Her Name is Sabine

New Zealand Premiere

Sandrine Bonnaire is better known as the César award winning French actress who starred in movies such as Maurice Pialat’s Sous le Soleil de Satan, Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie and Patrice Leconte’s Monsieur Hire.

In this deeply moving film, she has turned to directing a documentary about her sister Sabine, who has autism, a condition that was for years catastrophically undiagnosed. Through years of improper diagnosis and care, Sabine’s development and many talents were crushed. With enlightened treatment in a new care home, Sabine is making progress, but she had previously been placed in a heartless psychiatric hospital that thought of nothing but drugging and pacifying its patient-prisoners. Using family videos of Sabine as a heartbreakingly free-spirited girl and weaving these images with the grim reality of Sabine today, unrecognisable at 38: overweight, depressed, prone to abusive and aggressive episodes.

Using her own video archive and shooting new material herself, she offers a deeply intelligent, moving, personal essay about the poor bewildered sister that was lost – the hidden doppelgänger to the glamorous movie star who went out to conquer the world.

Bonnaire bravely admits you into the personal world of both her and her younger sister Sabine. The story is so poignant and heartbreaking, it leaves you angry at a system that let Sabine down but at the same time, inspires by the sibling love and hope it presents.

"One of the most arresting directorial debuts of recent times..." Empire Magazine