On 4 March 2024, France became the first country in the world to include the right to abortion in its constitution. Abortion has been legal in France since 1975 but parliamentarians voted to revise the country’s 1958 constitution to enshrine women’s “guaranteed freedom” to abort.
On this occasion, we picked from the archives of the Institut français a Q1A session with French director Blandine Lenoir, who presented her film Angry Annie (Annie Colère) as part of the Women’s Rights Now! Strand at the French Film Festival 2022 at Ciné Lumière.
Angry Annie tells the story of Annie (Laure Calamy), a working mother of two, who accidentally becomes pregnant in 1974 and joins the MLAC (Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception), an organisation created in 1973 in France and whose goal was to make contraception and abortion legal and safe.