About the Film
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival, French director Audrey Diwan’s feature film Happening is a devasting abortion drama. In the shape of a psychological thriller, its young protagonist finds herself in a fight with her own resilient body.
Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux, the story takes place in 1964. Despite being set fifty years ago, the drama of the novel speaks to us powerfully today. With legislatures from Texas to the world at large passing ever more restrictive anti-abortion laws, Diwan’s second film is both timely and important.
Three weeks after a casual sexual encounter with a visiting student from Bordeaux, Anne (played intelligently by Anamaria Vartolomei) discovers that she is pregnant.
Alone and determined, she starts the hard journey to terminate her pregnancy at a time where abortions were illegal. Anyone who helped was liable to arrest and imprisonment.
Feeling humiliated and disgraced before her classmates, her drive to continue her studies and become a teacher gives her the will to risk her own life. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life.” Both brutally honest and compassionate, Happening is often a tough watch.
Thanks to cinematographer Laurent Tangy's shooting with a slender aspect ratio, many close-ups and hand-held tracking shots following the protagonist’s every move, Diwan creates a strong first-person view that is intimate and grows more powerful as Anne resorts to more and more dangerous methods of abortion. “I did this movie with anger. I did the movie with desire also. I did it with my belly, my guts, my heart, my head,” Diwan said, “I wanted Happening to be an experience". And an experience it is!
Happening reminds us that cinema can be a powerful medium of empathy. It earns its place in the company of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Mahamet Saleh-Haroun’s recent Lingui.
Nicole Guillemet