Pardonnez moi

In the genre documentary ego documents, the director/actress Maïwenn seeks with increasing vehemence the boundaries of a direct confrontation with reality. Pardonnez-moi starts with home-movie material of the little Maïwenn as she looks into the camera. Then we see her on stage, when she has chosen to be an actress, something that evokes a great deal of opposition from her father. Later, the pregnant actress decides to leave the stage and make a documentary about her family. Now she becomes the character Violette and a document is created that is partly spontaneous and partly staged. Encouraged by her psychiatrist, she buys a hand-held camera and embarks on her meticulous unravelling of the secrets that drive her family apart as much as they keep it together. Mother, sweetheart, sisters, a former lover, they all turn up in a series of stormy encounters and confessions in which the director is, as it were, tightrope walking above an abyss filled with traumas. Where the denouement doesn’t come of its own accord, she forces it to. At the epicentre of this cinematographic self-exploration is her difficult relationship with her violent father. In the presence of a girlfriend and armed with the camera, she finally confronts him, in an uneasy and revealing climax, on his guilt and in doing so seeks the source of her greatest pain. (SdH)

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