Preview Screening
The Tree
Dir. Julie Bertuccelli. 2010, 100 mins.
35mm print courtesy of Zeitgeist Films. With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Morgana Davies. After the sudden death of her father, eight-year-old Simone begins to believe that he speaks to her through the leaves of the enormous tree that towers over her house. The closing night film at the Cannes Film Festival, this beautiful drama of loss and rebirth was written and directed by Julie Bertuccelli (Since Otar Left). “Bertuccelli, channelling her own tragic experience into the film (her husband died while she was writing the screenplay), has taken what might have been a therapeutic, message-heavy yarn aimed at children and made a beautiful, mysterious and gratifyingly complex study of how the past and memory can be destructive and powerfully liberating.” -The West Australian