Mathilde Girard gives her friends Heiner Müller’s Medea Material, a short reworking of the ancient myth, and invites them to read it aloud. Around kitchen tables and amid the routines of daily life, their readings turn into conversations about love, parenthood and the lives they have imagined for themselves.

Rather than staging Medea’s story, Girard follows what happens when her friends try to make sense of it together. Müller’s words are read, questioned and returned to, prompting conversations that move freely between the myth and the particulars of their own lives. As each voice finds a different way into the text, Recherche Médée becomes a film about the unexpected intimacy of reading with others and the space it creates for excavation and self-discovery.

The UK Premiere screening on Friday 11 December will be followed by an in-person Q&A with filmmaker Mathilde Girard.