Séraphine

Séraphine (2008) is Martin Provost's French drama you can watch online on iFILM. The film follows a real woman who scrubbed other people's floors by day and painted luminous, stained-glass-bright canvases by night — long before anyone thought to call her an artist.

Séraphine Louis cleans houses in the small town of Senlis in the years before the First World War. She mixes her own pigments from whatever she can find and insists the angels tell her what to paint. One of her employers turns out to be Wilhelm Uhde, the German collector who had spotted Picasso and the customs officer Rousseau ahead of the crowd. He stumbles on one of her pictures and refuses to believe the maid the whole town mocks could have made it. From there grows a fragile bond between connoisseur and self-taught painter, one the art world keeps lifting up and dropping.

Yolande Moreau plays Séraphine almost wordlessly, all face and hands, with Ulrich Tukur opposite her. The film swept seven César Awards, among them Best Film and Best Actress. It's a quiet, unhurried portrait of a gift the world recognized far too late. Stream Séraphine (2008) online on iFILM.