Humanité

Humanité (L'humanité, 1999) is Bruno Dumont's slow-cinema drama, available to watch online in good quality. Police detective Pharaon de Winter lives with his mother in a flat northern French town and carries the case of an eleven-year-old girl raped and murdered nearby.

Dumont withholds almost everything a thriller would deliver. There is barely any procedure; the camera simply stays with Pharaon, an odd, near-silent man whose sensitivity borders on the unbearable. He stares at strangers, embraces a suspect, seems to absorb other people's pain into his own body. His bond with neighbor Domino and her coarse boyfriend grows thick and awkward across long, unhurried scenes.

The film took the Grand Prix at Cannes, while untrained leads Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele walked away with the Best Actor and Best Actress prizes — a jury call that split critics down the middle. It demands patience: long takes, silence, no genre payoff. What it offers instead is an unguarded study of guilt and compassion. Stream Humanité (1999) online on iFILM.