Bill Phillips One of the best movies of the year 2016, IMHO!!! Didn't get a lot of mention at Awards time, but certainly as important as a political comment on a true story as, say, Spotlight. The Russians have gotten an easy pass in the movie business, compared to the likes of Nazi Germany and Racist United States which have been turned every way but loose as far as getting raked over the coals by cinema.This quiet little story of Russian soldiers raping Polish nuns balances that trend in movies. Set after the war in 1945 as the Russians take over Poland, but the French Red Cross is still there, it's a reminder that there are always a few good people in the midst of the thugs. May the young French actress Lou de Laage have a long and happy career. She certainly has a good start here.Besides excellent acting and story telling, maybe it's the filming and mood created by this movie that makes it so good. You would think it painful to watch considering the subject, but it's not. Great shots of snowy, muddy roads and rambling old trucks offset by warm glow of music in a candle lit bar. Then the nuns, in a bleak cold stone refuge, yet in spite of their hardship, they are full of heart and life.

Red-125 The French film Les innocentes was shown in the U.S. with the translated title The Innocents (2016). Anne Fontaine directed this powerful movie.The year is 1945, just after the end of World War II. A French Red Cross unit is sent into Poland. Their mission was to care for French survivors of the camps. Among the Red Cross staff is a young medical student, Mathilde Beaulieu, played by Lou de Laâge. Early in the film, we learn a terrible secret about the nuns in a nearby convent. Many of them are pregnant, because they were raped by Russian soldiers. Mathilde learns of this, and she is allowed to enter the convent, where she meets Sister Maria, a French-speaking nun played by Agata Buzek. To go further with the plot would diminish the movie, so I'll stop at that point. Let me just say that the situation is even worse than it seems.This is a movie that is not to be missed. Yes, it's grim, but postwar Poland was a grim place. The film takes place in winter, so snow covers everything, and even the Red Cross staff is miserable. Obviously, for the nuns in the convent, everything is much more terrible.The acting in the film by the two lead actors is outstanding. Also, the ensemble acting was wonderful. There were no weak links, and no obviously staged scenes. Everything looked real--cold, dark, and threatening--but real.This is one of those movies where many frames could be lifted from the film and used as a photograph. My compliments to cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who did a brilliant job.We saw this film at the excellent Little Theatre in Rochester, NY. It will work well enough on the small screen, but the large screen gives you a better sense of the isolation of the convent. The nuns don't expect help from outside. They only expect harm to come to them. Mathilde is the exception, and they (and we) understand that. Small screen or large screen, don't miss this movie!P.S. The film is based on the experiences of a French doctor--Madeleine Jeanne Marie Pauliac. She was a member of the French Resistance, and did, indeed work tirelessly in Poland after the war. For artistic reasons, director Fontaine focused on Dr. Pauliac's work with the pregnant nuns. The rest of her accomplishments would also make a fascinating movie.

Howard Schumann According to military historian Antony Beevor, "The subject of the Red Army's mass rapes in Germany and elsewhere has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened." A Soviet war correspondent said, "It was an army of rapists," and that Russian soldiers raped every female from eight to eighty. The scale of the rapes that took place is suggested by the fact that about two million women in Europe had illegal abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.Anne Fontaine's ("Coco Before Chanel"), The Innocents (aka Agnus Dei) tells one personal story of the brutality of the "liberating" Red Army from the point of view of a young French doctor, Mathilde (Lou de Laage, "Breathe") caring for French soldiers at a nearby Red Cross hospital. Based on real events, recounted in notes by Madeleine Pauliac, a Red Cross doctor, Mathilde secretly takes time from her hospital duties to serve as a midwife for nuns at a Benedictine convent in Poland in 1945 that have become pregnant as a result of several visits by Russian soldiers. As the film opens, Mathilde is begged by the novice Teresa (Eliza Rycembel, "Carte Blanche") to come to the convent immediately to deliver the child of Sister Zofia (Anna Próchniak, "Warsaw '44"), who is near death.At first reluctant, the doctor is moved by the pleas of the novice and quietly goes to the convent where she performs a C-section to remove the breech baby and save Sister Zofia's life. Shortly afterwards, another nun, Sister Anna (Katarzyna Dabrowska, "Król zycia"), collapses and the truth is revealed to her that the nuns were subjected to the assaults by Russian soldiers who came to the convent on three separate occasions resulting in the pregnancy of six nuns and one novice. Giving assistance to the Abbess (Agata Kulesza, "Ida") and her young assistant Maria (Agata Buzek, "Redemption"), the French doctor is sworn to secrecy to prevent the nuns' pregnancy from becoming a blemish on the reputation of the convent.The ordeal is a test for the nuns' religious faith who must deal with the fear that they will be punished by God for failing to live up to their vow of chastity and Mathilde comes to respect that many of the nuns uphold their beliefs, even though many believe that God has abandoned them. More reflective than others, Polish actress Buzek is remarkable as Maria, a complex nun who admits that being a nun in these circumstances feels like "twenty-four hours of doubt for one minute of hope." When Mathilde has her own close encounter with Russian soldiers who try to rape her at a roadblock, her bond with the nuns rises to a new level of empathy.Though she was raised by Communist parents and is a non-believer, Mathilde develops a close relationship with the nuns and is moved by their devotional chants and returns to the convent each night to deliver the children of the remaining nuns. The Abbess tells Mathilde that the babies are taken to a sympathetic aunt but a deeper secret is hidden. A semi-love interest develops when Mathilde establishes a friendship with Jewish doctor Samuel (Vincent Macaigne, "Two Friends"), her medical supervisor who joins her at the convent to deliver the remaining babies and their engaging conversations are the film's only light note.The Innocents is a heartbreaking film that portrays a community that is helpless in the face of brutality and whose resolve is tested to the breaking point when a death occurs in the convent and the question of the disposition of the newborn children takes us to an unexpected dark place. Lou de Laage is outstanding as the sensitive doctor whose compassion for others allows her to thrive in an uncomfortable situation and whose quick thinking saves the nuns from another encounter with the Russians. Her performance succeeds because she is also one of the innocents, those who are willing to give of themselves to others without standing in judgment.One is reminded of the words of Mother Teresa who said, "If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway." Though it is shot in darker hues and is often bleak, The Innocents is also an uplifting experience.

marsanobill Poland, immediately after WWII: a highly stressed French Red Cross unit isworking MASH-style to treat and evacuate numerous wounded French soldiers when a desperate Polish nun asks for emergency help. By rule the corpsmen can treat only French military, but by luck and by example the nun moves a young French nurse to break that rule. At the convent she finds that the emergency is that a nun is about to give birth, and with no more help than her sisters' whispered prayers. The subsequent revelations are all convincing and all horrible, especially because the nuns have had to survive--just barely--both the German invaders and their Russian liberators. A.k.a. rapists. This riveting and beautifully filmed story is said to be based on fact. That always makes me want to know more than the 'based on' part. 'Facts are stubborn things,' as John Adams said, to which I add that filmmakers are malleable. They have to make the facts into a story. In this case I felt the wind-up of the story was a high-fructose invention—pat, glib, convenient. Excellent nevertheless.