Berlin to open with world premiere of Jacquot's Farewell My Queen

The world premiere of Benoit Jacquot’s Farewell My Queen (Les Adieux a la reine) will open the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival on Feb 9. It plays in competition.

The period drama stars Diane Kruger, Lea Seydoux, Virginie Ledoyen and Xavier Beauvoix.

The film is adapted from Chantal Thomas’ novel of the same name, about the first days of the French Revolution as experienced by the servants at Versailles. Kruger plays Marie Antoinette, with Seydoux as Sidonie, one of her ladies in waiting.

The film is a French-Spanish co-production.

Elle Driver is handling international sales and GMT Productions produced.

Jacquot, whose past films include La Fille Seule and Villa Amalia, said in a director’s statement of the work: “The film will move at the rhythm of Sidonie the reader’s heartbeat, more and more agitated, as disaster spreads from hallways to galleries, from bedrooms to salons, from the cellars to the rafters and will rest, at ease, strangely languid, in the presence of the Queen. We’d like to avoid the anecdotal, the decorative, the tired vignettes that don’t hold any interest for us anymore. Rather than an improbable reconstitution, or one guided by fantasy, we will allow ourselves the means – lightness, mobility – to create the lost and panicked world that Sidonie traverses, always moving closer to or further away from the being who is its center for her, the Queen.