Innocence

French with English sub-titles.

Aptly described as "David Hamilton meets Salvador Dali", this incredible exploration of childhood in a mysterious all-girls' boarding school is guaranteed quite unlike anything you've ever seen or will see.

This film operates at so many levels it is nothing short of a masterpiece. Everyone will have a different idea on what it's all about as they become at one with the young actresses, trying to make sense of an alien environment quite beyond their understanding.

This from a review of the 2004 London Film Festival:

"The most staggering French film in the festival was the debut full-length feature of Lucile Hadzihalilovic. Innocence (2004) is a meticulously designed fantasy of female coming of age. The opening images chart the delivery of a young girl to an old house in a forest. She is met by a group of girls dressed in white, each wearing a hair-ribbon whose colour corresponds to their age (and reveals an internal hierarchy). Slowly the film describes the enterprise of this strange world, detailing the educational rituals the girls undergo – and left me wondering, is this their training for womanhood or servitude? Much has been made of the film's pseudo-paedophilic imagery, which points to the film's real feat: its meticulous balancing act, innocence, is in the eye of the beholder. The tone is beautifully modulated throughout, the rituals move from the familiar to the suspicious. Innocence reveals none of its secrets, but beguiles and entices with possibility throughout."

"The school is a paradise and a prison at the same time." – Lucile Hadzihalilovic