FR, BEL, ISR 2013 | Director, screenplay: Nurith Aviv | Camera: Eric Marcheux | Editing: Effi Weiss | Production: Les Films d’Ici – Serge Lalou et Camille Laemlé / Dérives – Julie Frères | Participants: Barbara Cassin, Marie Gautheron, Ruth Miriam HaCohen Pinczower, Marie José Mondzain, Haviva Pedaya, Sarah Stern, Rola Younes | Colour | DCP | 64 min | french, hebrew OV with english SUB | Les Films d’Ici

Four announcements, seven women – eleven, if you add the women to whom announcements are made in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran. Nurith Aviv's ANNONCES revolves around the ANNOUNCEMENTS to Sarah and Hagar, Abraham's two wives, and to Mary, mother of Jesus, that they will all conceive a child through divine intervention. There are two versions of the annunciation to Mary – one from the Gospel of Luke, and one from the Koran. ANNONCES approaches these texts through encounters with people – seven women, each of whom addresses aspects of the texts that resonate with their own biographies and feminisms. The encounters are formally standardized: A shot of the interviewees' surroundings, photos from their childhood and youth, then a gradual transition to the present day and one of the seven topics. The formal standardization gives the film the calm it needs for its polyphonic, precise approach. ANNONCES is a cinematic meditation on passages of text that have shaped human history through the continuing influence of the religions from which they originate. In encounters with her conversation partners, Aviv's film exposes these passages to the realities of the present. (Fabian Tietke)