Women on Trial 2026

"Can’t you be a normal woman?” asks Fritna (Farida Ouchani) the mother of Gisele Halimi (Charlotte Gainsbourg), summing up in a sentence the ingrained everyday sexism the real-life Tunisian-French lawyer was up against when she took on the case of Marie-Claire in 1972 in Bobigny, outside Paris. Writer/directors Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller chart what would become the groundbreaking trial of 16-year-old Marie-Claire Chevalier (Saul Benchetrit), her mother Michele (Cecile de France) and two other women for helping the teenager have an abortion after she was raped. This pacy retelling, which keeps its focus on Halimi, interweaves the trial itself with the run-up to it and events outside the courtroom to solid effect, although the fact that the outcome of the case is known from the outset inevitably blunts some of the dramatic tension." — Amber Wilkinson, Screen Daily