Garance

Garance is a gifted and enthusiastic actor, but not a star. Living from one role to the next in Paris, she drinks to cope with the precariousness of her job and the pressures of everyday life. Across eight years, director Jeanne Herry follows her through auditions and rejections, a tender love story and her worries about a sick younger sister—while alcoholism quietly tightens its hold. A former actor herself, Herry draws on the experience of her performer friends to portray a profession made up of waiting, humiliation and small victories. Adèle Exarchopoulos carries the film and appears in nearly every scene, moving with striking ease from comedy to raw vulnerability, from bravado to collapse. The screenplay leaps through time with remarkable fluidity, letting years pass in a cut and trusting the viewer to keep pace. Above all, GARANCE stands out for its treatment of alcoholism, an illness that advances by degrees while coexisting with work, desire and joy. Avoiding the familiar spectacle of sudden ruin and melodramatic rock bottom, Herry captures the particular insidiousness of this addiction: drinking is so woven into social ritual that it passes unnoticed and so entwined with Garance’s sense of self that letting go feels like losing who she is. (Cristina Álvarez López)

On Sunday, 01.11. our main sponsor, Erste Bank, invites you to a matinee with free admission.

COLLECTION OF TICKETS FOR THE ERSTE BANK FILM MATINEE 
Free tickets (maximum 2 per person) are available at the Gartenbaukino advance ticket office, at the festival cinemas and through the Erste Bank Lotteries.

Jeanne Herry: MARCHER (2009, K), ELLE L’ADORE (2014), PUPILLE (2018), JE VERRAI TOUJOURS VOS VISAGES (2023)