An aging woman and her nurse develop a friendship that inspires her to unearth unacknowledged longing and thus help her make peace with her past

With an Academy Award nomination in 2019, the French-Canadian film directed by Marianne Farley turned heads all year with the tender and desiring storyline of an aging woman who comes to terms with her sexuality after connecting with a younger nurse. Starring Béatrice Picard (Les Jeunes Loups), alongside Sandrine Bisson (1991), ‘Marguerite’ is subtle and emotional, gravitated from silent moments and driven by the intimacy between an unlikely friendship. We had the extreme pleasure to interview Marianne just ahead of the Oscars back in February, and she had some wonderful thing to tell us about the film:

When I get asked about my inspiration for this film, I always talk about my grandmother because there is such a dramatic difference between the society she was born into and the one I grew up in. Maybe that has a lot to do with my parents and the values they inculcated in me, but there is also a huge gap between how we see homosexuality these days and how my grandmother’s generation viewed it. It was considered to be a mortal sin in God’s eye back then (and still is, in certain countries). The idea that two women from polar opposite realities connect and learn from each other moved me to the core. That is what sparked the idea for this story.

Read our full interview with Marianne Farley on her Oscar Nominated short Marguerite.