Christelle Cornil Movies

A woman struggles to hold on to her sanity and dignity behind bars in this hard-hitting drama from filmmaker Olivier Masset-Depasse. Tania (Anne Coesens) is a former French teacher from Russia who has been living in Belgium for the past eight years, where she earns her living as a cleaning woman and looks after her 14-year-old son, Ivan (Alexandre Gontcharov). But Tania has a secret -- she and her son are in Belgium illegally, and she lives in fear that she'll be found out by authorities. Tania's worst suspicions are confirmed when she's stopped by the police one day, and without proper documents she's sent to a detention facility for illegal immigrants, though Ivan is able to slip away to the home of a family friend. Taking the advice of her friends, Tania refuses to identify herself or cooperate with the police, but the Belgian authorities are unforgiving in their treatment of illegals, and as she's emotionally put through the wringer and subjected to physical deprivation, Tania finds herself locked in a battle of wills to see how long she can retain her composure before she cracks. Illegal received its world premiere at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, as part of the Directors' Fortnight program. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Music aficionados in the U.S. might remember Jeannine Deckers by her stage name, The Singing Nun -- performer of the one-hit-wonder "Dominique," which topped the U.S. pop charts for ten weeks in 1963, displaced the Kingsmen's seminal "Louie, Louie," and inspired the Debbie Reynolds musical The Singing Nun as a fictionalized version of Deckers' life. Behind the gloss, however, Deckers led one of the most unusual lives of any late 20th century European celebrity. With Soeur Sourire, director Stijn Coninx tells the performer's strange story. The tale opens in 1959, when young Belgian girl Jeannine (Cecile de France) flees her parents' strictly conservative home, and moves into a Dominican convent. While there, she chafes beneath the restrictions thrust onto her -- such as the inability to sing and play her guitar -- but begins quietly authoring songs. She impulsively books time in the Phillips studio to record one of the tunes, planning to donate to charity the monies earned from the song, but Phillips executives overhear it and grow so enthusiastic that they offer Deckers a recording contract under the stage name "Soeur Sourire" (or "Sister Smile,") and turn her into an international sensation. Then, at the pinnacle of her success, not long after The Ed Sullivan Show travels to Belgium to film her, she struggles with an attempted reconciliation between her religious faith and beckoning pop stardom. Deckers ultimately shocks everyone by shucking Catholicism, pursuing a full-time career as a recording star, recording radically left-wing protest songs, and taking up with a lesbian partner, Annie (Sandrine Blancke). The two fall deeply in love and open a school together for autistic children, but Jeannine's world falls apart when the Belgian government comes calling and informs her that she owes a fortune in back taxes for "Dominique" profits that she originally donated to charity. This actually marked the second of two major features within a ten-year period to cover Deckers' life -- the first, 2001's Suor Sorriso, utilized an experimental, non-linear approach and received mostly scathing reviews. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi