#SmallScreenScenes May is a month of Murder, Mayhem – and Motherhood on MHz Choice!
It all starts with the glorious French limited series Nona and Her Daughters, continues with multiple seasons of the BBCs delicious Maigret, and wraps with the return of fan favorite Alice Nevers.
Nona and Her Daughters is a true original. A sexually active septuagenarian gives birth in this enchanting French feminist limited series in nine brisk episodes. The luminous free-spirited actress Miou Miou, famed for leading roles in Memoirs of a French Whore and Entre Nous, stars as Nona, the still-frisky single mother of 44-year-old triplets: the inhibited sexologist, the married mother of five boys, and the late-blooming academic, who all move home to huddle around their miraculously pregnant mother in the Parisian apartment where they grew up. The close, yet contrasting, daughters are played by three noted French actresses Virginie Ledoyen, who starred opposite Leonard DiCaprio in The Beach; Valerie Donzelli, who directed all nine episodes of Nona, and also played herself in two episodes of Call My Agent!; and Clotilde Hesme from Lupin.
This new familial development shocks the triplets and all of Paris, as word of Nona’s pregnancy seeps out and people struggling to conceive who approach her as if she were a magical Madonna.
The bold series muses on the meaning of maternity, past and present. How does an independent woman navigate a life by her principles, while satisfying the demands of family and friends – when fate turns her life upside down? While many 70-year-old women struggle against cultural invisibility, Nona shines on. The former activist, now running a planned parenthood clinic, has wisdom to share with a world so curious about what makes this extraordinary woman tick.
Maigret Seasons 2 and 3 return us to the seedy world of Georges Simenon’s Paris--BBC Style. It’s a scream as dependable as Perry Mason, every episode’s a gem accompanying pipe-smoking Detective Maigret through the French capital’s twisted streets, and equally twisted crimes.
Under Law and Grace is an amiable French crime series in the Don Matteo and Cadfael vein. After a monk’s brutal stabbing, the no-nonsense atheist Captain Elli Talleb heads to the monastery to investigate. Once there, Elli encounters the curious Brother Clement (clay-ma) a young man on-the-verge of taking his vows and their worlds collide. The first episode sets up another unconventional sleuth pairing – as each episode presents a new crime while Clement gets an education about the outside world from Elli and her three younger sisters.
Unclaimed’s gimmick is that the series begins with a John or Jane Doe, an unidentified murder victim that will be buried in a mass grave in 7 days. That’s unless the under-staffed, underfunded Unclaimed team at the series’ center doesn’t step up and make a case for the overlooked victims incapable of speaking for themselves. Each episode works forward through police detection, and backwards as the victim’s contacts, like this adulterous housewife, begin to realize the absence. It’s a neat trick, and a new-to-us French crime show that, over the series arc, balances keen mysteries with an increasingly familiar rag-tag band of good guys.
Alice Nevers Season 4, a fan favorite, returns after a cliffhanger that found the smoldering examining magistrate in manacles alongside police Commander Marquand. The popular, long-running series with the tagline the “judge is a woman,” contrasts the public servant in charge of a new case each episode – and the sexy single mother’s ongoing romantic soap opera.
Homicide Hills is a cozy German mystery Homicide Hills returns with Tatort’s Caroline Peters as hotshot urban crimefighter Sophie Haas, still exiled in the fictional hamlet of Hengasch--translation hanging ass. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by local crime waves like exploding garden ornaments that the locals take all too seriously?! With Crime Scene Cleaner’s Bjarne Mädel at her side, Detective Haas proves there’s no such thing as little murders even far from the big city.
Movies of the Week Season 5 slate that expands across Europe, with standalone stories like these family dilemma dramas – in one, the family patriarch passes and the surviving siblings must decide what to do with their schizophrenic brother Jacques; in another, a sister needs a new kidney, and the viable donors -- her flaky brothers – are unreliable and self-involved. Plus we return to Milan for the second season of the Italian youth classical music drama, The Swan Company, under the baton of its traumatized and traumatizing conductor.
From Nona and the surprise of the new, to the comfort of the well-worn gumshoe Maigret, we invite you to savor the mysteries of childbirth, as well as the deadly whodunits we adore this month on MHz Choice.
MHz Choice Debuts the Joyful French Limited Series
Starring French Star Miou-Miou
Nona And Her Daughters
May 2, 2023
Also Streaming in May:
Two New Seasons of 1960s UK classic detective series Maigret
and more new series from France and Germany
The French drama-comedy Nona and her Daughters (Gaumont), a series Variety named a top “French TV Series to Watch,” will debut on May 2 on MHz Choice as a limited series with nine half-hour episodes. The venerable actress and ten-time César Award nominee, Miou-Miou (Memoirs of a French Whore and This Sweet Sickness) stars as family matriarch, Nona, who runs a planned parenthood clinic in Paris. Soon after discovering Nona’s pregnancy, her 44-year-old daughters return to the family apartment at the foot of Montmartre in a show of support: Gabrielle (Clotilde Hesme, Lupin), the uptight sexologist; Emanuelle (Virginie Ledoyen, The Beach), who did everything she could to disavow her feminist mother; and George (Valérie Donzelli, Shelter), the virgin and doctoral student who refuses to leave childhood behind.
Also premiering May are a pair of French crime dramas, Unclaimed (Mediawan) and Under Law and Grace. The detective duo of Under Law and Grace is an odd match even for police drama standards, with a criminologist who is also a devout Monastery resident teaming up with a police captain who has long been skeptical of religion.
The British 1960s classic detective series Maigret (Kino Lorber) will continue to roll out in May with two additional seasons. Also returning to MHz Choice are the German series Homicide Hills (Beta Films), French fan-favorite Alice Nevers (Mediawan) and a slate of new movies from across Europe in the Movie of the Week collection.
Full May Schedule available here: https://mhzchoice.com/premiere-schedule/
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NONA AND HER DAUGHTERS
MAY 2
NONA AND HER DAUGHTERS, FRANCE, GAUMONT, NEW SERIES
Nona is a 70-year old matriarch who runs a planned parenthood clinic in Paris and discovers she’s pregnant! Her grown triplet daughters move back into their childhood apartment under the pretenses of caring for Nona, who is resistant to all the fuss.
MAIGRET, UNITED KINGDOM, KINO LORBER, NEW SEASON
The pragmatic, reserved and refined Maigret investigates murders in his singular unhurried manner. Based on the Maigret novels and stories by Georges Simenon and first broadcast on the BBC in the United Kingdom from 1960-63.
MAY 9
HOMICIDE HILLS, GERMANY, BETA FILMS, NEW SEASON
Detective Sophie Haas is transferred from Cologne to the fictional rural town of Hengasch in the Eifel mountains.Once there, she leads a comically small police force which investigates more black eyes than bodies. Disappointed by the lack of murders, she is determined to pursue every last lead.
MAY 16
ALICE NEVERS, FRANCE, MEDIAWAN, NEW SEASON
A mainstay of French TV characters, Alice Nevers is an admired and effective criminal prosecutor. She has both a professional and personal partnership with police captain Fred Marquand as they investigate crimes in Paris that often shed light on the larger societal issues of the day.
MAY 23
UNCLAIMED, FRANCE, MEDIAWAN, NEW SERIES
In this French thriller, a police task force specializes in murder cases involving unidentified victims.
MAIGRET, UNITED KINGDOM, KINO LORBER, NEW SEASON
The pragmatic, reserved and refined Maigret investigates murders in his singular unhurried manner. Based on the Maigret novels and stories by Georges Simenon and first broadcast on the BBC in the United Kingdom from 1960-63.
MAY 30
UNDER LAW AND GRACE, FRANCE, FRANCE TV, NEW SERIES
Police captain Elli Talleb is a self described atheist who is also the primary caregiver for her younger siblings. Brother Clément is a criminologist who lives his life inside the Monastery walls. Their reliably different perspective about the world is ultimately the pair’s greatest strength.
MOVIE OF THE WEEK, VARIOUS, NEW SEASON
Expand your horizons with a new international TV movie
Valérie Donzelli (War is Declared) acts in, and makes her television directorial debut, with Nona and Her Daughters, a delicate comedy about the improbable and mysterious pregnancy of a septuagenarian grandmother, and her adult triplet daughters, in a series Variety calls a top French TV Series to Watch.
Venerable actress and ten-time César Award nominee, Miou-Miou (Memoirs of a French Whore, This Sweet Sickness) stars as family matriarch, Nona, who runs a planned parenthood clinic in Paris. Soon after discovering Nona’s pregnancy, her 44-year-old daughters return to the family apartment at the foot of Montmartre in a show of support: Gabrielle (Clotilde Hesme, Lupin), the uptight sexologist; Emanuelle (Virginie Ledoyen, The Beach), who did everything she could to disavow her feminist mother; and George (Donzelli, Shelter), the virgin and doctoral student who refuses to leave childhood behind.
Throughout the whole experience Nona reminisces about her romance with the brilliant Jacqueline (Olga Mouak) during her first pregnancy in the 1970s, and the immense influence Jacqueline continues to have on her life.
This nine episode half-hour drama-comedy is a magical fable about disarming motherhood, feminism and family. The female lead production also includes a chorus of male roles--the comical doctor, the devoted midwife, the clumsy secret lover, the unstable researcher, and the baffled husband.
Donzelli considers motherhood as both a "super-power and a super poison" and created the series as a way to develop many characters and stories to explore familial relationships over a long term.
"A quest where the intimate collides with society, science with the supernatural,
and the comic with the tragic in a joyful mix of genres that borrows from police drama, soap opera, vaudeville and musicals!" - Télérama
CAST
Miou-Miou has been an unusual personality in the French cinema. She once refused to take the Cesar Award for Best Actress, which she won for the title role in Memoirs of a French Whore (1979). She explained that refusal citing her belief that artists should not compete against each other. Her career was hardly affected by such a gesture. She was nominated for Cesar nine times. Her better known works were made with Gérard Depardieu in Going Places (1974), Tell Her That I Love Her (1977), Ménage (1986), and Germinal (1993). She made her film debut in The Sentimental Life of George Le Tueur and became romantically involved with Patrick Dewaere - their relationship portrayed in F... comme Fairbanks (1976), and the 1992 documentary Patrick Dewaere.
Valérie Donzelli, plays wonderfully clumsy, gawky, goofy girls, failed seductresses and successful charm freaks. She is a noted film director, who mixes comic, offbeat, sentimental, tragic elements. She played a neurotic young mother in Sandrine Veysset's Martha... Martha (2001). and Clara Sheller's best friend in Shelter. As a writer, director, and producer she created The Queen of Hearts (2009), War is Declared (2011), Hand in Hand (2012), Marguerite et Julien (2015). her doc Notre dame features Paris's cathedral filmed a few months before the 2019 fire that devastated the building.
Clotilde Hesme is a French actress best known for playing Lilie in Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers and Alice in Christophe Honoré's Love Songs, for which she was nominated for the César Award for Most Promising Actress. She is also known for the role of Juliette Pelegrini in Lupin, Adèle from the TV series Les Revenants. She has won the César Award for Most Promising Actress for the film Angèl et Tony.
Virginie Ledoyen was shooting TV commercials at age 2. She made her film debut at 10 in What Every Frenchwoman Wants (1986). She has been nominated for the César Award for most promising actress three times for the series The Kings Favorite, A Magical Journey and Notre Dame. Her international breakthrough was as an ambassador for L'Oréal, which led to her role in The Beach (2000), with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Olga Mouak is a French actress based in Paris who began performing in Bordeaux, studying dramaturgy and drama theory. By way of RESAD in Madrid, Olga entered the renowned School of Performing Arts in Montpellier, graduating in 2016. She has since performed modern and classical theatre on stages in France, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. She's fluent in English, french and Spanish and is currently learning Swedish.
Nona and Her Daughters
2021, Germany, France, Series (9 x 30m)
Directed by: Valerie Donzelli
Screenplay: Valérie Donzelli and Clémence-Madeleine Perdrillat
Actors: Miou Miou, Virginie Ledoyen, Valérie Donzelli, Clotilde Hesme, Antoine Reinartz, Michel Vuillermoz, Barnaby Metschurat, Rüdiger Vogler, Christopher Thompson
Production: ARTE France, SWR, Gaumont, Rectangle Productions, Les Films de Françoise, Gaumont Germany
