Battle Cries

Haut les coeurs ! is a film about two women at war: director Sólveig Anspach and actress Karin Viard. Because it takes two fighters to tackle the daunting subject matter of a film that the director makes no secret of being autobiographical. Emma, a young woman pregnant with her first child, learns that she has advanced breast cancer. The surgeon also tells her that she will have to have an abortion, as the radiotherapy he recommends is incompatible with her pregnancy. This is a blow that hits you like a punch to the solar plexus. A punch that is all the more violent because it is delivered in slow motion under the powerful anaesthetic injected by the images that accompany this exposition: cold, clinical, ascetic. (Gérard Lefort; libération.fr)