The woman who sings - incendies

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Movie
German title The woman who sings - incendies
Original title Incendies
Incendies Logo.png
Country of production Canada
original language French , Arabic
Publishing year 2010
length 133 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 14
Rod
Director Denis Villeneuve
script Denis Villeneuve
Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne
production Luc Déry
Kim McCraw
music Grégoire Hetzel
camera André Turpin
cut Monique Dartonne
occupation

The Woman Who Sings - Incendies is a 2010 Canadian film based on the drama Burns by Wajdi Mouawad . Parts of the story are based on the life story of Souha Bechara .

action

The secretary Nawal worked in Canada for the notary Jean Lebel, who sees and treats her and her children as part of his family after the death of his wife. After her death, Lebel reads her last will to her adult children, the twins Jeanne and Simon. In it, she writes that she wants to be buried naked face down in an anonymous grave. He also hands them two letters. Jeanne receives a letter for their father, whom the twins have never met, Simon receives a letter for another son of their mother who has not yet been known to them. Only when these letters have been handed over should Nawal be allowed to put a tombstone with her name on it.

While Simon hesitates to take his mother's last will seriously, Jeanne travels to her mother's fictional country of birth (generally corresponding to today's Lebanon ), where Nawal grew up.

A flashback shows how the young, pregnant Nawal has to watch how her lover and father of her child is shot by her brothers because he, as a Muslim refugee, threatens the honor of the family. Immediately after the birth, the son is taken away from her; a little later she herself was expelled and sent to live with an uncle in the northern part of the country, where she began studying. Tensions within the country between fundamentalists and liberals are escalating and civil war breaks out, particularly in the south - the home of her family. Nawal flees the city and travels to the orphanage where her son was given and finds only a ruin. She then survived a militant Christian anti-Muslim massacre in a fully occupied bus and then joined an Islamist organization in order to take revenge. She finally shoots an important functionary, for which she has to go to prison for 15 years.

Jeanne finds out that Nawal is still notorious and hated for this in her home village. She learns from a former prison guard that while in custody, Nawal was raped by a torturer named Abou Tarek and became pregnant by him. However, it was not possible to break Nawal in prison; she is only known there as "the woman who sings". Jeanne is overwhelmed by the flood of new information about her mother's life and begs Simon to come to her.

Simon and Lebel follow Jeanne. The twins find and meet the former prison midwife and to their shock it is discovered that it was not their unknown brother but they who were conceived and born in the prison. The midwife saved the siblings and later reunited them with their mother after they were released. Nawal was subsequently made possible a new life in Canada through the connections of the militia leader for whom she fought before her arrest. Simon now meets this former leader and learns from him about the fate of the half-brother. He and the other children were taken from the orphanage by the said militia and trained as a child soldier. During the war he became a notorious fighter and sadist and later went to the prison where Nawal was held as a torturer. It turns out that the missing half-brother and the missing father are one and the same person, namely Abou Tarek.

Nawal was also unaware of this information until shortly before her death, but when she recognizes her son by a tattoo on his heel in a swimming pool in Canada and sees her tormentor on his face, she falls into severe shock and suffers a stroke. Abou Tarek had also been able to flee to Canada after the end of the war through the same connections of the militia leader. On her deathbed, Nawal dictates the two letters and her last will, which Lebel records in writing.

The twins find the man who is their half-brother and father at the same time, and give him both letters. While the letter to the father was written in a hateful and accusatory tone, the letter to the son was written in a conciliatory and loving tone. The film ends with Abou Tarek standing alone at Nawal's tombstone.

criticism

The film received positive to outstanding reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website counted 108 positive reviews of 117 professional reviews, which corresponds to a value of 92%. The film was also received with very positive reactions from the general public, because at the same time 92% of 14,349 users rated the film as positive. This, in turn, is more than confirmed by the online film archive IMDb , another platform on which normal users can submit their film reviews, because Incendies is currently the 125th best-rated film of all time (as of October 10, 2018).

“A 'search movement' based on two time levels, whose access to real history becomes a tragedy of guilt and fateful entanglements. The politically concrete material is thus transformed into a universal human drama that laments the devastating destructiveness of armed conflicts with great emotional force. "

publication

After the film had its world premiere on September 4, 2010 in Telluride, USA, at the Telluride Film Festival , its official Canadian theatrical release was on January 20, 2011. In the US, the film will be on April 22, 2011 and in Germany on April 23. Launched June 2011 at Arsenal Filmverleih .

Awards

The film was nominated for the Oscars in 2011 as a foreign language Best Picture . In this competition, the film critic Roger Ebert named the work his personal favorite. The film also won the Don Quixote Prize at the Tromsø Internasjonale Film Festival in northern Norway in 2011.

music

The soundtrack is from Grégoire Hetzel . In the composition Incendies he sets words by Friedrich Nietzsche from Also sprach Zarathustra ( From old and new panels ) to music - and thus clearly refers to the fourth movement from Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony. In the recording, the soprano Ciara Hendrick interprets the piece, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Ben Foster .

“(O man), O brothers, whoever is a firstfruit is always sacrificed. But now we are first fruits.
We all bleed at secret sacrificial tables, we burn [...] all in honor of old idols.
O man, O brothers, your nobility should not look back, but look out! You shall be expellees from all fatherland and forefather countries! "

Other music used are You and whose army and Like Spinning Plates by Radiohead and Nami Nami by Marcel Khalifé .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for The Woman Who Sings - Incendies . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , June 2011 (PDF; test number: 128 092 K).
  2. Age rating for The Woman Who Sings - Incendies . Youth Media Commission .
  3. Article. In: Dailystar (English)
  4. ^ Incendies (2011). rottentomatoes.com, accessed October 22, 2011 .
  5. Ranking of the 250 best films in the Internet Movie Database
  6. ctv.ca ( Memento of the original from January 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Roger Ebert's Oscar favorite. Accessed February 22, 2011 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ctv.ca
  7. ^ FICC . Tromsø Internasjonale Film Festival (Norwegian). Retrieved on April 5, 2011