Directed by Maurice Pialat • 1968 • France
Starring Michel Terrazon, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry
The singular French director Maurice Pialat puts his distinctive stamp on the lost-youth film with this devastating portrait of a damaged foster child. We watch as ten-year-old François (Michel Terrazon) is shuttled from one home to another, his behavior growing increasingly erratic, his bonds with his surrogate parents perennially fraught. In this, his feature debut, Pialat treats that potentially sentimental scenario with astonishing sobriety and stark realism. With its full-throttle mixture of emotionality and clear-eyed skepticism, L’ENFANCE NUE (NAKED CHILDHOOD) was advance notice of one of the most masterful careers in French cinema, and remains one of Pialat’s finest works.
Up Next in Directed by Maurice Pialat
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We Won’t Grow Old Together
Directed by Maurice Pialat • 1972 • France
Starring Marlène Jobert, Jean Yanne, Christine FabrégaAn end-of-love story for the ages, Maurice Pialat’s masterpiece is a combustible portrait of a couple whose mutual desire tears them apart. A work of lacerating autobiography drawn from the director...
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The Mouth Agape
Directed by Maurice Pialat • 1974 • France
Starring Nathalie Baye, Hubert Deschamps, Philippe LéotardOne of cinema’s greatest and most profound meditations on mortality, THE MOUTH AGAPE observes, with striking unsentimentality, the final days of a terminally ill woman (Monique Mélinand) as thos...
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Graduate First
Directed by Maurice Pialat • 1978 • France
Starring Sabine Haudepin, Philippe Marlaud, Annick AlaneMaurice Pialat’s oft-overlooked chronicle of jaded adolescence unfolds in a small town in northern France where a group of teenagers stave off boredom and the looming responsibilities of adulthood...
