Bay Area Premiere!

Artist in Person

(La Dernière lettre). Wiseman's new fiction film has its roots in a theatrical work the filmmaker directed first in Boston fifteen years ago, and again in 2001 at the Comédie-Française. The film, like the French theater production, stars the great Catherine Samie as a Russian Jewish woman composing a last letter to her son after her city is seized by the Germans in 1941. “The cinematographic talent and tact of Wiseman are at work in all his choices: of black-and-white (how could you give color to the worst the 20th century has to offer?), of a play of shadows and lights (memories from beyond the grave), of a minimal set-up (an actress wandering around a bare set) for maximum effect. Wiseman succeeds in the prodigious feat of filming—sculpting—the human voice. The Last Letter is also a documentary about the face of the actress Catherine Samie, a face like a landscape, in which Wiseman captures extraordinarily ordinary things: the weathered effects of misery...the sunniness of her features...or that intemperate moment when tears break forth” (Gérard Lefort, Libération).