The Facets Cinémathèque is located at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. in Chicago. For more information on films playing in the Cinémathèque, please call 773-281-4114. To order advance tickets online, visit the TicketWeb website by clicking here.
Chicago Theatrical Premiere
HADEWIJCH
WINNER
FIPRESCI Prize Toronto Intl Film Fest
"Thought-provoking, troubling, and inevitably frightening, it provides the most overt psychological portraiture yet seen in a [Bruno] Dumont work" -IndieWire
"Those who follow [Dumont's wavelength]...will find themselves in the rarefied territory of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer" -New York Times
-TimeOut NY
"A beautiful and mysterious work with a rhythm all its own" -Salon.com
"Dumont is in touch with something timeless" -San Francisco Chronicle
"[Dumont] arrives at one of his most provocative existential inquiries into the nature of human violence yet" -Reverse Shot
"A provocation in a more serene key than we're used to from this director (Humanité, Twentynine Palms)... [Dumont] sets up Hadewijch as a series of hypotheticals, finding no shortage of poetry along the way" -TimeOut Chicago
½ "Stern and pictorially bold... [Hadewijch] reaches high without becoming pious about its intentions" -Chicago Tribune
In one of his most uncompromising works to date, Bruno Dumont (Life of Jesus, L'Humanité) undertakes a topical exploration of the psychology of religious extremism and martyrdom. Expelled from a convent for her overzealous faith, teenage Céline (Julie Sokolowski) reluctantly returns to a life of comfort and privilege as the daughter of a French government minister. Impatient to find her true purpose, she befriends Yassin, a young Arab man from the projects who introduces her to Nassir, his fundamentalist brother. Together they seek the perfect expression of commitment despite the difference in their religions, as Dumont exposes the consequences of divine grace and madness.
As enigmatic as its unforgettable heroine, Bruno Dumont's cinema is consistently fascinated with extreme behavior and absolutism. In Hadewijch he responds to the writings of the titular Flemish poet who claimed that God and love are one and the same. Hadewijch is a movie on a quest: at once a sincere theological inquiry and a provocative political meditation.
Directed by Bruno Dumont, France, 2009, 35mm, 105 mins. In French with English subtitles.