East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall
Maison Française Film Festival 2024: Cinema/Care
Villa Albertine, Institute of Comparative Literature and Society, Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Institute of African Studies, Alliance Program, School of Social Work, Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Registration is required, and can be found here.
Claire Simon, 2023, Documentary, 168 min.
In French with English Subtitles
Film introduced by Aubrey Gabel
French documentary titan Claire Simon observes the everyday operations in the gynecology ward of a public hospital in Paris. In the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. Through these many encounters, the specific fears, desires and struggles of these individuals become the health challenges we all face, even the filmmaker herself.
“An intimate, moving, intelligent doc about the frontlines of women’s healthcare.”
–Jessica Kiang, Variety
Berlin Film Festival 2024
MoMA Doc Fortnight 2024
London-born Claire Simon is a French filmmaker. Her work explores the limits between documentaries and fiction. In 1992, she made a documentary about children’s preschool games, Récréations, followed by Coûte que coûte, 800 km de difference:Romance, and Mimi. Concurrently, three of her feature films were shown at the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, and she won the prize of the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (SACD) for God’s Offices. Her films have won many accolades at various festivals, including the Belfort Film Festival (Grand Prix in the fiction and documentary categories for That’s Just Like You) and the Venice Film Festival (Best Documentary for The Graduation).
Aubrey Gabel is Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University. She is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, culture, and visual media and is currently the chair of the “Comics and Graphic Albums” University Seminar.
