The Grand Illusion

A kinetic thriller assembled from the everyday obstacles faced by working parents everywhere, FULL TIME is an impossible race against time anchored by Laure Calamy's powerful performance as a single mother who can’t catch a break. Julie is raising two children in the suburbs of Paris but working in the city. For her, the commuter train is a lifeline–and it’s suddenly been severed during the latest transit strike. Without the train, Julie can’t get to her job as the head maid at a five-star hotel–or to the interview for a better job she has lined up. Out of desperation, she turns to neighbors and her own gutsy resourcefulness to get to work and barely makes it back in time to pick up her kids before bedtime. Worse yet: it’s only Monday. Julie is at her breaking point and soon finds herself bending the rules to stay afloat in a ruthless society as her responsibilities pile up. In French with English subtitles.

CRITIC’S PICK! “A portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers’ joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations.” Beatrice Loayza, The New York Times

“It’s a propulsively intense piece of filmmaking – at times a bit like watching a highwire chainsaw juggling act about to go horribly and catastrophically wrong.” Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

“Full Time looks and sounds like a nail-biting thriller and tells a story that many viewers will be able to relate to on an intensely personal level. This is the kind of narrative that the Dardenne Brothers have made a specialty out of in recent years, but here it’s done with breakneck pacing that will remind viewers of the similarly headlong Run Lola Run.” Peter Sobczynski, RogerEbert.com