Juliette Binoche opened the Berlin Film Festival, known to the locals as Berlinale, with her new film, Nobody Wants The Night.

The film stars Juliette Binoche and is directed by Spain’s Isabel Coixet, who is only the second woman director to ever open the festival.

Juliette Binoche‘s film didn’t receive as many accolades as one would hope, but the premise is incredibly interesting.

Described as Jack London with women by Coixet and a woman’s western by Juliette Binoche, the film follows Josephine Peary (Binoche), the determined and well-educated wife of Robert Peary, who is an American adventurer who wanted to lead the first expedition to the North Pole.

The year is 1908 and the setting is Greenland’s forbidding frozen outer reaches.

Juliette Binoche’s character braves below freezing temps, avalanches, and wild animals to find her husband. When she finally finds his base camp, she is greeted by none other than her husband’s Inuit mistress, Alaka (played by Japan’s Rinko Kikuchi), who is pregnant.

The two women, though natural enemies, have no choice but to hunker down together and wait for Robert’s return.

As the food runs low and Alaka’s pregnancy progresses, Binoche’s character assumes a caretaker role. She hunts for their food and enables them to survive.

Juliette Binoche said of the film’s premise, “You have a white, educated person… she goes into the wilderness and finds a new way of feeling, a new way of behaving and this kind of nowhere place becomes the place where she kind of humanizes.”

She added, “We come in the world, in this western world , as thinking we know everything, having power, we possess everything, and the elements and the others are telling us, ‘hang on a minute’.”

Juliette Binoche said the title came from a line in the film.

She said, “Nobody wants the night, nobody wants to go to that dark place but we have to sometimes if we want to become human.”

Sounds interesting! What do you think of the story behind Juliette Binoche’s film?