A Frenchman stands trial for the slaughter of his mother, sister and brother in the 19th century.
Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviere, a unique and original film, charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Riviere, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Details of the crime and of the trial that followed are told from varied perspectives, including the written confession of Pierre himself, and form a rich and complex narrative that interrogates the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘history’. Radical, bold and uncompromising, director Rene Allio’s extraordinary work is at one and the same time an ethnographic enquiry, an historical reconstruction, and an unflinching portrait of psychopathology and its aftermath.
“One of the most haunting and thoughtfully composed French films of the 1970s, a work of almost unparallelled cinematic veracity with its extremely naturalistic account of a horrific crime that was a cause célèbre in 1830s France. The film is closely based on a book of the same title, published in 1973, by the eminent philosopher Michel Foucault… not only a superlative piece of cinema, it is also a valuable social document from which we can all learn something.” – Films de France
Starring Claude Hébert, Jacqueline Millière, Joseph Leportier, Annick Géhan, Nicole Géhan.
Not rated, but contains difficult subject matter.
Note: Full title is Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère… or I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, Sister and Brother…