She Is Conann

She Is Conann
Directed by	Bertrand Mandico
Written by	Bertrand Mandico
Produced by	Gilles Chanial Emmanuel Chaumet Avi Amar Antoine Garnier Olivier Dubois
Starring	Elina Löwensohn Christa Théret Julia Riedler Claire Duburcq Sandra Parfait Agata Buzek Nathalie Richard Françoise Brion
Cinematography	Nicolas Eveilleau
Edited by	Laure Saint-Marc
Music by	Pierre Desprats
Production companies	Les Films Fauves Ecce Films Floréal Films Novak Prod Orphée Films Nanterre-Amandiers
Distributed by	UFO Distribution (France) Altered Innocence (North America)
Release dates	19 May 2023 (2023-05-19) (Cannes) 29 November 2023 (2023-11-29) (France) 2 February 2024 (2024-02-02) (United States)
Running time	105 minutes
Countries	France Belgium Luxembourg
Languages	French English German

She Is Conann is a 2023 action fantasy film written and directed by Bertrand Mandico. A reworking of Conan the Barbarian, the film follows six incarnations of Conann across different eras, each eventually killed by her future self.

Conann is portrayed by Claire Duburcq at age 15, Christa Théret at age 25, Sandra Parfait at age 35, Agata Buzek at age 45, Nathalie Richard at age 55, and Françoise Brion as Conann Queen. Elina Löwensohn portrays Rainer, a dog-headed guardian of the underworld who narrates Conann's successive lives, while Julia Riedler portrays Sanja.

Plot

In the underworld, Rainer guides the dead Queen Conann through her previous lives. Rainer has followed Conann throughout her life, photographing her with a camera. During these memories, Conann appears at ten-year intervals, with each new incarnation killing and replacing her younger self.

At 15, Conann is captured and enslaved by Sanja and her band of barbarians after her mother is killed. At 25, she becomes a warrior. At 35, Conann lives in the Bronx in 1998, where she works as a stuntwoman and Sanja is her lover. At 45, she lives in a dystopian future. At 55, Conann is a wealthy patron of the arts.

The 55-year-old Conann gathers a group of artists and offers them her fortune on the condition that they consume her body after her death, expecting them to grant her immortality through their work. The story then returns to the dead Queen Conann in the underworld.

Production

Mandico developed the project alongside a theatrical work after the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers asked him to devise a show about the making of a film. He proposed a female version of Conan the Barbarian and later wrote the feature-film screenplay separately from the theatrical project. Mandico said that his research led him to a figure named Conann in Celtic mythology and to fantastical dog-headed creatures, which echoed ideas he had already developed for Rainer. He cited Max Ophüls's Lola Montès as a major influence on the film.

The film is part of a cycle of works around Conann that was originally conceived as a live stage production titled The Deviant Comedy. After the COVID-19 pandemic halted live theatre productions, Mandico had the stage work filmed on 16 mm film. Cinematographer Nicolas Eveilleau, who had previously worked as a first assistant camera on Mandico's The Wild Boys and After Blue, later served as cinematographer on She Is Conann.

The film was shot entirely in Luxembourg at the former ARBED industrial site in Esch-Schifflange, which was converted into a film studio for the production. More than 60 Luxembourg technicians and artists worked on the film. Unifrance lists the film as a Luxembourg-majority co-production, with Luxembourg accounting for 50 percent of the production, France 35 percent and Belgium 15 percent.

Eveilleau shot the film with an Aaton Penelope camera, using two-perf 35 mm and Kodak 5219 500T film stock. The film was shot in color, although most of the finished film is presented in black and white. According to Eveilleau, no post-production visual effects were used; rear projection, filters, overlays and other optical effects were created during filming.

Release

The film had its world premiere in the Directors' Fortnight program at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2023, where it was in competition for the Queer Palm. It subsequently screened out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival and was selected for Fantastic Fest and the Official Fantàstic Competition of the Sitges Film Festival.

UFO Distribution released the film theatrically in France on 29 November 2023. Altered Innocence began a limited theatrical release in the United States on 2 February 2024.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 85% of 33 critics' reviews are positive. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100 based on seven critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Katie Rife of RogerEbert.com called the film Mandico's best work to date and praised its "clear, propulsive story arc". William Repass of Slant Magazine described it as "gleefully hostile to realism" and likened it to a French Symbolist poem.

External links

• She Is Conann at IMDb