Francine

Melissa Leo stars in this elegiac study of a woman attempting to reclaim her life after returning home from prison.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director-Screenwriter Brian M Cassidy, Melanie Shatzky
  • Producer Joshua Blum, Katie Stern
  • With Melissa Leo, Keith Leonard, Victoria Charkut
  • USA-Canada 2012
  • 74 mins
  • Sales The Film Sales Company

Francine is a woman just out of jail, having served time for an unspecified crime. She moves into a cottage in a small rural town, takes a job in a pet store, befriends a woman who invites her to a local community church meeting, and there’s even the possibility of a romantic date with a man she meets there. All these things would suggest that Francine is reclaiming her life, but she is clearly in a fragile mental state after years of incarceration. She takes in the stray animals that gravitate to her, and appears to care more about them than she does about herself, ultimately putting her health, sanity and freedom at risk for their sake. Francine is a small wonder of a film, a spare, wildly original and elegiac character study that carries integrity and emotional weight. Melissa Leo gives an incredible performance in the title role, one completely lacking vanity or ego.
Michael Hayden

Director statement

Our films come together from seeing the things around us and observing them in a fragmentary way. We start collecting these images in our mind’s eye, and figure out how to give them a shape and a way to populate the landscape that we see. […] We were just moved by the landscape, and Melanie and I are both very drawn to animals. So we were also interested in telling a story of someone with a complicated relationship to animals, about when that kind of intimacy and comfort one feels in the presence of animals can cross over into other psychological and emotional territory. […] We wrote a screenplay for the film, but, at the same time, I think where Melanie and I are best is in the intersection between designing scenes and in the powers of observation and allowing things to just come in. We don’t really get that excited unless we feel like we’ve discovering something. Our documentary work sometimes feels a bit more like fiction, more stylised in some ways. So our instinct for narrative is really the reverse. Our documentaries don’t really feel like documentaries, and our fiction films don’t really feel like fiction. […] That’s what we look for in characters and in images and in storytelling – what can we see, and what can that tell us about what we don’t see? A good film exists outside of the margins of what we see, and we’re seduced into wanting to know more.
Brian M Cassidy

Director biography

Husband and wife team Brian M Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky founded Pigeon Projects in 2005 as a means of producing their uncompromising fiction and non-fiction films, which live comfortably at the margins of documentary and narrative cinema, Together, Cassidy and Shatzky have shown their films at the Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, and Rotterdam film festivals and won awards at the European Media Art Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Athens International Film Festival. Their films have also shown in museums and galleries including the National Gallery of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2007, Filmmaker Magazine named them as among the ‘25 New Faces of Independent Film’. In addition to promoting Francine, Cassidy and Shatzky are currently on the film festival circuit with their documentary The Patron Saints, a disquieting and hyperrealistic look at a nursing home.

Filmography

2007 Fish Kill Flea [doc s]; The Delaware Project [s]; God Provides [doc s]
2011 The Patron Saints [doc]
2012 Francine