ANTIGONE by Sophie Deraspe

Following the murder of her parents, young Antigone, her sister Ismène, her brothers Eteocles and Polynices, and her grandmother Menoeceus take shelter in Montréal, where they live a quiet life in a small apartment in a working-class neighbourhood. A model student, Antigone is the glue that holds the family together. Tragedy explodes when Eteocles is killed by police while they are arresting Polynices, a small-time drug dealer. Motivated by her sense of duty towards her family and by the memory of her parents, Antigone decides to risk her own future to protect her family’s: she casts aside the law of man to rely on her own sense of justice, founded on love and solidarity.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
It was around the age of 20 that I was struck by “Antigone”’s reading: her intelligence, her sincerity, her incorruptibility immediately seduced me. After Jean Anouilh’s version, I then read Sophocles’ original. I discovered an Antigone whose quest for justice is all the stronger because it is based on laws that she deems superior to those written by men. I wanted to bring to life, in our time and in the social context of our Western cities, the integrity of Antigone, her sense of justice and her capacity for love. I also wanted Antigone to remain very young (16 years old) and physically small, in order to bring out the inner strength of this person who opposes her personal values to the official laws of men. There is a stranger scene where Antigone is interrogated by a blind psychiatrist named Teresa, a modern incarnation of the soothsayer Tiresias. Beyond the game of associations created between a soothsayer who belongs to the world of Greek tragedy and the contemporary figure of a psychiatrist, I found it essential to open a space where Antigone’s unconscious could speak and bear witness to the force that animates her and makes her heroic. Antigone feels entrusted with a higher duty towards those who preceded her, towards her dead loved ones, whom she always perceives at her side. The laws of men have less value through her eyes than those dictated by her dead, which places her faced with a dilemma that is the very essence of this tragedy.

TITLE Antigone

DIRECTOR Sophie Deraspe

NATION Canada

YEAR 2019

DURATION 109′

CAST Nahéma Ricci, Rachida Oussaada, Nour Belkhiria, Rawad El-Zein, Hakim Brahimi, Paul Doucet