Age of Panic (La bataille de Solférino)

Wednesday 16 October at 7.30pm –  Open to the Public

Justine Triet | France | 2013 | 94 mins | TBC

In co-operation with the Institut Français and the Embassy of France.

With political protests roiling in the streets of Paris, a young mother tries to keep it together on the home front. Justine Triet’s first feature mixes comedy with documentary-style energy.

“The tumultuous, hotly contested 2012 French presidential election, pitting right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy against socialist Francois Hollande, provides the larger maelstrom against which a couple’s custody battle unfolds in French writer-director Justine Triet’s frantic farce Age of Panic. The exes’ skill at sweeping lovers, friends, colleagues, babysitters and total strangers into their emotional vortex adds greatly to the absurdity wending its way through the streets, packed to bursting with masses of warring party enthusiasts. Placing a couple’s inability to mediate visiting rights within the context of extreme political polarization, this whirlwind comedy might prove particularly timely… Triet brilliantly orchestrates the intersection of documentary and fiction. If reality fails to furnish the kind of drama that made Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool such a benchmark, the spontaneous ebb and flow of the enormous French crowds seen here syncs visually and rhythmically with the film’s domestic Sturm und Drang, acted throughout with improvisatory immediacy.” – Ronnie Schieb, Variety