Cinema Guild debuted the official trailer Our Body (Notre Corps), the documentary from French filmmaker Claire Simon (Human Geography, The Competition), following doctors and patients at a gynecology ward in France.
Release Date
Our Body world premiered at Berlin Film Festival and opens in theaters at Film Forum in NY on August 4th, 2023.
Synopsis
French documentary titan Claire Simon observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, she questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the diversity, singularity and beauty of patients in all stages of life. Through these many encounters, the specific fears, desires and struggles of these individuals become the health challenges we all face, even the filmmaker herself.
Reviews
In their review, Slant Magazine called the film a realistic celebration fused with pre-emptive mourning, writing, “Simon’s film is, in this sense, akin to iconic film works that have tapped into the celebration of life in overpowering ways, such as Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving and Artavazd Peleshyan’s Life, even as it goes far beyond their triumphant ethos. Hers is a realistic celebration fused with pre-emptive mourning. Our Body never shies away from the contradictions and complexities of what it means to be alive—that is, to also be in a process of dying, haunted by and even defined by the ultimate disposability, if not insignificance, of our human body.”
Giving the film, 4 of 5 stars in their review, International Cinephile Society wrote, “Like last year’s (also French) documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Our Body contains medical surgeries filmed up close, where the human flesh is opened up and delved into; but what Claire Simon pursues with these sequences is entirely different. She reflects upon the mystery of the female body, cradle of the greatest wonders as well as the darkest aches, including the breast cancer she witnesses in others when observing the result of a mastectomy, before eventually being diagnosed with it herself in a harrowing scene. In this overwhelming moment, the director simultaneously becomes a patient and passes in front of the camera. As she puts it herself, “it all weirdly came together”; her doing this movie and her body turning against her. The use of the ‘us’ pronoun has rarely been more accurate than in this case.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for Our Body: