized Polish nuns who were viciously raped by a group of Russian soldiers during the immediate aftermath of the war.

Based on a heart-breaking true story, the 1945-set film stars French actress Lou de Laage (Breathe) as Mathilde Beaulieu, a young French medical physician working in Poland at the end of WWII as a Red Cross medic. After agreeing to go to a local convent and look at a gravely ill nun, she unknowingly is drawn into a world of fear, faith, guilt, and ultimately survival.

Co-starring Polish actress Agata Kulesza (who also starred in the Oscar-winning Polish nun drama "Ida"), "The Innocents" will be released in New York and Los Angeles on July 1st with other cities to follow.

synopsis:
Warsaw, December 1945: the second World War is finally over and French Red Cross doctor Mathilde (Lou de Laage) is treating the last of the French survivors of the German camps. When a panicked Benedictine nun appears at the clinic begging Mathilde to follow her back to the convent, what she finds there is shocking: a holy sister about to give birth and several more in advanced stages of pregnancy. A non-believer, Mathilde enters the sisters' fiercely private world, dictated by the rituals of their order and the strict Rev. Mother (Agata Kulesza, Ida). Fearing the shame of exposure, the hostility of the occupying Soviet troops and local Polish communists and while facing an unprecedented crisis of faith, the nuns increasingly turn to Mathilde as their beliefs and traditions clash with harsh realities.

 

directed by   Anne Fontaine

starring   Lou de Laage, Agata Kulesza

release date   July 1, 2016 (NY and LA; other cities to follow)