Annie Colère: a tribute to solidarity

UPDATE DAY

A year after the release of Audrey Diwan's hard-hitting L'Event, French director Blandine Lenoir returns to its turn on women's fight for the right to abortion by highlighting the actions of the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC) in the mid-1970s, in France.

Her film Annie Colèretakes us to February 1974, to a small French village. We follow Annie (Laure Calamy), a worker and mother of two who has just become pregnant for the third time. The problem is that neither she nor her husband wants to have another child and that abortion is still illegal in France. 

Her steps will eventually lead her to the MLAC, a a group of women who perform clandestine abortions safely and with medical support. 

Not only will her MLAC-supervised abortion go well, but Annie will immediately feel welcomed by this collective of women who want to make a difference. 

Finding in this battle for the right to abortion a new meaning to her life, she decided to get involved in the feminist movement. 

Emancipation 

By initiating the writing this third feature film, a few years ago, filmmaker Blandine Lenoir (Aurore) could not have imagined how much the subject would come back so much in the news when the right to abortion is again questioned in several countries. 

Annie Colère< /em> will not make as much of an impression as The Event – Audrey Diwan's punchy drama which chronicled with disturbing realism a clandestine abortion during the 1960s – but it makes a vibrant tribute to the courage and solidarity of these ordinary women who succeeded in making a difference. Well researched and skilfully told, the film tenderly depicts this important period for the emancipation of women.