An Encounter with Simone Weil

I'll be in the lobby at 6:15 as usual with a Meetup sign. This film is a part of the Austin Film Society's Doc Nights series. Screening starts at 7:00. Tix are $5 for AFS members, $8 general admission. Q&A with director Julia Haslett following the film screening https://www.austinfilm.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=1731&srctid=1&erid=2618324&trid=a3f881cd-c892-46e5-ad1c-a58368ad3f82

While wrestling with questions about her father’s suicide, her brother’s depression, and the unfathomable horrors of war and religious hatred, filmmaker Julia Haslett ran across a sentence written by the French philosopher Simone Weil: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. This seemed to be the beginning of an answer to a question constantly tugging at the mind and heart of the young filmmaker: What response does seeing human suffering demand of us? To try to understand what Weil meant, Haslett set out to learn more about one of the most remarkable – and yet little known – young women of the first half of the 20th century, one who spent her short life grappling with the urgent moral and political questions of her time by direct experience of factories, warfare, hunger, and political activism, which she then turned into volumes of profound thought.

Original music by Daniel Thomas Davis
USA, 2012, digital, color and B&W, 85 min.
English/French with English subtitles