Hansen-Løve says she wrote the role of Nathalie with Huppert in mind, while the character was inspired by her own mother, a professor of Philosophy. The film accords as much importance to silence as to words; to the poetry of landscapes – from low tide in Brittany to the peaks of Vercours – as to quotes from Pascal and Rousseau. There is also the symbolic cat that Nathalie inherits from her mother: overweight and cumbersome, homeless and disorientated, with the tantalising name Pandora.

Beneath the French-arthouse-film veneer lies a universal story of a woman who loses the cornerstones of her carefully crafted existence and must set out anew. Hansen-Løve’s four previous films focussed on younger characters, but a fundamental question of L’Avenir runs through her work: how to reconcile liberty with loneliness? A WFC Members’ Choice film.

“Thinking of Isabelle throughout the writing process inspired me and stimulated me tremendously; it helped me give the script an uplifting spirit, even though the subject matter of the film is rather serious.” Mia Hansen-Løve, quoted in Variety.

“I found compelling the way this film draws a portrait of an intellectual woman, which we seldom see in contemporary movies […] I liked the way Mia depicted this character in a sensual, light and youthful way.” Isabelle Huppert, quoted in Variety.