Annie colère (2022)

In France in 1974, about a year before the Veil Law, Annie (Laure Calamy) works in a mattress factory. She has two children but does not want any more. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she turns to the Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC), which campaigns to legalize abortion by helping women terminate their pregnancies openly. The MLAC uses the Karman method, based on suction, with the help of doctors and volunteers. Women do not have to pay anything (though they can make a donation if they wish), and if they are more than eight weeks pregnant, the movement arranges trips to the Netherlands, where they can have an abortion. Annie’s abortion goes well. She is moved by the kindness of Hélène (Zita Hanrot), a nurse, and Monique (Rosemary Standley), who sings to comfort her. Annie is invited to join the association and help other women in the same situation, but declines, explaining that she is already too busy with work and her family. But when her neighbor and friend Christiane (Iris Bry) dies as a result of her clandestine abortion, Annie decides to get involved in the movement. There she discovers a great sense of solidarity and gradually learns how to perform abortions herself. The movement struggles to meet the growing demand from women. Tensions arise between young doctors, who want abortion to remain an act controlled by doctors and eventually take place in hospitals, and Hélène, Annie, and other volunteers, who see it as an opportunity to give women control over their bodies and challenge a medical system that treats women more as objects than as subjects. When the Veil Law is passed and abortion is decriminalized, the question arises of whether the association should dissolve or survive. Abortion will not be free of charge, and some activists fear that the conscience clause for doctors will in practice limit access to abortion. Annie has found in the movement a solidarity she already misses, and discovered a vocation: she decides to begin studying to become a nurse.