“With I’m Going Home – a tale as gracefully transcendent as the film itself – Oliveira has made an impossibly delicate, indirect film about the least delicate of subjects: mortality” (Dave Kehr, Film Comment). A hit in Cannes and at TIFF (and just about everywhere else it played), Je rentre à la maison is a deeply moving film, and gives Michel Piccoli one of the greatest roles in his august career. Eschewing sentimentality for a sober yet affecting humanism, the film centres on aging theatre actor Gilbert Valence, who suffers the unthinkable loss of his wife, daughter and son-in-law in a tragic car accident. “All I can do is fall,” he says prophetically during the performance of Ionesco’s Exit the King that begins the film. But fall he doesn’t, and instead finds ways to cope, seeking out daily rituals to guide him, defending his role as an artist and loving his grandson Serge, the sole surviving member of his family. Filmed in Paris (with a camera that is constantly subverting our expectations) at the time of the jubilee celebrations, the film has a prescient fin-de-siècle feel, especially when Valance confirms: “I have a past that helps me fill in the voids of the present.” When he is offered a last minute role in a film adaptation of Ulysses made by a renowned American director (perfectly played by de Oliveira favourite John Malkovich), the pressures of life and art weigh upon him heavily and equally – a message that de Oliveira has never ceased to convey.

Rated 14A.