Bruno Reidal: Confession of a Murderer

Vincent Le Port's first feature is based on a real case in the Cantal region of France in 1905. Bruno Reidal, a seventeen-year-old seminarian, kills a child in the woods near his village and goes straight to the authorities to surrender. In prison, at the request of the doctors studying his case, he begins writing an account of his life; the film rests on that text and builds its narration in Reidal's own voice. Le Port does not try to explain or excuse the killing; he lays out the childhood, the poverty, the religious schooling and the thoughts he told no one, in cold sequence. The director drew his material from the archive of a physician regarded as a founder of criminal anthropology. The result is a distanced, disquieting portrait that never comes near genre. Who it's for: viewers seeking cold, analytical European cinema drawn from real cases. Who it's not for: anyone who cannot bear the killing of a child and this degree of proximity to the perpetrator's mind.