The Last Mitterrand

In this fictional cinematic version of the end of his political career, François Mitterrand meets an ambitious young journalist named Antoine Moreau who draws the president, his face marked by his impending death, into a conversation that soon evolves into a major discourse on life, death, politics and morality.
Robert Guédiguian: “François Mitterrand embodied the possibility of socialism in France at the very time when socialism was collapsing around the world. Whether he meant to or not (…) he made the socialist dream credible for a decade. I have always tried to make popular movies. To do that, a film must produce feelings, not gratuitous feelings but essential feelings in the sense that they incite an awakening or an opening, of the intelligence. So we have invented the character of Antoine Moreau, without which the film would not exist. Without him the film would be a mere series of moments, of speeches, a chronicle in the strict sense of the term. Drama, in other words action, requires at least two characters. Antoine Moreau, who, like all young men, needs a hero, is the victim of his passion. He wants to wrest a universal lesson from this old man who, like all old men, has little to dispense, because, contrary to what people think, things don’t appear any clearer in old age, only more complex.” —Berlinale