Séraphine (2008) Trailer

In 1914, Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a famous German art collector, rents an apartment in the town of Senlis, forty kilometers away from Paris, in order to write and to take a rest from the hectic life he has been living in the capital (and, it turns out, to escape the surveillance of a heterosexual culture in which he does not fit). The cleaning lady, who comes with the rented room, is a rather rough-and-ready fifty-year-old woman who is the laughing stock of others in her small village. We, the viewers, have already witnessed with mounting curiosity her daily travails as she scavenges in riverbeds, fields, and streets for diverse objects of interest long before we realize that she secretly produces from them her artistic material and paints by candlelight in her own rented room, a rent she is rather blithely and defiantly in arrears in maintaining. We see also eccentricities such as tree-hugging that bring to this otherwise bulldozer of a woman the flickering gleaming smile of a child locked in her breast. One day, Wilhelm who has been invited to dinner by his landlady, notices a small painting lying in a corner that catches his eye, and he is stunned to learn that the artist is none other than Séraphine (Yolande Moreau). (Read more.)