Joan of Arc online + Jeannette on DVD

Bruno Dumont makes the bold choice of casting a 10 year old as the teenage Joan.

In 1429, the Hundred Years' War between France and England had already been going 90 odd years. Believing that God had chosen her, the young Joan is a leader of the army of the King of France and lifts the siege of Orleans, enabling the dauphin to be formally crowned as Charles VII. After she is captured, she is sent for trial on charges of heresy, to be judged by pro-Burgundian and pro-English clerics. Refusing to accept the accusations, Joan stays obdurate.

The film was presented in the Un Certain Regard selection in Cannes 2019 and received the Prix Louis-Delluc for best French film of the year.

Also included on the DVD is the first UK release for Jeannette, The Childhood of Joan of Arc, the first part of Dumont's Joan diptych, but in the form of a heavy rock musical.

Bruno Dumont (born 1958, Bailleul, France) studied philosophy before he started directing films. To date, he has directed seven feature films and now a television series, all of which border somewhere between realistic drama and the avant-garde. His feature films are La vie de Jesus (1997), L'Humanite (1999), Twentynine Palms (2003), Flandres (2006), Hadewijch (2009), Hors Satan (2011) and Camille Claudel 1915 (2013). L'Humanite and Flandres were both awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, while Hadewijch won the FIPRESCI prize. Dumont began working for television with the series P'tit Quinquin (2014), which aired on ARTE. The move also brought humour into Dumont's filmic world for the first time and a shift in genre, which he repeated in his next feature film Ma Loute (2016), a blend of comedy and drama shown in competition at Cannes in 2016. The next change of tone was even more extreme, as the filmmaker tackled the challenge of a rock musical with Jeannette, l'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc (2017), based on a play by Charles Peguy. He presented the sequel Jeanne in the Un Certain Regard selection this year in Cannes.

Coincoin and the Extra Humans is the sequel to P'tit Quinquin and was presented during the 71st Locarno Festival in 2018, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Filmography

1997 La vie de Jesus (The Life of Jesus)

1999 L'Humanite (Humanity)

2003 Twentynine Palms

2006 Flandres (Flanders)

2009 Hadewijch

2011 Hors Satan

2013 Camille Claudel 1915

2014 P'tit Quinquin(L'il Quinquin)

2016 Slack Bay(Ma Loute)

2017Jeannette: L'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc (Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc)

2018 Coincoin and the Extra Humans (Coincoin et les Z'inhumains)

2019 Joan of Arc

2020 On a Half Clear Morning (yet to be premiered)

"Ten-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme blazes her way through this wildly inventive reconfiguring of the story of Joan of Arc, a sequel to Dumont’s equally surprising musical Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc."

Tara Brady The Irish Times

"There is a God and his name is Bruno Dumont. His piously poisonous sequel to last year's best film, Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, is artier, holier, and will give you Catholic goose bumps. The ten-year-old star stares nobly and defiantly through the camera lens right into your soul and doesn't even wait for the church authorities, she burns herself at the stake."

John Waters, Artforum

CRITIC'S PICK

Joan of Arc Review: The Saint Is Revisited in Song

"Dumont's depiction of the French priests who try her is striking. Eager to deliver her to the secular arm, so that she can be executed without their taking any responsibility, the men are egotistical, cynical and bombastic in a way that's contemporary without breaking the particular period spell the movie creates."

Glenn Kenny, New York Times

"Viewers who commit to the challenge of the movie's initial passage may find themselves drifting into the center of Dumont's spell, as the movie crawls toward a fascinating rumination on the character's persistence under duress. Prudhomme's immature features make her a fascinating entry point for exploring Joan's mystique."

Eric Kohn, IndieWire
Dignified and painterly portrait suffused with an air of fantasy...

'Prudhomme is extraordinarily convincing in the role, exuding a rare maturity. Dumont is clearly both in awe and in love with Joan and determined to clear her name and debunk the myths that led to her burning at the stake as a heretic. The story may be medieval but it still resonates today.
Meredith Taylor, Filmuforia

"Soldiers, saints, and prelates emerge from the wilderness and are swallowed back into it...composition conjures poetic imagery of simplicity, where everything comes down to the triad of human, divine and nature, and the rugged immensity of the latter participates in trumpeting the glory of the Creator.

It achieves the miraculous feat of poking at the dogmatism of religious institution, while celebrating faith in all its mysterious, obscure powers."
Leonardo Goi, The Film Stage

"Dumont evokes the war sparely with an extraordinary equestrian ballet, as the French cavalry go through their pre-battle paces - sometimes shot directly from above as the horses form elaborate patterns, it's a mesmerising sequence, giving the film a flavour that's equal parts Brecht, Bresson and Busby Berkeley.

Joan has consistently been a figurehead for the French right, but here she very much embodies resistance to religious intolerance, while in terms of gender politics, there could hardly be a more extreme example of a woman's persecution by the massed ranks of the patriarchy.

Dumont's boldest move, and the one that provides the film's emotive drive, is the casting of 10-year-old Lise Leplat Prudhomme as Joan. Her performance is consistently forceful - quite extraordinary and formidable. It's her presence as an embodiment of innocent, unbending will that gives the film its most persuasive meaning.'
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily

'For the second instalment in Bruno Dumont's diptych, the director follows his 2017 rock opera, Jeannette with the sombre and ironic balladry of a defeated young warrior facing execution at the hands of her enemies.

Adapting a play by Charles Peguy, Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers' rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars' sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan's defiant responses, which reduce her captors' pride to ridicule. With music by the singer-songwriter Christophe (who died of COVID-19 in April)."

Richard Brody, New Yorker
"Dumont's venture is more preoccupied with processes of de-mystification: grounding spirituality so we see that the sacred exists not in institutions (the Church, the Law, the Nation), but rather, as he describes it, in common things.

That is what all of Dumont is fundamentally about, which is why there may be a no more encapsulating and rigorous sequence in his cinema than the prolonged trial that makes up the bulk of this film."

Blake Williams, Cinemascope

Joan of Arc:

Download the pressbook

Download photo set

Trailer on YouTube - link or embed

Download trailer pro res

Masterclass with Bruno Dumont at the Cine Lumiere (YouTube)

Interview with Bruno Dumont by The Criterion Collection

Conversation with Bruno Dumont at Locarno 2018

Dumont explores his inner child - Interview with Eye for Film

International pressbook

Jeannette:

For film bookings please contact Colin Burch at Verve Pictures — [email protected]. Press resources are on the Press page.