On the poster of “Annie Colère” by Blandine Lenoir, Zita Hanrot plays Hélène, an activist nurse at the MLAC, and India Haïr embodies Claudine, one of the very first female gynecologists. We met them to tell us about this choral film and the importance of its subject.
Annie Angera film about a struggle as important as it is unknown
Created in 1973, the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception was greatly involved in the adoption of the Veil law in 1975, which legalized abortion. Dissolved following the vote of the law, the MLAC will have sensitized the population, organized a support circuit for women wishing to have an abortion and worked to bring the practice out of hiding. A little-known but nevertheless essential story in the history of women’s rights and collective struggles in French society, to which Blandine Lenoir pays homage in her film Annie Anger. We met two of his actresses, India Hair and Zita Hanrot.
Meet
You are part of the great female cast of Annie Anger, which explores a little-known subject. How did you approach this film?
Indian Hair : Blandine’s writing overwhelmed me, her way of seeing a class of women, how this transmission happened. I didn’t know anything about MLAC – I was actually angry that I hadn’t learned about it sooner! She had told me that Zita and Laure were there, and I really wanted to work with them.
Zita Hanrot : We had met on Student services office On the set, we got along very well. She told me she was writing something and thinking of me. When she told me about the subject, I was very enthusiastic. I liked these themes. I had a very good a priori and reading the script I realized that it would be very choral. So I said yes very quickly, for the fact of being with lots of other actresses, of discovering this subject which I didn’t know much about. All the intuitions I had while reading were verified on the set. The joy, the troupe, the solidarity, the trust, it was a real feeling during the making of this film.
On the screen as on the set, the issue was therefore this solidarity?
HI : When I met Blandine, I realized that it freed speech to work on this subject. I was pregnant, then my baby was in the film, we all wanted to talk about our experiences, in a great collective experience. We feel it at the public presentations ofAnnie Angerthe spectators are touched by the sweetness that exists between us.
ZH: Whether or not we have had an abortion, women all have in common that they have suffered, in one place, violence against their bodies. Whether it’s insults, inappropriate looks, an invasive medical examination, a delivery where the method is imposed.
There is a common experience of pain, as well as intimate knowledge of one’s body and the issues around it, the transmission of which is essential.
Despite the fact that the Veil law exists, Annie Anger comes out in a context of regression on the subject…
ZH : I am aware that this is a threatened right. I did an experiment before shootingAnnie Anger, I pretended to be a teenager on a forum, where I said that I wanted to have an abortion. And in fact it is a site which, under the guise of facilitating access to abortion, tries to dissuade it.
I spoke with a woman who told me that I was going to “murder a human life”. His speech was super dangerous. This type of discourse exists much more than we think, so access to abortion is still fragile and threatened.
India : I think there is only one thesis on MLAC, if you search online you find very little. We don’t know that story, which is pretty crazy. I wish I had seen it 20 years ago, and I’ll show it to my daughter, because you can’t be passive once you’ve seen it. It should be shown as much as possible.
