The Widow of Saint-Pierre

The Widow of Saint-Pierre (La Veuve de Saint-Pierre, 2000) is a French-Canadian period drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Patrice Leconte set his story on a small French island off Newfoundland in the 1850s, where a murder conviction runs into a bureaucratic problem: the island has no guillotine and no executioner, so both must be shipped from the mainland.

Condemned fisherman Neel Auguste waits under the supervision of an army captain. The captain's wife — Juliette Binoche — quietly begins fighting for him: teaching him to read, finding him work, pressing his case with reluctant officials. Daniel Auteuil plays the captain watching his household reorganize itself around a man he is charged with keeping alive only to have killed. Emir Kusturica is the convicted man himself — quiet, changed, harder to hate than the law requires. Leconte takes his time, and the slowness is deliberate: by the time the machinery of justice finally arrives, what it has to do feels genuinely wrong. Stream The Widow of Saint-Pierre (2000) online on iFILM.