Directed by Claude Chabrol • 1988 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, François Cluzet, Marie Trintignant

Isabelle Huppert won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her riveting performance in this tale of wartime survival based on the true story of Marie-Louise Giraud, one of the last women to be executed by guillotine in France. Struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied France, impoverished mother Marie (Huppert) finds success and a chance at a better life by performing clandestine abortions—work that puts her in conflict with the Vichy regime’s brutal ban against the practice, which it regards as a “crime against the state.”