When a man is found dead in the snow in a remote town in the French Alps, police question whether it was suicide or murder. His wife becomes the main suspect, and their near blind young son is the only witness.
Director Justine Triet’s drama from France, Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute), is a smart, solidly crafted procedural anchored in an unsettling family drama. The film earned Triet the Palme d'Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
On October 9, after the Eastern Region Special Projects Committee Global Cinema Series screening in New York, Triet discussed the making of the film during a Q&A moderated by Director Nicole Kassell.
During the conversation, Triet spoke about how the film changed from script to screen even though she co-wrote it.
“I think that there are less words. It doesn’t show, but it was much more talkative. I worked a lot on the writing and did a storyboard, but I realized that everything is on the set. The different thing that I did on this movie it was to always record everything not doing not doing any rehearsal. I told my technical team to shoot it all even if the light is not good because I was looking for happy accidents. I was obsessed by that because the script is not a book and I think the script was too crafted, so we had to find imperfections. We did have rehearsals for the courtroom scenes, but it was less of a rehearsal for the acting and more of a technical run in because we needed to know where the cameras would go.”
Triet’s other directorial works include the feature films Victoria, Age of Panic, Des ombres dans la maison and Solférino; the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or nominated feature Sibyl; and the Berlin International Film Festival 2012 Golden Berlin Bear nominated short film Two Ships.