When developing films like 2008’s “Home” and 2012’s “Sister,” French-Swiss director Ursula Meier began by focusing on geography, imaging what stories may spring from a forgotten stretch of highway or how a remote mountaintop might shape the lives of those living upon it. But when she began work on “The Line,” which premiered on Friday at the Berlin Film Festival, the filmmaker had a different terrain in mind.
“The setting for this film would be the character’s body,” Meier tells Variety. “I wanted to follow a series of old scars that would retrace a troubled past, so that landscape would be the body itself and the story would be one of violence.”
Indeed, violence was what drew Meier and the film’s co-writer and lead actor Stéphanie Blanchoud to the project. “We wanted to examine a violent woman,” Meier says. “The project really started from a…
