Marceline. A Woman. A Century

  • Cordelia Dvorák
  • France, Netherlands
  • 2018
  • 58 min
  • World Premiere
  • Luminous

A portrait of the strong-minded writer and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018). As a girl, she survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, after which she had to find herself as a woman in freedom. Her approach was radical and unconventional, she says. As she approaches the age of 90, in essence she appears unchanged; her life simply moves a bit more slowly.

In her Paris apartment, she serves her guests coffee or vodka. They look back on memories of Marceline herself, the history they have experienced together, and how they view it today: the Algerian War of Independence, for example, or the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution in China—momentous events about which Marceline made inspired films, initially with Jean-Pierre Sergent, later with her second husband Joris Ivens, the legendary Dutch documentarian. In the second part, the consummate Parisian Marceline—small, slender, carefully dressed and with bright red hair—looks back wistfully and lovingly over her years with Ivens. Her recollections are illustrated by archive footage from their films such as 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War (1968) and How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976).

TV5MONDE supports all French-language productions at IDFA 2018. For more French documentaries with Ducth subtitles, visit TV5MONDE.

Credits

  • 58 min
  • DCP
  • Spoken languages: French
  • Subtitles in: English
Director
Cordelia Dvorák
Production
Christilla Huilard-Kann for Elda Productions, Corinne Delpech for Elda Productions
Co-production
Windmill Film
Cinematography
Georgi Lazarevski, Susanna Salonen, Bettina Borgfeld, Thomas Bataille
Editing
Laurence Miller

IDFA history

2018
World Premiere
Luminous

Share this film

Print this page

IDFA history

This website uses cookies.

By using cookies we can measure how our site is used, how it can be further improved and to personalize the content of online advertisements.

Read
 here everything about our cookie policy. If you choose to decline, we only place functional and analytical cookies