"Agnus Dei" in Cinemas in Finland

Niewinne (Agnus Dei/Les innocentes), a film directed by Anne Fontaine and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, will be released theatrically in Finland on January 20, 2017.

Agnues Dei: Finnish Premiere

On January 20, 2017 Niewinne (Agnus Dei/Les innocentes) by Anne Fontaine will be released theatrically in Finland. The film’s title is Vattomat and distribution is handled by Cinema Mondo.  

Distribution in Several Territories

Anne Fontaine’s latest feature, co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, has been released in Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, the US and France. The French release alone brought over 720,000 admissions.

On March 11, 2016 the film was released theatrically in Poland. Distribution is handled by Kino Świat.
The film is popular with international distributors; to date, it has sold to Canada, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Colombia, and the United Kingdom.

Niewinne (Agnus Dei / Les innocentes)

Niewinne (Agnus Dei / Les innocentes) is set in Poland in winter 1945. Mathilde Beaulieu (Lou de Lâage) is a young intern at the French Red Cross, working to find, cure, and repatriate French survivors of Nazi labour camps. One day a Polish nun arrives at the hospital. In broken French, she begs Mathilde to accompany her to the convent.

Cast

Niewinne (Agnus Dei / Les innocentes). Photo by Anna Włoch, Aeroplan Film

The film stars Lou de Lâage (Respire, Jappeloup – nominated for a Cesar award as Most Promising Actress), Vincent Macaigne (Eden) and Polish actresses Agata Kulesza (Ida), Agata Buzek (Rewers/The Reverse) and Joanna Kulig (Sponsoring/Elles, Ida).

International Co-Production Supported by the Polish Film Institute

The film was produced by Eric and Nicolas Altmayer of Mandarin Cinema (Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent) amd by Philippe Carcassonne, and co-produced by Eliza Oczkowska and Klaudia Śmieja of Aeroplan Film (Poland), Mars Films, Canal+ Frane, nc+ Polska, France 2 Cinema and Scope Picture (Belgium), and supported by Film Commission Poland. Lensed by Caroline Champetier, the film was filmed entirely in Poland. Polish artists were also responsible for the film’s visual side, with Joanna Macha as production designer and Katarzyna Lewińska as costume designer. The film was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute.

Reviews

Niewinne (Agnus Dei/Les innocentes) has received acclaim in Polish and international film press.
“Shot in a deliberately drab, muted palette perfectly suited to the convent’s plain-looking environs, Agnus Dei in some way recalls Of Gods and Men (2010), Xavier Beauvois’ magisterial tragedy about Trappist monks coming under siege from Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria,” writes Justin Chang for Variety magazine.

“Fontaine sketches a subtle portrait of the nuns. Some of them are vivacious young women who consider the convent a temporary shelter (Joanna Kulig’s bold performane as Irena). […] In Agnus Dei, what’s at stake is not only the past. It is also a film about the traumatic experiences that poison people with distrust. It’s a film about the dangerous fear of corporeality, rooted much deeper than orthodox Catholic dogmatism. It is also a film about fanaticism. In the world of Agata Kulesza’s complex character of Mother Superior, the solitary struggle between compassion and haughtiness ensues; a struggle between striving for the ‘lesser evil’ and crime,” writes Gazeta Wyborcza’s Paweł T. Felis.

05.01.2017