Innocence

This DVD release from Artificial Eye has very crisp visuals and soundtrack. Being able to hear the unnerving bass rumbles in Dolby Digital 5.1 only adds to the extraordinary sense of menace that underlies all the film's beautiful imagery of nature.

There is a theatrical trailer for Innocence and a brief biography of writer/director Lucille Hadzihalilovic, but the only extra of real substance is an extended, and fascinating, interview with Hadzihalilovic (18min, in French with subtitles), intercut with scenes from the film. She describes how she wanted to adapt Frank Wedekind's novella into a film as soon as she had read it; her problems securing funding for a project with an unconventional narrative and a cast of unknowns; the difficulty of working on-set with young children; her insistence that only natural lighting be used and her use of the paintings of Magritte as a visual reference; her creation of a claustrophobic atmosphere by avoiding shots of the sky and only using ambient sounds; the influence on her style of Erice's The Spirit Of The Beehive, as well as the works of Robert Bresson and Dario Argento; and her belief that the film will elicit different reactions from male and female viewers.

She concludes, "I've never shown up anywhere in a coffin... But certainly the film is autobiographical." And promises that her next project will not be based on a literary text.