Friends from France

Odessa, 1979. Carole and Jérôme, a young French couple, arrive on vacation to celebrate their engagement. At least, that is their story: in fact, Carole and Jérôme are cousins — and, more importantly, Jewish — and have slipped into the USSR undercover to make contact with local Jews, the so-called refuseniks, in an effort to get them out of the country and free of further persecution.

With Les Interdits, Anne Weil and Philippe Kotlarski employ a light-hearted premise to explore the Cold War deepfreeze of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. By day, Carole and Jérôme are tourists, travelling to see the sights; by night they are activists, reaching out to help. When they scratch the carefully controlled surface, managing to evade the bugs in their hotel rooms, they find a different kind of reality: drugs, sex, people who have spent time in the gulag. And it is not long before they meet a man with an especially powerful story.

Les Interdits meticulously recreates the hotels, restaurants, apartments, and streets of the Brezhnev era — a time of grey, grim uniformity, when people constantly looked over their shoulders and trusted no one. But Carole and Jérôme infiltrate this icy world, and the ways in which their effort plays out provides the film's substance. A reminder of a past that's not so distant, Les Interdits balances the personal against broader issues, and demonstrates that matters of the heart can provide deeper experiences than imagined.

PIERS HANDLING

Contemporary World Speakers

Due to a scheduling conflict Michael Ignatieff will not be participating in the Contemporary World Speakers extended Q&A on Friends from France on Tuesday, September 10 at 12:15 pm. The Festival is pleased to welcome Randall Hansen, Director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs, to lead an extended post-screening discussion. Visit tiff.net/worldspeakers to find out more. Special thanks to the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.