Miami International Film Festival 2010

Premiering at the 2009 Venice Film Festival and picking up top honors at Seville’s 2009 fest, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s latest low-key comedy is nestled somewhere between religious satire and spiritual redemption story and approaches questions of faith through the eyes of a disheartened doubter. French film star Sylvie Testud (La vie en rose, Beyond Silence, Fear & Trembling) plays Christine, a lonesome, wheelchair-bound woman who is traveling with a group of pilgrims to the French Catholic shrine of Lourdes in the Pyrenée mountains. A famed city of healing, Lourdes offers hope to innumerable devoted Christians who seek miracles there. Not particularly pious herself, Christine, accompanies the church group mostly to escape her solitary life.  Although she would love to be “normal” again, to be able to move like others can in a carefree manner, she isn’t really interested in a miracle cure; she honestly just wants to make new friends.