The Innocents

December 1945, Poland. A young doctor working for the French Red Cross is pressed by a nun to come to a convent, and freezes at what she finds: a number of nuns raped by Soviet soldiers are pregnant and close to term. The convent has to hide it, because exposure means closure. The film is not interested in criticising faith. It is interested in two moral systems colliding: the doctor protects medicine, the abbess protects the institution, and each is consistent within her own logic. The most shattering passage is the discovery of what the abbess has been doing with the babies. The form is cold and distant: snow, candlelight, grey corridors, few close-ups. Anne Fontaine does not show the rapes and is concerned only with what follows them. The story starts from a real person: the notes of Madeleine Pauliac, a French doctor working in Poland immediately after the war. Lou de Laâge plays the doctor, with Agata Buzek and Agata Kulesza as nuns. Who it is for: viewers drawn to postwar narratives, dramas inside religious institutions, and quiet but heavy films. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot carry the weight of the subject. The film is quiet and keeps the pressure on throughout.