A Wider Angle Film Series: THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH

For November, A Wider Angle, our monthly film series highlighting independent global cinema, will screen the 2022 French mystery thriller The Night of the 12th, directed by 2-time César Award-winning director Dominik Moll. The film premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and would go on to win six César Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) in 2023, including Best Picture, Director, Adaptation, and two acting awards.

Based on true events described in a 2020 French non-fiction book, the film realistically depicts the determined but ultimately unsuccessful efforts of an investigative unit of the Grenoble police department to solve the gruesome murder of a young woman in a nearby mountain resort town. Numerous promising leads emerge only to fizzle out, and tension stemming from members of the investigation team's own personal lives further exacerbates their frustration at not being able to identify the killer. Yohan, the captain, spends his nights relentlessly pedaling his bicycle feverishly doing laps on the local velodrome, a metaphor for the unit's hard work on the case getting them seemingly nowhere. Even a final shot-in-the-dark attempt to gather potential evidence several years later after reopening the investigation, which seems to generate a genuinely promising suspect, leaves Yohan and his colleagues seemingly no closer to a resolution.

In French with English subtitles. (Running time 115 minutes)

For a review of the film, click here.

A Wider Angle film series is made possible through funding provided by the Friends of the Library.