Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, a unique and original film, charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Radical, bold and uncompromising, director René Allioʼs extraordinary work is at one and the same time an ethnographic enquiry, an historical reconstruction, and an unflinching portrait of psychopathology and its aftermath.