Happening

In early 1960s France, Anne, a gifted working class university student, discovers she is pregnant at a time when abortion is illegal. As her studies and future slip out of reach, she searches for a way to end the pregnancy while nearly everyone she approaches refuses to speak of it or help.

The film renders isolation with a secret of the body that no one will share, and the mounting pressure of shame, silence, and time on a young woman left alone with an urgent choice. It is a precise account of what it is to carry something unspeakable through a world determined not to hear it. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, and is based on the memoir Happening (L'evenement) by Annie Ernaux.