INNOCENCE

The lid is off the coffin and out pops Iris, the new kid in a strange girls' school where obedience is paramount. The girls wear hair ribbons color-coded by age, ballet is the most important class and the 12-year-olds disappear each night, under strict orders not to reveal their whereabouts to the younger girls. A visionary film by the frequent collaborator of Gaspar Noé (IRREVERSIBLE), INNOCENCE taps into the angst of adolescence with a chilling beauty and a fairy-tale sense of allegory. Best New Director, 2004 San Sebastian and FIPRESCI prize, 2005 Istanbul Film Festivals.

DIR/SCR Lucile Hadzihalilovic, from the novella Mine-Haha by Frank Wedekind; PROD Patrick Sobelman. France, 2004, color, scope, 115 min. In French with English subtitles. NOT RATED

Director Lucile Hadzihalilovic describes how she adapted Wedekind's novella for film:

"When writing the script, I realized that above all I shouldn't try to explain anything. Any explanation brought the whole edifice tumbling down like a house of cards. The changes I made are, therefore, factual.

For example, in Wedekind's text, we follow the same girl through all her years at the school. It would have been difficult for me to find several different children to play the same girl at different ages, so I split the heroine into three characters: Iris, the youngest girl, who arrives at the school; Alice, who has already spent several years there and rebels; and Bianca, who is at the end of the school cycle and represents a young girl shaped by it. During the film, there is a relay from one to the other. What's more, this enabled me to maintain a certain unity of time by fitting the story into one year, marked by the rhythm of passing seasons."

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