• View Trailer

    Barrage

    Directed by Laura Schroeder
    Luxembourg/Belgium/France | 112 minutes | Awards Buzz

  • View Trailer

    Barrage

    Directed by Laura Schroeder
    Luxembourg/Belgium/France | 112 minutes | Awards Buzz

  • View Trailer

    Barrage

    Directed by Laura Schroeder
    Luxembourg/Belgium/France | 112 minutes | Awards Buzz

  • View Trailer

    Barrage

    Directed by Laura Schroeder
    Luxembourg/Belgium/France | 112 minutes | Awards Buzz

Outstanding performances by Isabelle Huppert, her real-life daughter Lolita Chammah, and Thémis Pauwels as grandmother, daughter and granddaughter illuminate how loss and abandonment can give way to a tentative trust, just as water must find new ways to flow around a dam or barrage.

film synopsis

Some things are forgivable, some are irrevocable. Between daughters and mothers, they are often both. In co-writer/director Laura Schroeder’s second feature film, three generations of women navigate the commitments and challenges of maternal love. Grandmother Elisabeth (the impeccable Isabelle Huppert) hasn’t seen her daughter in 10 years. Catherine (Lolita Chammah, Huppert’s own daughter) abandoned not only her mother, but her daughter, Alba, whom Elisabeth is raising exactly as she raised Catherine, right down to her strict training as a competitive tennis player.

After many years of treatment for depression and substance abuse, Catherine shows up out of the blue at tennis practice, desperate to renew her relationship with her daughter. She convinces Elisabeth—and Alba—to give them a few hours alone. A few hours stretches into several unauthorized days at a long-unvisited family chalet in the woods, where all three women must eventually face the ghosts of then and now.

In competition for the FIPRESCI Prize.

film details

Director: Laura Schroeder
Producers: Pol Cruchten, Sébastien Delloye, Jeanne Geiben, Sebastian Schelenz
Screenwriter: Marie Nimier, Laura Schroeder
Cinematographers: Hélène Louvart
Editor: Damien Keyeux
Music: Petra Jean Phillipson
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lolita Chammah, Themis Pauwels, Charles Müller
Country: Luxembourg/Belgium/France
Language: French (deaf-friendly)
Year: 2017
Running Time: 112 minutes

2018 Film Festival