Trailer for The New Woman with Leïla Bekhti, lovely film about Maria Montessori

Italian actress Jasmine Trinca plays this teacher who revolutionized education at the start of the 20th century.

In 1900, Lili d’Alengy, a famous Parisian courtesan, has a shameful secret – her daughter Tina, born with a disability. Unwilling to take care of a child who threatens her career, she decides to leave Paris for Rome. There she met Maria Montessori, a doctor who developed a revolutionary learning method for children who were then called “deficient”. But Maria also hides a secret: a child born out of wedlock. Together, the two women will help each other to gain their place in this man’s world and write history.

Ad Vitam unveils the trailer for The New Womana film about education that made sensation at the last Sarlat festivalaimed precisely at young cinema students. Jasmine Trinca (The son’s room) And Leila Bekhti (I will always see your faces) embody two feminine and maternal figures that everything seems to oppose: the teacher Maria Montessori, who really existed and whose research revolutionized education at the beginning of the last century, and Lili d’Alengy, a fictional courtesan, but inspired by various women from this same period, using their seduction to find a place in society.

Its co-author and director, Léa Todorov, participated in the writing of a documentary on the evolution of teaching methods (School revolution 1918-1939, by Joanna Grudzińska, broadcast in 2016), which pushed her to delve into the life of this exceptional woman, which earned her performer an acting award. It also places children with disabilities at the heart of the debate, showing that the famous Montessori method was originally developed to help young people “deficient” as they were called at the time, hidden from the world in specialized centers.

Met at the Sarlat festival, she told us what had attracted her about this woman’s journey, and why she had decided to mix true story and fiction to create a rich portrait. Here is an excerpt from this interview to read in full when the film is released in theaters on March 13.

“There is indeed a film that served as a reference for me, it is Amadeus. For Milos Forman’s ability to respect and shake up the period film at the same time. He took liberties with Mozart’s life, while at the same time being very faithful to a spirit, which was something I found captivating. For me, that was the line to follow. Not that of biopics ‘classics’.

Often, portraits of women always seem to me to want to convey the message in a somewhat monolithic way. Say ‘He was just a victim’ or on the contrary ‘She was an incredibly great woman’… Well, I still found it more interesting to try to create female characters that were more complex and more ambivalent than that.

I find that Jasmine Trinca seduces us so much that Maria Montessori perhaps becomes a little too much ‘great’ in turn, but despite everything, I see her as a woman who, even in difficult times, has always been full of contradictions. She makes a strong choice for all children. But ultimately, is it really for them or was it also to serve his career, his ambition? I think we need to ask ourselves these questions and there is no single simple answer. It seemed important to me to make a biopic, or at least a form of biopic, which would be able to dent an overly sacrosanct image of this woman. By showing her flaws, it makes her human.

For the role of Leïla Bekhti, I struggled to find which female character at the time could be strong enough to face her without being her carbon copy. She is a woman who draws her power from her ability to seduce men, and I found this opposition particularly interesting.

I found that the shame that his character feels, in truth, is a bit like the relationship that we always have with these children with disabilities. We know that they exist today, obviously, but everyone still looks away a little and is very happy to say that they live in their own place, their specialized place, well out of sight. I really wanted to enter the film with this character who cannot look at her child and who rejects her. By creating a parallel with our current societies, the idea was also to show how far we have come since the time of Montessori, but also what remains to be accomplished for all these children. And this path is a path of sight. For that, cinema is the perfect medium.”