By Miranda Murray
CANNES, France, May 16 (Reuters) – Austrian director Marie Kreutzer recalled on Saturday it was difficult to make her Cannes Film Festival entry “Gentle Monster,” a family drama about the fallout from an investigation into child sexual abuse images that offers no easy answers.
“I could feel that everywhere, when I went somewhere with the project, people were like, shying away,” Kreutzer told journalists a day after the film premiere. “I knew this was not the easy path.”
The film does not offer solutions, she said, but is meant to pose questions. “The idea of the film is to ask you questions, to ask us as a society questions.”
French actor Lea Seydoux stars as Lucy, a musician who has recently moved her family to the countryside when police arrive to arrest her husband, Philip, played by Laurence Rupp, on allegations of trading child sexual abuse images.
Shocked by the arrest, Lucy searches for answers about the man she loves and whether their son may have been a victim. French cinema icon Catherine Deneuve plays Lucy’s fiercely independent mother, who becomes a key source of support.
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Kreutzer, whose previous feature about Austrian royalty, “Corsage,” premiered in Cannes’ second-tier Un Certain Regard category in 2022, said she decided to make the film after reading an article about a paedophile ring in Germany.
“I just felt helpless after reading it. And I felt that the only thing that I could do as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, is make a film about it,” she said.
Rather than focusing on the alleged perpetrator, Kreutzer said she chose to centre the film on those around him.
“This was a story about how society, how people who love someone who did this deal with it,” she said.
“Gentle Monster” is competing against 21 other films for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, which will be awarded on May 23.
(Reporting by Miranda Murray. Editing by Mark Potter)
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