Saint-Cyr, Patricia Mazuy

Saint-Cyr, Patricia Mazuy, France, Germany, Belgium, 2000, 119’

France, early 17th Century.Madame de Maintenon, wife of Louis the 14th, has founded Saint-Cyr, a boarding school outside of Paris for the daughters of destitute nobility. Girls of all ages are gathered throughout the kingdom and brought here to acquire the language and manners befitting to their rank. For Madame de Maintenon, what begins as an amusing and heart-warming form of cultural charity will, over the years, becomes a source of nightmarish anxiety and eventually religious fanaticism.