Three Indie Biopics About Women History Forgot

by Marina Berlin · February 25, 2016

Do you love biopics? I love biopics. They allow us to consider how we remember our history, and whose lives we think merit a film budget and a production crew. Some of my favorite biographical films include César Chávez (2014), Before Night Falls (2000) about poet and author Reinaldo Arenas, the big-budget, Oscar-nominated Erin Brockovich (2000), and Hilary and Jackie (1998). The more famous a person is, the more often they are mentioned in the history books, the more attention their stories and their biopics receive. I wanted to introduce you to three biopics you should know if you don’t already, all centering women who accomplished extraordinary things and were overlooked in favor of their male contemporaries. These three movies were either made on a small budget and received relatively little media attention, or were, for various reasons, barred from wide distribution in the U.S. While their accuracy varies, all of them will inspire you to reflect on the lives of women we know too little about.

Angel (2007)

Angel

Directed by Francois Ozon, this film is inspired by the life of 19th-century bestselling author Marie Corelli. Born to her unmarried parents, a Scottish poet and a servant girl, Corelli (whose real name was Mary Mackay) rose to prominence writing what would today be considered “new-age” pulp fiction. A contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, her books outsold theirs and were collected by the likes of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria — yet Corelli was, perhaps unsurprisingly, considered an upstart and a hack by most of the influential writers of the time. T

he film Angel is based on a 1957 novel of the same name, written by Elizabeth Taylor (Corelli was the inspiration for several novels, both before and after her death). Angel Deverell — played by Romola Garai — is a 19th-century working-class woman who dreams of fantastical things and puts them into writing. When a publisher offers to buy her work if she changes certain aspects, she refuses. Her commitment to her vision and her belief in herself allow her to succeed despite the odds, but also prevent her from changing with the times. Both the novel and the film show Angel’s early days of struggle, her years of enormous success, and finally the end of her career, when the reality of World War I renders her extravagant stories irrelevant.

If you’re at all familiar with Ozone’s work, you won’t be surprised to learn that the movie is as over-the-top as Corelli’s novels – Angel is larger than life in her ambition, in her lust for perfection. It’s what draws people to her, makes men and women fall in love with her, buoys her when she encounters harsh criticism from the literary establishment. The movie ultimately shows her getting everything she wants, all while letting her be occasionally selfish and arrogant, without the need for “redemption.” If you’ve always wanted a movie about a badass 19th-century anti-heroine who managed to have it all, Angel is here for you.

 

Agora (2009)

Agora

Hypatia of Alexandria was a 4th-century Greek philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Roman-ruled Egypt. She attained a senior position in academia and taught many generations of students at the Platonist school in Alexandria. As none of her writings survive to this day, she’s been effectively written out of the history of Greek philosophy. Agora represents one effort to restore part of her legacy while exploring broader themes of sexism and classism. The film portrays Hypatia (played by Rachel Weisz) as a prominent political figure who made many scientific discoveries before her time – including finding proof of the heliocentric model of the solar system and inventing new scientific tools – only for them to be lost after her death.

One of the few things we definitely know about Hypatia is that she was killed by a mob of Christians and blamed for worsening the conflict between the governor of Alexandria (Orestes, played by Oscar Isaac) and the city’s newly appointed Christian leader. Agora chooses to portray these events in a subversive light, depicting Hypatia as a force for peace – she even risks her life to protect her Christian students. Early Christianity is depicted as a zealous cult that attempts to seize power by attacking minorities – including Jewish people and women – and recruiting disenfranchised young men to commit violence. (While the film received the blessing of Vatican officials, North American distributors balked at giving it a wide release.) All it takes for Hypatia to lose her life, her work, her legacy, is for Orestes — a former student of Hypatia’s who still regularly relies on her council — to remain complacent in the face of the extremists of the day. Hypatia loses everything because even the men who love and respect her don’t see the true danger she’s in; this depiction is a stunning indictment of casual cultural misogyny.

But perhaps the most amazing sequence of the movie has nothing to do with religious conflict. Early on in their acquaintance, Orestes – at this point one of Hypatia’s many young, rich male students – decides to court her. He creates a public spectacle, plays her a song, and begs for her favor, all with the certainty that she’ll fall into his arms. Instead, Hypatia shows up to class the next day armed with her menstrual rags, which she gifts him, in full view of his peers. It’s this mix of humor — Scenes About Menstruation You’ll See Nowhere Else — and the movie’s deconstruction of complex social issues and history that makes Agora worth your time.

 

Mozart’s Sister (2010)

Mozarts Sister

Maria Anna Mozart was born four years before her brother Wolfgang and was, by many accounts, as dazzlingly gifted as he was. She was also subjected to the same rigorous regime of musical training and traveling through Europe – playing for kings, queens, and celebrities of the period — when she and Wolfgang toured together, they were referred to as “the astounding Mozart children” and Maria Anna was billed first. When Maria Anna was fifteen, she was left in Austria with her mother while her father and brother continued touring. She continued to write music – none of which survives, although there is a record of Wolfgang praising it – and give piano lessons locally, but her performing career was effectively over. As a young woman, being on the road would have endangered her reputation, and her father preferred not to risk any scandal being attached to the family name. Mozart’s Sister focuses on Maria Anna’s last year of freedom, when she is fourteen and traveling with her family to France. It depicts her adventures at the French court, some of the family dynamics that led her father to halt her career, and her friendship with 13-year-old Princess Louise, who she meets at a remote convent at the start and end of her journey.

Among other things, Mozart’s Sister is about the ways in which the world betrays young women. Despite Maria Anna’s immense talent and popularity, everyone around her knows that eventually she’ll have to step back, stay home and relinquish her claim on greatness. She spends the film fighting against the forces of family and society that try to constrain her ambitions — she continues to play the violin, begins to compose her own music, and dresses in boys’ clothes to gain access to the French prince and become part of his entourage. She even attempts to gain entrance to the best music conservatory in France, where women are not permitted to study.

The film draws a parallel between Maria Anna’s struggle and Princess Louise’s fate of being brought up in the remote austerity of the convent while her brother, the heir, experiences court life in all its luxury. As the film draws to a close, Louise ponders how different the women’s lives would be, had they been born boys: “You would be your brother and I would be mine, and we would both reign.” The chief mission of Mozart’s Sister is to tell Maria Anna’s story and show that she lived vigorously, energetically, and fought against the circumstances of her birth.

 

So, those are my three recommendations. What are some of your favorite biopics about extraordinary women who haven’t gotten enough attention? Throw them my way!

Marina Berlin grew up trilingual on the coast of the Mediterranean. She has degrees in film and sociology and spends most of her free time writing fiction about girls in space.

101 Comments

  2. Xolandra +14

    O my goodness, my bestie and I credit going to see Angel with how we became besties! And i thought no one else knew it! Spoilers in the reply!

    1. Xolandra +15

      Specifically, 1) when she manages to bag her man, she gets up from post-coital bliss and plonks herself down only a LOVELY chair, and i leaned over to my now bestie and hissed “she is _leaking_ all over that chair!” B) after the war, THE OUTFITS, specifically the HAT that she wears visiting her husband’s lover/mother of his child.

      These are the things (plus also her yelling my fate of being her bestfriend across the room on our first meeting – movie date was our second) upon which friendships are built. Thank you for the lovely memories!

      2. rachelthistle +10

        I feel that if we had known this was a biopic we would have spent a great deal less time trying to figure out if she was going to wake up at the end and go “It was ALL a DREAM”. It is definitely over-the-top (yay hats!), and I recall there was some deliberately obvious blue screen meta stuff going on as well.

  3. lcannon23 +42

    These all sound amazing and I can’t wait to see them. Here are my own favorites:

    I, the Worst of All (Spanish: Yo, la peor de todas) is the real-life story of Sor Juana, a nun in Mexico in the 17th century who is a brilliant writer and all-around bad-ass. Warning: the ending is pretty damn dark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTI7H1ohD2M

    Impromptu, starring the amazing Judy Davis as George Sand, a successful writer who dresses as a man and sucks the marrow out of every moment and then falls in love with Chopin (Hugh Grant) for some reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6upEXpPRKY

        1. Xolandra +6

          I feel like this is really a large part of why Chopin is my fav composer and Keats my fav poet. Or maybe those two things are why I have always had a tendency to lust after men that seem like i will break them in two? idk, it is a chicken and egg question, probably.

    4. aquamarinaveen +20

      i will forever remember that movie because of hugh grant’s pathetic line ‘i do not like the sun’. i repeat that all the time when it’s too bright out.

    5. bighairnoheart +10

      My grandfather makes everyone who stays at his house watch Impromptu. EVERYONE. That movie’s twenty-five years old now, but I don’t think he’s ever gotten tired of it and I doubt he ever will.

  4. Merripat +19

    These are great recommendations, and I wish I had known about Hypatia last year already so I could have incorporated her in my thesis about Plato.

  5. alicia +56

    I’ve seen Agora, and feel I should mention that among other heart-breaking scenes in that movie there is one of scrolls burning which book lovers should steel themselves for. I <3 Toastie librarians.

    3. bighairnoheart +4

      I watched that with my grandparents and my grandmother the former librarian was in agony all through that scene.

    1. Marina Berlin +4

      You’re right! WHAT AN EMBARRASSING TYPO /o My film school profs are frowning at me somewhere far, far away.

  7. hlmorris85 +40

    Oh my god I did a report on Hypatia in 9th grade full of primitive clipart and she is one of my absolute favorite historical figures we know like nothing about.

    Also, geez Romala Garai is beautiful.

  8. Kelly L. +66

    I love biopics, but I hate the word “biopic.” I always want to pronounce it bi-OP-ic and to think it has something to do with eyesight.

    1. rosemarybush +18

      I pronounced it bi-OP-ic for YEARS before I finally heard someone say it correctly and everything clicked. So these days, it’s “bi-OP-ic” in my head and “bio-pic” out loud.

      1. bookwormV +18

        I pronounce it “bi-OP-ic” in my head as well! I almost never hear it said, and when you see it written down it feels like the sensible pronunciation.

      2. Ivans_Sister +15

        Exactly my experience with the word. And it’s not like bio-pic doesn’t make 100% sense. It’s a picture. That’s biographic.

    2. sigaloenta +29

      I can’t bring myself not to pronounce it bi-OP-ic, so, after sound mockery from my entire family, I just try not ever to have to say it out loud.

    3. alder_tree +11

      I’ve just realized that those are the same word. I’m pretty sure I thought they were different words until now.

    4. owlbrick +7

      tangetially- I always see the word “antelope” and want to pronounce it with a long “e” like it’s some sort of classical Greek thing, like “Antigone”.

      1. tinypaperme +9

        Then there’s that whole Questionable Content gag where Faye pronounces Penelope’s name like “antelope.”

      1. TheasyPeasy +9

        My roommate and I have a debate about this. It’s going on about a month and I’m sticking with my pronunciation, even if it is incorrect.

        NEVER SURRENDER.

      2. CNM +4

        Dude, I’m pretty sure I’ve been pronouncing it bi-OP-ic forever. But when I googled the pronunciation, it was bio-pic. My world is shattered.

    6. AmazingSandwich +15

      Well, I was past due for another installment of “Words I’ve Been Pronouncing Wrong For Decades,” anyway.

  9. dameacademyalumna +22

    I had no idea there was a biopic of Marie Corelli and now I need it in my life.

    I didn’t really like or dislike Agora, though I loved [SPOILER] the menstrual rag scene. It set new life goals for me.

      1. dameacademyalumna +2

        I am so glad you did, thank you! My weekend was chaos but I know what I’ll be doing next weekend.

      1. dameacademyalumna +1

        I’ve heard about this (I looked it up after I watched the movie because I had to know) but can we agree that “the ring of truth” really means that it totally happened?

    3. geekcrackteam +3

      I found Agora really boring; but then I probably wasn’t paying much attention, I just wanted some light fluff and this wasn’t it. I think I turned it off about half way through

    4. danelleorange +3

      I think the framing of the story was awkward, but the overall main meat of the movie was good? The narrator entered at awkward times, when cast was good enough to carry the exposition.

    1. tiny_bookbot +11

      Yesssss, this one is excellent. Hildegard is amazing for being someone who manages to be so thoroughly herself (and what a brilliant and occasionally difficult self it is) within the confines of a patriarchal system.

    2. Adrian +1

      There is also a book about her! Hild, rhymes with meticulously researched historical fiction. Rhymes with includes more than one powerful woman, interacting in realistic period-appropriate ways. (It’s by Nicola Griffith, who wrote the Aud Torvingen books. Aud rhymes with proud. Aud rhymes with shroud.)

  11. purebrightfire +5

    Wow, I haven’t heard of any of these and I’ve usually at least aware of the existence of most recent movies! Thank you for the recommendations.

  12. cosetthetable +14

    Who’s seen “Temple Grandin”? I saw maybe the first 15 minutes, had other things to do, and haven’t yet gone back to it, and I’m curious whether it’s worth my time.

    2. PhoenixtheRainbow +11

      I love “Temple Grandin. ” It feels very respectful and innovative in its portrayal of her inner life and how her autism challenges the world around her. We get to see her thinking through problems visually, which is her mode rather than verbal. Bonus points for many loving
      women who support and encourage her (mother, aunt, best friend) as well as a male teacher who sees her unique perspective as a gift. Great actors and performances. Plus! She also battled sexism and some scenes really get me riled up. Lastly, the film conveys how her untraditional work with animals is so valuable.

      I have a lot of feelings about this movie. I always feel encouraged when I watch it. Highly recommend.

    4. owlbrick +8

      It’s actually really good. Claire Danes nailed it… she really captured Ms. Grandin’s mannerisms and intensity perfectly, without it feeling like plain mimicry.

    5. anniebananie +3

      I saw the movie after I met Temple when she spoke here – it is so so great. She said they really captured how she thinks in a visual sense. My son is autistic – it was a very powerful film for me.

  13. octopoda +3

    Agora was so good! I saw it in the theater here for SIFF I think. I’ve been meaning to give it a re-watch.

  15. feelingofgaze +12

    We recently watched the movie Leonie on a whim with no real idea what it was about (streaming on Amazon Prime right now). Fascinating look at the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who herself was a writer/editor/educator who led an interesting and HIGHLY unconventional life for a woman in the early 20th century. Really beautifully shot as well, and I thought Emily Mortimer was pretty great.

    1. bluewindgirl +2

      Here to discuss Arendt. I couldn’t tell whether the filmmakers thought the “banality of evil” really was a bit of a bad-faith justification for Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger?

      1. ElinorCadwaller +3

        Welllll ok I don’t think the film connected the two directly. I love ‘banality of evil’ and how pissed off she was with the circus of eeeevil that Ben-Gurion/the media were trying to orchestrate when she wrote it. I don’t think the film suggested she’d apply it to Heidegger, who’s pretty much the opposite of Arendt’s chillingly unthinking bureaucrat, Eichmann.

        The biopic showed that her relationship with Heidegger was a youthful and very power-imbalanced one (which predated his Fash sympathising I think?). IRL when they met again after the war he convinced her that he’d been slandered; if she came to know otherwise she never turned the laser of her mind on him in public, but their relationship was complicated-she was a complicated woman (she did accuse him of near-murdering Husserl, mind). In the film she confronts him but the scene is inconclusive, and I felt like it was suggesting that he was in many ways her blind spot.

    2. ironedorchid +3

      Hannah Arendt is not unknown in academia, she is a really important political philosopher, whose works are taught in other departments. But it is a shame she’s not better know in general.

  17. ThomasinaCoverly +18

    I remember really liking a French movie called (and about) Camille Claudel. She was a sculptor who put her own work on hold to support Rodin, then battled mental illness. (I have no idea if that’s biographically accurate, but that’s what I remember from the film). Since I watched it in the late 80’s, it might not measure up to my memories.

    1. Jamila6452 +2

      Yes, she’s the gorgeous Isabelle Adjani, and Gerard Depardieu plays Rodin! I loved it when I first saw it in the early 90s, recently bought it when I saw the DVD for a song. It’s not AS good as I recalled, but still very enjoyable.

    2. ironedorchid +1

      I was going to mention this. I saw it many years ago, but it was excellent.

  18. Chance_Hale +18

    Don’t know if it counts as overlooked, but I loved Joan Campion’s An Angel At My Table. It’s based on the autobiographies of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, and it’s a beautiful kind of Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Non-Neurotypical Woman (come to think of it, it would fit well with those Bildungsromane from the other day [that plural is my new favorite plural and I will use it at every opportunity {or at least every opportunity that doesn’t make me seem too pretentious, hopefully}]).

  20. praemunire +6

    A biopic of Paula Modersohn-Becker is coming out this year, I think: http://www.pandorafilm.com/filmography/paula.html

    Kind of weird to say that Hypatia was “written out of history,” though: she’s no less famous/obscure than most other writers of the time whose work didn’t survive (of which there are a ton). If you’re even moderately educated in the classics, you’ll have heard of her.

    1. bighairnoheart +4

      O. M. G. How did I not know about this?

      Someone find me a paper bag so I can breathe into it.

      The last time I was in Germany (as an overweight angsty teen who I still want to slap for not taking advantage of things more) my elderly German chaperones dragged me around to every cultural point of interest and so many art things. ALL THE PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER THINGS. By the time we got to her grave even my dirtbag teenaged self cried.

      I need this movie in my face now.

  21. anthemyst +14

    Was I the only one disappointed by the menstrual rag scene in Agora? Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% in favor of more movies featuring menstrual rags, but when I originally read about the incident I imagined Hypatia, like, really energetically shoving bloody rags right up in a dude’s face.

  22. aintnothingtoit +16

    These all sound incredible! Never heard of any of these badass ladies, so pumped to watch.

    (Also Rachel Weisz and Oscar Isaac = I’m so in.)

  23. Libbie +16

    I am SO excited to watch all of these.

    I’m obsessed with Hypatia and am working on a novel about her, but I have somehow managed to NOT watch Agora (!!!!?????!!!). This reminded me that I have to get my butt in gear and watch it first, before the others. 🙂

  24. Frédérique +7

    Angel is a brilliant book and Ozon’s film, while making some disturbing albeit technically minor changes to plot and characters (key words: sex, consent, children or lack thereof …), is very pretty … but the Marie Corelli connection has been overstated (by those involved, I know) in a way that does a disservice to their respective individualities.

    For one thing, Marie Corelli was born about thirty years earlier than Angel. For another, she published her first work aged thirty or so, having already tried her hand at music; Angel would be a very different character if she had not become an overnight success as a teenager who wrote her first novel while home faux-sick from school. And Corelli’s family background is rather more like the sort of story Angel later invents for herself than her actual origins! The contents of their novels (or their, uh, philosophical foundations) are also quite different.
    Of course there ARE parallels beside the fact of their being wildly successful women writers in their time – both had faithful intimate female companions (cough) and both were also entangled with (male) painters, but especially the latter plays out very, very different in Angel’s life (grrrr).

    I do encourage everyone to watch Angel (or better yet read it! reeeeead eeeeet!), but if you go into it expecting the life of Marie Corelli you’ll get a couple of things you did NOT bargain for. It’s not so much a barely accurate biopic as a work of fiction that plays on related themes.

  25. StoatCat +39

    I would KILL to see a movie based on the life of Rose Valland, the French museum staffer and member of the Resistance in World War II who had to work at the Jeu de Palme Museum under the Nazis, as they used it as a depot for looted artworks scheduled to be shipped to Germany. They thought she was just this mousy Frenchwoman, but they didn’t know she spoke German and was secretly recording the movements of artworks to the Resistance, who did all they could to slow the passage of looted art out of France. She was a shrewd manipulator and had no family of her own, so she was able to play blustering Nazi shitheads off of one another without risking her loved ones’ safety being held over her head as a threat. She’s my personal professional heroine. More here: http://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/the-heroes/…

    1. StoatCat +11

      And no, I don’t consider that the movie Monuments Men counts at all, because fuck George Clooney’s terrible scriptwriting and directing. He ruined what could have been a great story.

      1. StoatCat +4

        That’s just it; I want a movie about her, where she is the central character, and where the plot centers on her ability to blend in and play baddies off of one another to survive.

        The actual train delay featured in The Train was not nearly as dramatic in and of itself as that movie made it out to be.

  27. tinypaperme +3

    Ooo, I did not like Agora at all. I went with a bunch of my former grad school friends (we are in a field related to the topic) and we were collectively disappointed. Unfortunately I don’t remember much about why — except that the movie seemed almost too self-conscious. Every scene seemed to say, “why yes, I AM a movie about a woman in classical mathematics!” (Also I am not a Rachel Weisz fan.)

  28. Jeanette +14

    One of the really brilliant things about Hypatia was that it portrayed rather brilliantly how such an intelligent woman was susceptable to the blindness of priviledge and class, and how even she dehumanized her slaves.

    I really recommend the movie “Vision” about Hildegaard of Bingen. She’s a medieval saint and abbess, who was brilliant composer, physician and naturalist of her time. She was also navigated the politics of the Catholic Church of the day brilliantly. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995850/

  29. Tinypaws +2

    Thank you so much for this list! I’ve been spending some time on thinking of a possible topic for my thesis and a lot more time on actively trying to avoid thinking about this obviously, but it all comes together now!
    I love it and at the same time I’m rather ashamed cause I never even heard of Marie Corelli. Well, actually I’m furious. How do they do this to women all the time?

  30. summerestherson +5

    I’m sorry but I really, really hated Angel. I guess I just didn’t realize what the director was going for, but I thought the whole thing was really weird and terrible. I read a review of it after I saw it which said that the director was going for a kind of “old Hollywood epic” in the style of Gone with the Wind but I thought it REALLY didn’t work. Plus Angel is really, truly terrible. Like, obviously, it’s cool that she’s so unapologetic and she gets to be that way, but that doesn’t mean I have to actually like her. Still: Romola Garai! I will watch anything she’s in.

    1. MunchletteBelle +1

      Yeah, I did not love Angel. Mostly because of how whiny and terrible I thought Michael Fassbender was in it. Romola Garai was a delight though.

    2. Britt

      yeah I watched Angel this weekend and it is the worst thing to watch for an aspiring writer who is regularly treated like shit by men ever ever ever

      also c/w rape scenes

  31. PallasPerilous +9

    Has nobody still made a decent George Eliot movie? >:| C’mon, people, Middlemarch is SO HOT right now!

    1. Glen H +3

      Middlemarch might be hot now, but George Eliot was much more interesting than anything she wrote! I’d pay good money to see that.

    2. fhlurd +1

      The BBC kind of did make a hot Middlemarch- Rufus Sewell is in it.

      Full disclosure my dad works at a hospital in her home town where most of the wards are named after characters from her novels

  32. MunchletteBelle +3

    Impromptu is mostly about George Sand, which is pretty cool. Plus Julian Sands plays Liszt in it which… definitely seems right.

  33. Bonnie L +2

    There’s a film on George Sand that I watched as a kid so I don’t remember enough to comment on its quality, but the internet says it’s called “Impromptu”.

    Also not technically a biopic but I feel that Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando should be mentioned here. Because I recently rewatched that and it was as bizarrely beautiful and baffling as I remembered.

  36. Gretchen

    Hannah Arendt is not unknown in academia, she is a really important political philosopher, whose works are taught in other departments. But it is a shame she's not better know in general.

  38. Hellianne +4

    Dangerous Beauty, based on the life of Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco, is my favorite in this category. For one, there’s the amazingly lush and sumptuous depiction of Venice at the height of the Renaissance, with what seemed to my amateur eye to be good historical authenticity. For another, it’s a rather breathless experience to watch Veronica walk the fine, perilous line of being an educated, influential woman whose mere existence is a threat to the status quo.

  39. Sophia McDougall +1

    I love Hypatia, the historical figure, but I find her death so upsetting that I can’t watch a film about her. I was slightly – slightly! — comforted to learn recently that she may have been killed in her 60s, which would at least mean she got more of a life than I thought. I named a character after her in Romanitas, though. And “She continued to write music — none of which survives” means I can’t watch Mozart’s Sister either. I can cope with “after her death she faded into a degree of obscurity but we CAN FIX THAT RIGHT NOW and she was triumphant in life.” But stories of brilliant women crushed or irrecoverably erased I just… can’t. Maybe Angel, then? I can at least look up Corelli’s books.

  40. Mildred Pinkerton +1

    ‘Violette’, about Violette Leduc, marginalised feminist writer and Simone de Beauvoir protege (on Netflix). Very engaging as a film. (article from Guardian on Leduc: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/07/viol…
    and
    ‘Seraphine’ about avant garde, art brut painter Seraphine Louis. The film is atmospheric and tender, just great. The actress who plays Seraphine, Yolande Moreau, is masterly.