Her name is Sabine

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Movie
German title Her name is Sabine
Original title Elle s'appelle Sabine
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 2007
length 85 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Sandrine Bonnaire
script Sandrine Bonnaire
Catherine Cabrol
production Thomas Schmitt
music Jefferson Lembeye
Nicola Piovani
camera Sandrine Bonnaire Catherine Cabrol
cut Svetlana Vaynblat
occupation
  • Sabine Bonnaire

Her name is Sabine is a French documentary film from 2007. The actress Sandrine Bonnaire made her directorial debut with this film about her autistic sister Sabine.

action

The film shows the director's autistic sister: Sabine. On the one hand, old film material is used that Sandrine Bonnaire has collected over 25 years (e.g. footage from a family vacation) and, on the other hand, Sandrine Bonnaire also films in the supervised living group in which Sabine lives today. A comprehensive portrait of the autistic sister, who is 38 years old at the time of the documentary, emerges from flashbacks and the present.

At a young age, Sabine still seems surprisingly unaffected. She initially attended a special school, but at the age of 12 she was even enrolled in the same school that her siblings attended. There, however, she is teased and marginalized. Then Sabine begins to become more and more aggressive, bites her hands and undresses in the yard. She has to leave school soon and stays at home, where she reads, does handicrafts and learns to play the piano. Sabine is very creative, but when her siblings grow up and move out and her older brother dies, she loses her familiar surroundings. She is left alone with her mother, and when they both move to the country, Sabine gets into an acute, aggressive crisis. Sandrine Bonnaire and another sister bring her back to Paris . But Sabine cannot overcome the crisis with them either. She remains so aggressive that no one can get along with her anymore. Sandrine Bonnaire rents an apartment and hires two nurses, but the two nurses quit after a short time.

Since nobody knows what to do, Sabine is admitted to psychiatry at the age of 28 , where she lives for five years. In these five years she forgot a lot, gained 30 kg as a side effect of the high-dose medication and stopped talking. Her family noticed that the psychiatry is not good for Sabine, but they have no other solution: all other institutions refuse to accept Sabine. After about four years, Sandrine Bonnaire discovers a home that she likes and that Sabine could theoretically accommodate, but with too little space. The director wanted to open a new center for a long time, but he lacks funding. Sandrine Bonnaire and the head of the facility are working together to set up a new group in a village in the Charente department . After about a year, the funding is in place and Sabine can switch from psychiatry to the new group, which consists of four other autistic people and two carers. The psychiatrist who has been caring for her since then is interviewed in the film and describes her work on bringing Sabine back to life and reducing her medication. In the present time you can see a grown woman who is still in no way like the girl of yore, but who seems to be on the mend.

The other residents are also portrayed through the recordings in the supervised residential group. The viewer gets an impression of everyday life in the facility; the mother of another resident also has a say. The film shows difficult situations as well as happy moments. In the end, however, the impression of the deep cut that the placement in the psychiatry meant for Sabine remains.

History of origin

Bonnaire had originally planned to make a film about her sister back in 2002, who at that time had been in psychiatry for five years. It was only after meeting families who had similar problems (among others as the godmother of the Autistent Days 2001) that the actress decided to make the film. A feature film would have been less haunting Bonnaire, which is why she chose the documentary.

The current recordings were made between June 2006 and January 2007 in Sabine's home in Charente. The shooting took place with their consent and that of the other family members. Bonnaire worked hard to make the audience feel the “terror” that the “psychological and physical deformation of Sabine” meant for her family. She dedicated the film to her sisters, as they were the only ones who looked after Sabine when she lived in psychiatry for five years.

reception

Her name is Sabine , which premiered on May 24, 2007 at the Cannes Film Festival , where the film was shown in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs series. On September 14, 2007, Bonnaire's directorial work was broadcast in France on the public television channel France 3 , which was followed by a televised debate with the director of the home where Sabine lives and the director of the psychiatric service at the Montpellier University Hospital . The television broadcast of Your Name is Sabine reached 3.2 million viewers in France, which corresponds to a market share of 14.7 percent. The French daily praised Sabine and her family for the courage to go public with her disability. Bonnaire implemented the documentary "with a relative propriety", which would force even more to look at this misfortune in the face. "It is incredible that as much love can pass into such simple images," wrote the Liberation . The aim of the film is not to reveal the family secret of a star, but to get the sluggish authorities to create more livable places for the mentally handicapped. "I want to underline the fact that the hospital is a place of care for the transitional period and by no means a place to live," said Bonnaire. After the premiere in French cinemas, Bonnaire also met with President Nicolas Sarkozy . He agreed to create smaller care facilities.

In Germany, the film was shown for the first time at the Berlinale in February 2008. In the discussion after the broadcast, the director mainly talked about the hopelessness of her situation: her family's thoughts that Sabine should never have been sent to a psychiatric hospital collide with the irrefutable knowledge that all alternatives had been exhausted beforehand and there was no other Solution gave. The fault lies not with the family, but with the deficits in the care of the disabled. Today, Sandrine Bonnaire is politically active and actively involved in further expanding the care offers for adult autistic people in France. The German-language specialist press also praised Bonnaire's directorial debut. “This first directorial work by the actress, who shot with Varda and Téchiné , with Chabrol and Rivette , is unsentimental and touching - a document that shows that even the most incomprehensible decline of a person does not destroy the love for him,” said critic Jan Schulz-Ojala in Tagesspiegel . The daily newspaper spoke of an intense, very personal portrait, the strength of which is that Bonnaire reveals a lot about himself. “Not anger, but a deep sadness is the impulse of her (Bonnaire's) cinematic accusation. She carefully tries to penetrate a world into which she is repeatedly denied access, ”says Gerhard Midding. The film service joined the other critics. “'Her Name is Sabine' is a terrifying film that doesn't spare the viewer anything. Not the anger about the 'fate' of the sister, not the frustration in dealing with the sick, not the love with which Sandrine takes care of Sabine. "

The film is part of the "over making" -Filmfestivals the 2009 shareholder initiative of Aktion Mensch shown in about 120 German cities.

In 2018 the film was shown at the 32nd Braunschweig International Film Festival .

Awards

At the premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2007 , Your Name is Sabine was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize . This was followed in the same year by the special jury award and the audience award at the International Festival of French-Language Films in Namur, Belgium . In 2008 the film was awarded the Globe du Cristal , the French press award for art and culture. In 2009 this was followed by a nomination for the César in the category of best documentary film .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Isabella Reicher: She is the star - not me! In: Die Standard , September 28, 2008, issue 4 WI, p. 5, interview
  2. ↑ a b c Ines Kappert: Actress Sandrine Bonnaire. “I felt useful.” In: die tageszeitung , February 15, 2008, p. 28
  3. ^ A b Francis Cornu: Le handicap, droit dans les yeux . (PDF; 92 kB) In: Le Monde , September 9, 2007, p. 4
  4. ^ Télévision: 3.2 million de téléspectateurs pour "Elle s'appelle Sabine" . In: Le Monde , September 19, 2007, p. 31
  5. ^ Gérard Lefort: "Sabine" la bien aimée; Quinzaine des réalisateurs . In: Liberation , May 25, 2007, p. 20
  6. ↑ Philippe Azoury: Sabine, born sous le signe of maux. In: Liberation , September 14, 2007, p. 20
  7. ↑ Jan Schulz-Ojala: Brief & Critical. In: Der Tagesspiegel , February 11, 2008, p. 24
  8. ↑ Robert Schröpfer: One and the same woman. In: the daily newspaper , January 29, 2009, p. 28
  9. ^ Gerhard Midding: At the place of life . In: Berliner Zeitung , January 29, 2008
  10. ↑ Her name is Sabine. In: film-dienst , 2009, No. 2