Revoir Paris

Mia, a Russian interpreter, is caught in an attack on a Paris bistro one autumn evening. Three months later she cannot get back into her life and remembers only fragments of that night. She does not know when she got under the table, whose hand she held, how she got out. She returns to the bistro and begins talking to the other survivors. The film is not interested in the attack. It is interested in memory reassembling itself: it never shows the event whole, only as much as people remember, and the pieces do not fit. What Mia is looking for is not the perpetrator but the man who helped her that night. The form is close and quiet: Paris streets, the hospital, survivors' meetings. The sound design carries the suddenness with which memory arrives. Alice Winocour wrote and directed. Her own brother was at the Bataclan on 13 November 2015, and the film draws on that. It screened in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2022. Virginie Efira plays Mia and won Best Actress at the 48th César Awards for it; Benoît Magimel plays another survivor. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet drama about the aftermath of trauma. Who it is not for: anyone close to the subject. The film does not show the attack but rebuilds its sound and its panic directly.