“Traveling solo across Greenland, camping on an ice floe, single-handedly wrestling a bear. Not much daunts Coline Morel – except, perhaps, confronting her own existence when it starts to spiral out of control.” Thus reads a synopsis of French writer-director Sébastien Betbeder’s film The Incredible Snow Woman (L’ Incroyable femme des neiges) with French comedian Blanche Gardin (Yannick, The Book of Solutions), Philippe Katerine, Bastien Bouillon, Ole Eliassen, and Martin Jensen, which will world premiere at the 75th Berlin Film Festival.
Screening in the Berlinale’s main sidebar Panorama, the new movie from the director of Marie and the Misfits and Ulysses & Mona sees the protagonist, an explorer, turning up unannounced in her native village in the Jura mountains to visit her two brothers Basile and Lolo, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Add in the appearance of her first love and other unexpected developments, and Coline spirals out of control.
The journey she decides she must go on, which also includes an inner journey, could turn out to be the most difficult and the most important of her life.
“The Incredible Snow Woman is a film that combines comedy and drama,” Betbeder highlighted in a director’s statement. “I needed to use this co-mingling of genres in order to accompany Coline Morel, a one-of-a-kind explorer who is like a modern-times Calamity Jane or an Alexandra David-Néel of the Great North. While her larger-than-life personality, free spirit and courage guided me through the writing and filming, I felt certain that we first needed to laugh at her (and with her) in order to better accept her choices, as well as her radical rapport with the world.”
Plus, the filmmaker emphasized: “I also considered it a specific responsibility on my part to draw the portrait of a woman as a leading character that went counter to all clichés.”
In the first of two clips from The Incredible Snow Woman that THR can exclusively reveal, Coline talks to one of her brothers who asks, among other things, if she ever managed to find “her” Yeti. In her response, the explorer shows off her knowledge of the Inuit language.
‘The Incredible Snow Woman’
The second clip from the movie, which was filmed in Greenland and France, sees two men in Greenland making a surprise discovery and discussing climate science deniers.
‘The Incredible Snow Woman’
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