13/09/2016 - French actress Isabelle Huppert stars in both the opening and closing films, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come

Unspooling from 15-25 September, the 29^th Helsinki International Film Festival - Love & Anarchy will focus on female filmmakers, including the special guest, French writer-director Lucile Hadžihalilović, who will screen her award-winning return to cinema after six years, Evolution [+see also:
film review
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film profile], in the Twilight Zone section.

French actress Isabelle Huppert stars in both the opening and closing films: Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s Elle [+see also:
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film profile] and French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come [+see also:
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Q&A: Mia Hansen-Løve
film profile]. In Verhoeven’s thriller, which was launched at Cannes, she plays a tough woman leading a big company, and her love is as merciless as her working methods. But everything changes when she is attacked in her own home by an unknown man – and now she wants revenge. Hansen-Løve, who won a Silver Bear for Best Director for her film at the Berlinale, cast Huppert as a Philosophy teacher struggling with an existential crisis caused by her mother’s death, a deceitful husband and the loss of her job.

Male filmmakers have not been neglected, though. A three-time Cannes winner, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu will present his drama about a doctor in a small Romanian town, Graduation [+see also:
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Q&A: Cristian Mungiu
interview: Cristian Mungiu
film profile], starring Adrian Titieni, which earned him the Best Director Award on the Côte d’Azur this year (shared with French director Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper [+see also:
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interview: Artemio Benki
interview: Olivier Assayas
film profile]). British director Terence Davies will introduce his two latest films, Sunset Song [+see also:
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interview: Terence Davies
film profile] (2015), about the coming of age of a Scottish farmer’s daughter in the early 1900s, and A Quiet Passion [+see also:
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film profile], with US actress Cynthia Nixon starring as American poet Emily Dickinson in the story of her life (1830-1886).

German director Doris Dörrie will join Love & Anarchy to show off Fukushima, Mon Amour [+see also:
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film profile], which collected two awards at Berlin; the drama tells of an unlikely friendship between a German woman and a former Geisha in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. Other films by female filmmakers, screened in the section Impossible Girls, include Baden Baden [+see also:
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film profile] by Belgium's Rachel Lang, in which a 26-year-old's life is given a temporary meaning as she starts to renovate her sick grandmother’s bathroom, As I Open My Eyes [+see also:
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interview: Leyla Bouzid
film profile] by Tunisia's Leyla Bouzid and Miss Impossible [+see also:
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film profile] by France's Émilie Deleuze. Visiting Nordic filmmakers include Norwegian director Rune Denstad Langlo, with Welcome to Norway! [+see also:
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interview: Rune Denstad Langlo
film profile]; Sweden’s Peter Grönlund and his lead actress Malin Levanon, with Drifters [+see also:
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film profile]; Iceland’s Benedikt Erlingsson, with The Show of Shows: 100 Years of Vaudeville, Circuses and Carnivals [+see also:
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film profile]; and Icelandic producer Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir, with Sparrows [+see also:
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interview: Atli Óskar Fjalarsson
interview: Rúnar Rúnarsson
film profile] (directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson).

Also present will be Norwegian screenwriter Linn-Jeanethe Kyed, with Magnus [+see also:
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film profile] (directed by Benjamin Ree); Swedish producer Madeline Ekman, with The Here After [+see also:
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interview: Magnus von Horn
film profile] (directed by Magnus von Horn); Swedish director Suzanne Osten, with The Girl, the Mother and the Demons [+see also:
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film profile]; and Swedish director Alexandra-Therese Keining and composer Sophia Ersson, with Girls Lost [+see also:
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film profile]. Five films will be competing for the festival’s Audience Award, including Italian director Nanni Moretti’s My Mother [+see also:
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interview: Nanni Moretti
film profile], Argentinian director Pablo Trapero’s The Clan [+see also:
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film profile], French director Thomas Bidegain’s Cowboys [+see also:
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film profile], Russian director Mikhail Mestetskiy’s Rag Union and Davies’ Sunset Song.