Queen Margot (La Reine Margot)

In collaboration with the PleinAir Festival by the French Institute of Greece.

The film will be screened in a digitally restored print and for the first time in Greece in its full duration.

Director: Patrice Chéreau
Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Vincent Perez, Virna Lisi
Runtime: 161’
Year of Production: 1994
Language: French
Subtitles: Greek

In the greatest success of his career, which was prematurely cut short in 2013 with the director’s death, the great Patrice Chéreau presents his own incomparably brutal and sensual version of a period film. Light years away from the usual calligraphy of formality and luxury usually reserved for such historical epics, "Queen Margot" bursts in fountains of red blood and utter decadence, with a sublimely raw realism the likes of which we have never seen in the chronicles of this genre in cinema.

Based on the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas, the film unfolds the events leading up to the Night of St. Bartholomew massacre in 1572 France, with a dazzling Isabelle Adjani as the young Marguerite de Valois, caught between her personal strains and a marriage of convenience, poisonous intrigue and relentlessly Machiavellian characters, at the center of the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants. With scenes that seem to have emerged from Delacroix's paintings and a commanding soundtrack by Goran Bregović, Chéreau's audacious masterpiece won the Jury Prize and the Best Actress Award for Virna Lisi at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, five César Awards (three of them for the performances of Adjani, Lisi and Anglade), as well as an Oscar nomination for costume design. Thanasis Patsavos