A note on forgiveness: film as case history

This article begins as a review of the French-Moroccan film, Carved by the Wind (2024), directed by Layla Triqui. The film offers an opportunity to use a 'case history' approach in considering classical and recent psychoanalytic theories of forgiveness, a theme embedded in the storyline. A contemporary model of forgiveness proposed by the Italian psychoanalyst Carla Mucci is applied to the principal character, a woman suffering from the overpowering guilt of infanticide. Here, forgiveness is characterised as a potent exchange between the forgiver and the forgiven, involving truthful witnessing of fact, emotional expression and the emergence of shared empathy. The adaptation of Professor Mucci's psychoanalytic model to the non-clinical setting of the film suggests how forgiveness might foster healing in ordinary life.