The screening on Thursday April 19 will be introduced by freelance writer and programmer Savina Petkova. It will feature English subtitles.
Synopsis:
Papatakis’s debut unfolds in a country home where two domestic servants are cruelly exploited by the family they work for. When their abusive employers push them too far, it provokes a shocking and escallating rebellion. This allegorical portrait of the Algerian resistance was inspired by the real-life story of the Papin sisters, two maids who brutally murdered their employers in 1930s France - also the basis for Jean Genet’s influential 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol’s 1995 psychological thriller La Cérémonie.
Curator’s note:
Boycotted by the selection committee of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival, Les Abysses was publicly defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, and Jean Genet. The case of the two sisters has long been cited in French left-wing intellectual circles as a perfect example of working-class struggle. In Papatakis' view, the sisters' violence stemmed directly from their living conditions - the humiliations they endured and the exploitation they suffered at the hands of their employers.
The film exemplifies Papatakis' hyper-stylized, expressionistic approach, escalating the domestic conflict into paroxysmic class warfare. Like ancient Greek tragedies where masked actors embodied archetypes rather than nuanced psychological portraits, the performances are deliberately exaggerated - raw and symbolic rather than naturalistic.
Simone De Bouvoir:
"A magnificent and strange film in which reason descends into madness, paradise into the depths of hell, and where love is painted with the colours of hate. [...] Only the violence of the crime committed by the two heroines allows us to measure the atrocity of the invisible crime of which they themselves were victims
Content warning:
The film Contains intense violence, psychological distress, and disturbing imagery related to class conflict and abuse.
