A Radiant Girl

DVD Features

BONUS:
French Institute Alliance Française Q&A with director Sandrine Kiberlain and actress Rebecca Marder, moderated by Columbia University Film Professor Annette Insdorf.
 
BONUS SHORT FILM:

FINE
Directed by Maya Yadlin
Israel | Hebrew with English subtitles | 9 minutes

A song on the car stereo ignites a violent rift between a mother and father and their two daughters, bringing their family road trip to a dramatic halt.

Discs: 1

• Highest Rating
  "Calling upon “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Journal of Hélène Berr” as well as recollections shared by her own family to process the events of the period through the eyes of a young woman, Kiberlain infuses Irène’s story with a more contemporary immediacy, assisted by cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman’s energetic camerawork… there are no false moves in Marder’s truly radiant lead performance."
  Michael Rechtshaffen, The Los Angeles Times
• Highest Rating
  "Impressive… Through an affecting mix of comedy, romance and drama, A Radiant Girl sounds a warning about the perils of not looking directly at tough realities. And yet it’s so alive from moment to moment, so finely attuned to the emotional lives of its characters, that it never feels like a history lesson dressed up as narrative."
  Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter
• Highest Rating
  "A promising debut from actor-turned-director Kiberlain, and in Marder, we may be witnessing the birth of a new leading lady in French cinema."
  Catherine Bray, Variety
• Highest Rating
  "There’s plenty to engage in A Radiant Girl, not least a performance by Rebecca Marder which more than delivers on the luminous promise of the English title."
  Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
• Highest Rating
  "Radiant is the right word to describe Rebecca Marder as Irène, an aspiring actress on the brink of first love. From her first seconds on-screen, we are immediately entranced by her open, trusting, vulnerable face… Most Holocaust dramas show us the trains, the barbed wire, and the starving prisoners. This movie shows us what happened before, making the story real by making us identify with the people who were lost."
  Nell Minow, RogerEbert.com
• Highest Rating
  "Between Marder's exquisite performance and Kiberlain's powerful yet subdued storytelling, radiant is the perfect word to summarise the writer-director's feature debut."
  Andrew Murray, The Upcoming
• Highest Rating
  "Kiberlain presents an adeptly conceived character portrait contained in just the right way to remain chillingly effective and memorable."
  Nicholas Bell, Ion Cinema
• Highest Rating
  "There’s something incredibly poignant about watching someone happily going about their everyday life with no idea that history is coming for them, inescapably and inexorably… Kiberlain lets it all unfold gracefully, letting Irène’s girlish enthusiasm and innocence stand in contrast to viewers’ knowledge of the grim future in store for Paris’ Jewish population. As a result, there’s a tension underlying even the film’s lightest, sweetest moments — but that tension is exactly what makes A Radiant Girl so powerful."
  Betsy Bozdech, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
• Highest Rating
  "A deeply personal film for Kiberlain, partly inspired by her own family history, it is a haunting depiction of everyday life under fascism and a timely reminder that the echoes of the past can still be heard today — and we would do well to listen… A Radiant Girl is a film where horrors hover on the edge of every frame, out of sight but never truly out of mind. That doesn’t take away from its moments of great beauty; rather, it accentuates them as something all the more valuable, for they may be fleeting."
  Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry
• Highest Rating
  "Marder does indeed live up to the film’s title as the infectiously vivacious Irene, and “A Radiant Girl” is laced with enlivening bursts of creativity.... Making the most of a moment isn’t only a skill of Kiberlain’s, but a means of survival in “A Radiant Girl” when it’s clear there’s no assurances of how long it’ll last."
  Stephen Saito, The Moveable Fest
• Highest Rating
  "Sandrine Kiberlain’s début feature, A Radiant Girl... contains sparkling moments of illumination where the historical context of Paris in the summer of 1942 enters into a dialogue with lines by Marivaux from 1740, as well as a coming-of-age tale that is as old and new as theatre itself."
  Anne-Katrin Titze, Eye for Film
• Highest Rating
  "Marder is a radiant actress, her face an open book. She plays Irène as a young woman with joie de vivre and excitement, and perhaps some willful blindness about the political situation around her. Part of what differentiates A Radiant Girl from other holocaust dramas is that Kiberlain is less interested in telegraphing future harm than she is in showing the psychological impacts of even small losses of civil liberties. "
  Alex Heeney, Seventh Row
• Highest Rating
  "To put it simply, A Radiant Girl is something special. A unique yet incredibly effective blend of both the best and worst of humanity, the film is as charming as it is devastating."
  Carson Timar, Clapper
• Highest Rating
  "A Radiant Girl offers a chilling look at fascism’s accumulating evil in a way that lulls its audience into a sense of complacency — a pointed mirroring — and then pierces right straight through the heart when it’s least expected."
  Matthew Lucas, In Review Online
• Highest Rating
  "A masterfully assembled coming-of-age that falls in love, enchants, unsettles, and breaks your heart."
  Ricardo Gallegos, La Estatuilla
• Highest Rating
  "Rebecca Marder is marvelous in the leading role of Irene and delivers a star-making performance in A Radiant Girl."
  Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies