Chichester Cinema at New Park
Incendies
A mother's last wishes send twins Jeanne and Simon on a journey to the Middle East in search of their tangled roots.
The French-Canadian director of ‘Maelstrom’ and ‘Polytechnique’ mounts his most ambitious film, an adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s wrenching play about twin siblings Jeanne (Désormeaux Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), who travel to Lebanon to discover the history of their mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal). The twins are stunned when they receive a pair of envelopes from their mother's will - one for the father they thought was dead and another for a brother they didn't know existed.
In this enigmatic inheritance, Jeanne sees the key to Nawal's retreat into unexplained silence during the final weeks of her life. She immediately decides to go to the Middle East to dig into a family history of which she knows next to nothing.
Simon is unmoved by their mother's posthumous mind games. However, the love he has for his sister is strong, and he soon joins her in combing their ancestral homeland in search of a Nawal who is very different from the mother they knew. Blessed with the help of a strong cast, the country’s best cinematographer (Andre Turpin) and his own leaned-out screenplay, ‘Incendies’ is a deeply moving story that brings the extremism and violence of today's world to a starkly personal level, delivering a powerful and poetic testament to the uncanny power of the will to survive. (Subtitles)
France · 
Lebanon · 
Canada · 2010 · Denis Villeneuve · 130min
