All Your Faces
2023 · Jeanne Herry
Since 2014, France's restorative justice programmes have offered a safe space for supervised dialogue between offenders and victims. Grégoire, Nawelle, and Sabine, victims of heists and violent robberies, agree to join one of these discussion groups alongside offenders Nassim, Issa, and Thomas, all convicted of violent robberies. Meanwhile Chloé, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, prepares for dialogue with her own agressor after learning he has moved back into town.
dir. Jeanne Herry · 2023
France's restorative-justice programme — which since 2014 has seated victims and offenders in the same room, under supervision, to talk — gives Jeanne Herry a subject and, more radically, a form: cinema as moderated conversation. Herry, an actor before she was a director (her mother, Miou-Miou, appears here) and previously the maker of the adoption drama In Safe Hands, builds the film almost entirely from faces listening. One strand follows a discussion circle of robbery victims and convicted robbers; another follows Chloé, preparing for a far more intimate reckoning. The ensemble is a who's-who of contemporary French acting — Adèle Exarchopoulos, Gilles Lellouche, Leïla Bekhti, Élodie Bouchez, Dali Benssalah — all playing at the pitch of documentary plainness, and Exarchopoulos took a César for it. The lineage is French cinema's institutional humanism, The Class by way of 12 Angry Men's faith in the room itself. Herry's craft signature is patience: she lets silence do the arguing, and films the exact moment a face changes its mind.
Lines of influence
- 12 Angry Men (1957) — Establishes the single-room deliberation drama where the camera studies faces reacting to speech, and the moral turn is engineered through seating, listening, and accumulating close-ups rather than plot.
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — The foundational grammar of the listening face in tight close-up, where the drama lives in a person absorbing another's words rather than in action — Herry's 'faces-listening' cinematography descends directly from this.
- The Class (2008) — Confines a fraught negotiation to one institutional room with semi-improvised, documentary-plain ensemble performance and coverage that cuts on reaction, the exact register Herry adopts for the mediation circle.
- Secrets & Lies (1996) — Builds long, unbroken confrontation scenes out of rehearsed-into-naturalism performance, letting emotional exposure surface in real time — the actorly method behind Herry's 'documentary plainness.'
- Two Days, One Night (2014) — Structures the whole film as a series of repeated one-on-one moral appeals, each a variation on the same conversation, mirroring Herry's parallel-strand accumulation of mediation encounters.
- Scenes from a Marriage (1973) — Proves that sustained two-person talk, shot patiently on faces with silence weaponized between lines, can carry an entire drama — the model for 'silence-as-argument.'
- A Separation (2011) — Stages moral conflict as mediated testimony before an institutional figure, granting each party unbroken argument so the audience adjudicates — the same balanced-listening ethic as restorative mediation.
- S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) — Physically places victims and perpetrators in the room of the crime to speak to each other, pioneering the restorative-justice confrontation as cinematic form that Herry dramatizes.
- Two Is a Family (Pupille) (2018) — Herry's own prior film built the same French institutional-humanism method: an ensemble of caseworkers and clients rendered with procedural warmth, faces at work inside a bureaucratic care system.
- 120 BPM (2017) — Turns the activist meeting room into a stage for collective deliberation, cutting among faces as argument builds — the same faith that a room of people debating in real time is inherently cinematic.
- Custody (2017) — Opens on a family-mediation session shot with clinical patience, letting a neutral room and two constrained parties generate dread — the identical staging premise of 'the room itself.'
- The Measure of a Man (2015) — Uses non-professional faces and long fixed takes in institutional settings (job interviews, disciplinary panels) to extract social-issue drama from plain, unperformed listening.
- Saint Omer (2022) — Extends the courtroom into a study of faces absorbing testimony, holding on listeners in near-documentary stillness and trusting silence to indict — French plainness pushed to austerity.
- Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — Contemporaneous French drama that lets adversarial testimony play out at length, privileging the reactive face and the unresolved argument over verdict — sibling in the 2023 conversation-as-drama mode.
- The Night of the 12th (2022) — Frames a crime through the patient, procedural rooms of French institutions and the weary faces working them, sharing the movement's cool humanist attention to process over spectacle.
- A Prophet (2009) — Grounds French institutional drama in the observed textures of a closed system and its power dynamics, an ancestor for treating a bureaucratic apparatus (here prison) as the film's true subject and set.