Bay Area Premiere!

Artist in Person

(La Dernière lettre). Wiseman's new fiction film has its roots in a theatrical work the filmmaker directed first in Boston fifteen years ago, and again in 2001 at the Comédie-Française. The film, like the French theater production, stars the great Catherine Samie as a Russian Jewish woman composing a last letter to her son after her city is seized by the Germans in 1941. "The cinematographic talent and tact of Wiseman are at work in all his choices: of black-and-white (how could you give color to the worst the 20th century has to offer?), of a play of shadows and lights (memories from beyond the grave), of a minimal set-up (an actress wandering around a bare set) for maximum effect. Wiseman succeeds in the prodigious feat of filming-sculpting-the human voice. The Last Letter is also a documentary about the face of the actress Catherine Samie, a face like a landscape, in which Wiseman captures extraordinarily ordinary things: the weathered effects of misery...the sunniness of her features...or that intemperate moment when tears break forth" (Gérard Lefort, Libération).


• Written by Véronique Aubouy, based on Chapter 17 of the novel Life and Fate by Vassili Grossman. Photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis. With Catherine Samie. (61 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)