Camille Claudel - dir. Bruno Dumont

The year 1915 is a horrible one for Camille Claudel, French sculptress and Rodin’s lover. Locked away in an insane asylum, she hovers between paranoia and apathy, in turn enraged like an injured animal and as spiritual as Joan of Arc.

Bruno Dumont, the subject of a retrospective at the 11th New Horizons Festival, is a director who attempts to treat metaphysics from an extremely materialist perspective, showing here how other, less tangible walls continue to rise around the heroine. The cold hospital walls and rough hands of the staff. Hypersensitivity that twists her senses. The brutal dictate of reason, which condemns outsiders to a life in captivity. Finally – the indifference of Camille’s brother, a poet, who is torn away from worldly affairs by megalomania, fuelled to greater heights by religious obsession.