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Trailer Watch: Ellie Foumbi’s Our Father, the Devil
A new trailer lands today for Our Father, the Devil, writer-director Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut that earned her a spot on our 25 New Faces of Film list last year. Selected for funding through the Venice Biennale College Cinema in December 2019, the film first screened as a “work in progress” at Venice in 2021 before premiering a final cut at Tribeca in 2022, where it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature.
Here’s the plot of the film, per an official synopsis:
Nominated for the 2023 Best Feature Independent Spirit Award, Ellie Foumbi’s elegant moral thriller and debut feature Our Father, the Devil (Mon père, le diable) stars a riveting Babetida Sadjo as Marie, the head chef at a retirement home in small-town France. Her day-to-day life spent caring for residents, hanging out with her co-worker and best friend Nadia (Jennifer Tchiakpe), and teasing a potential new romance is disrupted by the arrival of Father Patrick (former Spirit Award nominee Souleymane Sy Savané, Goodbye Solo), an African priest whom she recognizes from a terrifying episode in her homeland. As he further endears himself to the residents and staff, Marie is forced to decide how best to deal with this reminder of her troubled past.
Our Father, the Devil will open at Quad Cinema in New York City on August 25 and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on September 1.
In the meantime, read our interview out of Tribeca with Foumbi and DP Tinx Chan on the film, in which they discuss their collaborative history, how COVID halted the film’s production and Europe’s “very different relationship to nudity” on film compared to the U.S.
