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The Sky Is Yours
(Le Ciel est à vous)

Screening on Film
Directed by Jean Grémillon.
With Madeleine Renaud, Charles Vanel, Jean Debucourt.
France, 1943, 35mm, black & white, 105 min.
French with English subtitles.

The alternate English title for Grémillon’s film, "The Woman Who Dared," suggests the political message the director was aiming at the citizens of an occupied, wartime France. Based on a true account from the 1930s, the story concerns an ordinary woman who overcomes the pettiness of provincial views to break the women’s world distance-flying record, with the aid of her mechanic husband. This radiant and empowering masterpiece is less about aviation than about the average Frenchman’s (and, indeed, Frenchwoman’s) wartime potential. But for the disorganization of the French film industry in the late wartime years, The Sky Is Yours, with its beautiful and direct imagery, might have become the seminal film of a French neorealism.  

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