Nisimazine Cannes 2008#4-En

Nisimazine Thursday 22 May 2008

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A Bilingual magazine created by Nisi Masa, European Network of Young Cinema

A festa da menina morta Nuri Bilge Ceylan Alexandra Maria Lara

In partnership with

Full French and English versions online: www.nisimasa.com

Editorial Let me think…

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Sebastiano Pucciarelli

’ve never liked the expression “that film makes you think”, the kind of shortcut commentary that you could hear about any film dealing with problematic issues.

I like it if you say “that film makes you laugh” or “makes you feel scared”, and I can even accept “makes you cry”. They all seem more honest, and can be valid definitions for good genre films.

If you decide to watch Corman’s Cheerleader Massacre 2 (it really exists, you can find it at the Marché), you know in advance that you’re either going to be terrorised or laugh a lot. It depends on your taste in film, or maybe just on your age - sorry, Roger.

But “making someone think” always brings to mind the idea of forcing people to reflect. And compulsory reflection can’t give birth to brilliant reasoning.

In the last couple of days, watching films such as Lake Tahoe, Lorna’s Silence and Snow, I may have realised what great cinema means to me. If it must be expressed in a few words: it lets you think. I wouldn’t even say “helps you to think” - the spectator is a challenging partner, not a disadvantaged child.

It’s simply about allowing the most natural and almighty of human activities to display its full potential: it’s that subtle art of inviting the spectator on a walk through the narrative woods - a walk which is not always safe or idyllic, and above all can follow different paths.

Have a nice walk in the woods then, you film-wanderers…

NISIMAZINE CANNES

Thursday 22 May 2008

A magazine published by the NISI MASA organization with the support of the ‘Europe for Citizens’ programme of the EU and of the French Ministry of Health, Youth, Sports and Associative Life.

EDITORIALE TEAM Editor-in-chief Matthieu Darras Secretaries of the editorial Jude Lister, Emilie Padellec English translations Jude Lister French translations Emilie Padellec, Julien Melebeck Contributors to this issue Maartje Alders, Chloé Averty, Esra Demirkiran, Joanna Gallardo, Zsuzsanna Kiràly, Johanna Kinnari, Mario Kozina, Julien Melebeck, Helena Mielonen, Sebastiano Pucciarelli, Andreas Schenk Cover’s picture: A festa da menina morta

NISI MASA (European Office)

10 rue de l’Echiquier, 75010, Paris, France. + 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com

Review A festa da menina morta

By Matheus Nachtergaele (Brazil)

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n a remote village somewhere near the Amazon river, the 20th anniversary of the Dead Girl’s Feast is being celebrated. People from the nearby villages come to take the blessing of a mysterious Saint, a young man who, a long time ago, performed a miracle and saved his mother’s life. But the preparation for the feast doesn’t go as smoothly as it should, as some unexpected conflicts appear.

Matheus Nachtergaele’s debut feature film explores the human need to believe in something, no matter how false it might be. His portrait of the Saint and the people that surround him is deliberately negative and coloured with irony.

The Saint is characterised as a feminised homosexual who is obsessed with the image that others have created for him.

Although members of the local community mostly believe in his powers, he is actually an ‘impotent’ man, unable to fulfill even simple tasks like bringing a glass of water to his thirsty aunt.

Nevertheless, his father tries his best to exploit his reputation, transforming the religious fiesta into a spectacle of kitsch and bad taste, accompanying the music, rituals and stylised clothing with beer adverts. ‘‘Times change“, says one of the characters. ‘‘Even the Pentecostals say it’s not a sin to get rich“.

The cynical tone is underlined by the fact that the father shares the same bed with his son - and not just for lack of space. Their sexual relationship, a kind of a portrait of the ‘holy family’, could be understood as an ironic reference to christian iconography, while the motifs of incest and homosexuality are bound together to form a symbol of nonproductivity, selfishness and consentual © Alexandre Baxter abuse - not just between the father and son, but also between the family and the rest of the village. It’s interesting that even if the villagers are aware of everything that’s going on, they don’t care. ‘‘The day is a illusion’’, they sing. The fact that the Dead Girl didn’t speak this year is of little consequence to them: the only important thing is to believe in something, no matter how false it is.

Nachtergaele’s style is often grotesque and the over-thetop performances of certain actors is often irritating.

Unfortunately the same can be said about some clichéd decisions in the portrayal of his characters and of the story’s development. However, the film’s ironic view of people’s need to believe in something means that A festa da menina morta still manages to be effective and thought-provoking.

Mario Kozina

Review Shultes

By Bakur Bakuradze (Russia)

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akur Bakuradze’s first feature film at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes is a drama about the lonesome pickpocket Lyosha Shultes, who lives in a run-down Russian city. His daily life is a slow succession of repetitive events: waiting for the next job, watching TV, smoking, jogging…

He seems paralysed, doing only the minimum required to earn his living.

It’s only at the end of the film that we are allowed to discover the causes of his distant and solitary behaviour: Lyosha and his girlfriend had a car

accident one year ago, in which she died and he suffered from a headtrauma which still affects his ability to remember.

The recent death of his mother is a further strike of fate – an event which he actively tries to forget.

Whilst the puzzle of Lyosha’s personality and story is vague and somewhat incomplete, the emotional desperation of the character is effectively intense, and the cinematography succeeds in showing his struggle in all its depth.

Zsuzsanna Kiràly

Review Knitting

By Yin Lichuan (China)

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Your feet are fat.” “Your cooking is awful.” “You have no brains.” Haili makes sure to criticise Daping at every opportunity. Daping just wants to be with Chen Jin, a boy swept in any direction the wind blows and addicted to playing the lotto.

Knitting by writer, poet and now second-time director Yin Lichuan is a conflicted love triangle set against the backdrop of an enormous metropolis in contemporary China. Haili, an acquaintance of Chen Jin unknown to Daping, walks into their apartment © «Land of Plenty» by Win Wenders (2004) one day and disrupts their delicate relationship. A silent, naive girl looking for confirmation of her own existence from others, Daping is finding out the

hard way that she only has herself to rely on. Haili, slightly older and hardened through disappointment, has taught herself to survive by trampling on others to get to the finish first. Vying for the boy’s attention, the two women keep butting heads, too self-involved or scared to take a step back and look at the other as a companion instead of an adversary.

Intensely real close-ups are mixed with portraits of the city landscape. Everything far away looks impressive and beautiful, but everything close is either under construction or falling apart, reflecting the state of the characters’ relationships with one another. Then Chen Jin disappears, leaving a pregnant Daping to hit rock bottom, and it is Haili who is there to help her back on her feet. Both equally vulnerable, they discover that they have more to give each other than what they were looking to get from Chen Jin. The film explores the core of female relationships: the envy of each other’s bodies, the slumbering competition when men are around, and the never-ending capacity for love. In the end, the two women realise that they are equals, not so different in strength and resourcefulness.

Maartje Alders

Interview with:

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Director of Three Monkeys (Turkey)

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he script of Three Monkeys was a collaborative effort between you, your wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal, one of the actors in this film. How did the writing process work?

When Ebru and I heard of the selfsacrifice of a father, we decided to make a film about it. We developed the story and the idea reached a different point. Then when Ercan became involved, we made some changes to the script with his contributions.

The film contains a metaphorical and hidden solidarity between men – father and son, employee and boss… but what about the female character?

The family is isolated from the rest of the world. True, there is solidarity between the father and son; although in the film it is not on the surface because they don’t open up to one other. We didn’t show the woman with her friends, but put in a little information about them, so she is not alone in this perspective. We haven’t created such a female character deliberately.

Sometimes you need carrier characters to express a feeling, and in one sense the woman is fulfilling this aim.

Is it a film on the lack of communication?

I think the lack of communication is the destiny of humanity. There are people who talk much but say nothing of real meaning: everybody is coded to protect themselves and hide their own impotencies. Three Monkeys focuses more on how a person behaves in critical moments, faced with unexpected situations (e.g. what a man does when he learns his wife is unfaithful to him).

Nothing can turn out how we plan it - there will always be strange, complicated, incomprehensible feelings inside of people.

Distance, Climates and Three Monkeys tell city stories. How are cities - especially Istanbul important in your films?

I am a practical man. I make films according to conditions and possibilities. Istanbul’s scenery is not a must for my films.

Esra Demirkiran

1 book/1 film Graffiti

In Graffiti (the short story), a man falls in love with a woman without ever having seen her. In a town without a name where the militia police oversee all, in a total absence of freedom, the man and woman draw on the walls and defy the rules together. Two innocent beings, whose chalk mouths cry out their hope through abstract and interposed sketches. One evening, things start to go badly for her: a prison van, incarceration, torture. The other gets drunk, doodles and waits. Her freedom regained, she heals her wounds through writing. And on paper, their voices, their “you”s, finally fuse together.

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he first publication of the short story of Julio Cortazar, Graffiti, coincided with that of the exhibition catalogue dedicated to Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona in 1978. The writer, born in 1914 in Belgium from Argentinean parents, created Graffiti starting from the drawings of Tàpies, a Catalan painter fond of abstract graphics. Later integrated into We love Glenda so much (1989), in 1999 Graffiti was the subject of a first cinematic adaptation: Alexandre Aja took inspiration from it for his feature film Furia, a suspense thriller featuring Stanislas Mehrar and Marion Cotillard. Young Georgian filmmaker Vano Burdili is now offering a new version in a shorter format.

In his medium length film, Vano Burdili brings to the screen the story of a young painterphotographer and a young writer forced into silence in a grey town under heavy surveillance.

The childlike chalks have become paint bombs bought on the black market. Both visually and in terms of sound, the absurdity of the dictatorial mechanism is strong. Their urgent urge to paint on the walls, their shared desire, is just as palpable onscreen, against a soundtrack of free jazz and a brutal soundtrack. The transposition is inventive, even if the poetic fever of the short story is slightly mild...

Emilie Padellec

Into the festival NISI MASA European network of young cinema

7th European contest

for short film scripts Theme 2008

Photos © Lasse Lecklin

ESCAPE For people aged 18-28  Deadline 31 July 2008 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 An initiative organised in 19 countries of Europe -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More information: www.nisimasa-scriptcontest.eu

Portrait Alexandra Maria Lara

Une actrice dévouée aux sommets

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es origines de Alexandra Maria Lara, récemment nominée comme l’une des plus importante actrices allemandes de niveau international, sont à l’image de l’histoire des migrations européennes. Née en 1978 à Bucharest, Alexandra n’était encore qu’une petite fille quand ses parents ont fui le régime Ceauşescu en 1983 pour s’installer en Allemagne, d’abord à Fribourg dans le Sud-Ouest et ensuite à Berlin où ils vivent toujours.

A 4 ans, rapidement intégrée, Alexandra s’est toujours sentie bien accueillie en Allemagne, tout autant que sa maman linguiste et son père,Valentin Plătăreanu, ancien vice-directeur du Théâtre National de Bucharest (c’est lui qui a installé l’école de théâtre à Charlottenburg (Berlin) dans laquelle sa fille ira plus tard prendre des cours après son diplôme d’études supérieures). Bien qu’elle revendique ses origines, Alexandra se sent de plus en plus allemande et reconnaît la chance qu’elle a eu d’avoir grandi dans la liberté. « Peu importe ce qui m’arrivera ou à ma future carrière, Berlin sera toujours mon chez moi ».

© www.global-metropolis.net

À 11 ans déjà elle fait sa première apparition à la télévision. A 16 ans, elle tient le rôle principal dans Mensch, Pia! et modifie alors son nom de Plătăreanu en Lara. Elle a ensuite joué dans différentes séries télé comme Der Tunnel et Napoléon avant le tournant de 2004 où elle obtient le rôle de Traudi Junge, la secrétaire d’Hitler (Bruno Ganz) dans La chute. Grâce au succès du film, sa carrière prend une ampleur internationale et entérine son passage de la télévision au cinema.

Depuis les demandes pleuvent et sa popularité ne fait qu’augmenter. Malgré cela, elle insiste pour dire qu’elle est ouverte à toute proposition de rôles petits ou grands, pour la TV ou le cinéma. Ces dernières années on l’a vue dans des films allemands comme Vom Suchen und Finden der Liebe (Helmut Dietl) et Der Fischer und seine

Acting devotedly to the top

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he origins of Alexandra Maria Lara - recently named one of the most important German actresses on an international level - form a familiarsounding European migration story. Born in 1978 in Bucharest, Alexandra was just a little girl when she and her parents fled from the Ceauşescu regime in 1983, going on to settle in Germany - first in Freiburg in the South-West, and afterwards in Berlin, where all three of them still live. As a four-year-old, Alexandra was quickly integrated and always felt welcome in Germany, as did her mother, a linguist, and her father Valentin Plătăreanu, former Vice-Director of the state theatre in Bucharest (it was he who installed the theatre school in Charlottenburg, Berlin, where his daughter would later take courses after obtaining her high-school diploma). Although she appreciates her origins, Alexandra feels German through and through, and is thankful that she had the chance to live a free childhood. She states that “no matter what happens to me and my career in the future, Berlin is always going to be my hometown”.

It was at the early age of 11 that she got her first role on TV. At 16, she played the main character in Mensch, Pia! and changed her last name from Plătăreanu to Lara. Various TV productions such as Der Tunnel and Napoleon followed, before the big breakthrough in 2004 when she played Traudl Junge, the secretary of Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) in The Downfall. The wide success of the film made her internationally known and marked an important move from TV to cinema. From then on the amount of offers and her level of fame rose constantly. Nevertheless, she emphasises that she always wants to be open to every kind of role, be they small or major, in TV or in cinema. In the past few years she has been cast in German films such as Vom Suchen und Finden der Liebe (Helmut Dietl) and Der Fischer und seine Frau (Doris

Dörrie), as well as international productions such as Control (Anton Corbijn), Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola), and The City Of Your Final Destination (James Ivory). She is currently working on Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel), The Dust of Time (Theodoros Angelopoulos) and The Reader (Stephen Daldry). Something of an amazing film list for a 29-year-old actress… This year Alexandra Maria Lara is returning to the Cannes Festival as member of the Feature Film Jury, where Control was presented last year.

There are many reasons for this success story - talent, hard work and modesty being the main ones. Her supportive parents, and of course the good luck of being spotted that early on for TV films, have also played an important role. The special quality of Lara’s performances is to be found in her understated facial expressions and gestures, and her tranquil, sometimes a little startled, disbelieving gaze. She is mainly engaged in strong female characters who are loyal, independent, optimistic and passionate (good examples being Annik Honoré, the lover of singer Ian Curtis in Control, or the successful Annette, who despite all her realism truly believes in fate and love in Nackt), but she plays all of these characters in a light and modest way, without confirming female character stereotypes. Her subtle method, concentrated on small details and emotions, demonstrates the strength of every personality she plays.

Her beauty and dark brown eyes are certainly striking, and she gives every figure a certain kind of amiable charm. Nevertheless, in order not to be typecast and bring out other qualities, it would be exciting to see her in a darker, rougher role - daring to look drawn by life, wasted. There is no doubt that, given the opportunity, she would outperform here too.

Frau (Doris Dörrie) mais aussi internationaux comme Control (Anton Corbijn), L’homme sans âge (Francis Ford Coppola), et The City Of Your Final Destination (James Ivory). Prochainement on la verra dans Le complexe Baader Meinhof (Uli Edel), The Dust of Time (Theodoros Angelopoulos) et Le liseur (Stephen Daldry). Un rôle plutôt étonnant pour une actrice de 29 ans… Cette année Alexandra Maria Lara revient à Cannes comme jury pour la competition officielle où Contrôle était présenté l’année dernière.

Il y a plusieurs raisons à cette success story dont les principales sont le talent, le travail et la modestie. A cela il faut ajouter le soutien de ses parents et bien sûr la chance d’avoir été choisie très jeune pour des séries télé. Ses atouts : des gestes grâcieux, une expression de visage subtile associée à un incroyable regard intense, tranquille et quelque fois un peu surprenant. Elle joue la plupart du temps des rôles de femmes à caractère fort, loyales, indépendantes, optimistes et passionnéees (un bon exemple est Annik Honoré, la maîtresse du chanteur Ian Curtis dans Control, ou Annette, la femme d’affaire, qui malgré son pragmatisme, croit vraiment au destin et à l’amour dans Nackt). Mais elle interprète toujours ses personnages avec fraicheur et modestie, sans tomber dans les stéréotypes féminins. Sa méthode soignée, concentrée sur les petits details, les petites émotions, révèle la force des personnages auxquels elle donne vie.

Sa beauté, avec ses yeux bruns foncés, est indiscutable.

Alexandra Maria donne à ses personage une forme de charme attachant. Cependant, pour ne pas être coincée dans un type de rôle et révéler de nouvelles qualités, il serait intéressant de la voir dans un rôle plus noir, plus dur, pour lequel elle aie le courage de paraître dépressive ou ravagée par la vie.

Il n’y a pas de doute que si elle en a l’opportunité, elle livrera une prestation inoubliable.

Zsuzsanna Kiràly

Reportage I Cannes Get No

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Action. As Walter didn’t have a driving licence, it was the cousin who drove to Cannes from Namur (Belgium): 18 hours on the road at 90 km per hour in an old R5. They were stopped three times on the way by French customs authorities.

Belgian short film director Xavier Diskeuve has reunited his two favourite actors, Nicolas Buysse (Walter Molitor) and Francois Maniquet (Jacques) and a light crew of 4 people to shoot, over just three days and with two cameras, I Cannes Get No, a short film with a budget of 10 000 euros funded by the returns from his previous films.

Improvisations are added to the written base of the story, such as the arrival of two idiots who seem to be straight out of an episode of Strip Tease. The gathering that forms around their shoot is amusing, everyone trying to find out which star is present. The actors know each other well and handle their characters with skill. Walter, a big–mouth who is somewhat set in his ways, and Jacques, his slow-witted cousin. In one improvised scene Jacques leans against a revolving advertisement column on the Croisette. His Droopy-like expression and the “massaging” movement of the column create a comic effect similar to Tati’s best work. The whole crew is having a good laugh. Nicolas Buysse goes to look for some water, as for once the temperature is high on the Croisette. Yesterday he did the scene in which his character

© Photo Johanna Kinnari

unday 18th of May. Cowboy boots, stubble, black glasses.

Walter Molitor dampens his shirt with sweat on the Croisette, distributing copies of his CV to the paparazzi (he is bilingual, and can do stunt work), docilely followed by his cagoule-wearing cousin Jacques. The actor has come to make contacts.

goes all out by performing a tirade from Cyrano in the middle of the Croisette, attracting a crowd of 200 curious spectators.

“It was quite worrying for me as it’s a sort of film within the film, me myself being an actor who is not very well-known” he admits. The team has benefited from the help of people on location, such as permission to shoot on the Arte yacht and to borrow tuxedos from them. Above all, the project is a way for Xavier Diskeuve, who hasn’t made a film since 2005, to launch himself back into the energy of a shoot and practise through a fun experiment with his crew. “We had started to forget our dreams a little bit, and that woke us up” he says.

At the moment he is developing a feature film on the appearances of the Virgin Mary in a small Belgian town, with Francois Maniquet in the main role. Now for the crew, it’s just a question of who is going to suffer driving all the way back in the R5.

Interview - Into the credits:

Wild Bunch Distribution

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Julien Melebeck

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hat is the game plan for Wild Bunch this year at Cannes?

Anne: It’s a very important event for promoting our films.

But not everything is in play here. In 2007 We own the night, the film by James Gray, from whom we are presenting a new opus this year, Two Lovers, didn’t get a very enthusiastic reception from the critics. Certain people quickly changed their opinion when it came out in France.

Beyond the media buzz, how do you prepare the exhibition of the films here?

Nathalie: We line up meetings with French exhibitors in order to show them our new acquisitions. They come to make business for their Wild Bunch Distribution is a French cinema theatres. film distribution company which is presenting 4 films in official selection at Cannes this year.

Nathalie Cieutat, Programmer, and Anne Jacquelin, Communications Assistant, talked with us about their work.

--Picture above: Nathalie, Anne and Charles Vannier

The new documentary by Emir Kusturica on a football legend, which you are distributing, is a real event on the Croisette…

Anne: Maradona by Kusturica is getting a lot of attention because it unites two stars whose presence at Cannes has generated excitement.

But that doesn’t mean that the promotion of the film is easy. The excitement has to be managed in the right way.

Joanna Gallardo

Work in progress

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Walking with Music: Freedom?

ack then youths were happy enough because they could listen to music while walking. The magical walkman’s cheap but unforgettable click sound, the cassette’s visibility which shows at which point of the album you are at, the colourful plastic bracelets, unique hairstyles, and so on...

It was a time when the world had just come out of the liberation movements of the 70s, and was unfortunately moving towards a more thoughtless era - a time of neo-conservatism and apolitical youth masses, of more trivial and yet diversified commercial products.

Unsurprisingly, portraying the tendencies of a time period through cultural and artistic products gives us a better idea of the situation back then. In this year’s selection, the Cannes Festival is welcoming some films in different sections which refer to pop songs from the 80s.

In Tony Manero, in which the protagonist obsessively watches the film Saturday Night Fever over and over, there are unforgettable dancing scenes and typical 70s fashions. Raul wants to win a TV competition for Manero impersonators. Besides watching Fever and repeating the dialogues in his broken English accent, he continuously listens and dances to 80s Latin songs which carry a feeling of incompleteness. For some, music produced in the 80s has a strong element of kitsch - not only referring to bad taste as in the commonusage of the word, but also to a kind of raw and unfinished state. The sensations which are passed onto the spectator are fake and deceptive, but still highly attractive.

In one scene of the animated film Waltz with Bashir, Israeli soldiers are also listening to pop hits from the 80s. In this case, the story itself is set in those years, during the Israeli-Lebanese conflict at the beginning of the decade. The soldiers mostly don’t have a clue why they are going to war in Lebanon and are having fun with these songs, dancing around and brandishing their guns. The structures of 80s pop songs are were similar to these unquestioning soldiers: fake and temporary sentiments, no worries or reflection on the state of the world… They asked the listener to consume them fast and ‘ask for more’, in the slogan’s commercial sense. The contradiction in Waltz with Bashir is that war needs to be questioned. The soldiers - children of 80s - are just not aware of it yet.

In the Bosnian film Snow, a truck driver and a woman selling home-made conserves listen to the 1988 Italian song Libertá whilst talking about people who died in the war. The song mentions the importance of unity: “Freedom, you made lots of people cry, but without

Tony Manero

you there is loneliness”. The underlying meaning of the music is different here, firstly because freedom is a timeless struggle - a song mentioning it going back to the 80s is a true example of this - and secondly, because this decade didn’t bring the world more freedom than the one before it.

It is important to note that the 80s created a generation who expressed their ideas not with profound words but with colours, kitsch and shiny accessories.

Besides this however, these years also had their own dynamics amongst the youths who were demanding more rights.

As the decade during which MTV appeared (1981) and American pop culture rose up against the political backdrop of the fall of Berlin wall (1989), it brought the world to a point where youth was more and more apolitical. The Smurfs, Voltron, Karate Kid, VHS, Terminator, Elm Street, Ronald Reagan, Back to the Future, Madonna…

Did this diversity in outputs actually indicate more freedom, or did it bind us to a colourful atmosphere in which where all the rules were already decided?

Esra Demirkiran

Short Film Corner Beyond the Mexique Bay

By Jean-Marc Rousseau Ruiz (France)

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or its closing evening, the Critic’s Week is proposing the Mexican feature Desierto Adentro, preceded by the short film Beyond the Mexique Bay by Jean-Marc Rousseau Ruiz. The desert thus has a special honour in this screening programme.

In this sparse short, in which love is not powerful enough to protect against death, the desert is more than a simple backdrop. Firstly, it provides the reason for a brief encounter between a man and a woman: “I’ve been told that you could take me into the desert”, asks this tired European of a beautiful young Mexican woman, busy selling her jewellery on the market.

The woman guides this silent and reticent man through the desert and tries, despite the language difference, to converse with him. Whether they be trivial or more serious, human emotions tend to speak for themselves.

Thus the two characters spending time together somehow manage to communicate the essential: to speak about their pasts, about their experiences of death and loss. Their ephemeral encounter is not able however to change the inescapable destiny of this man, whose apparent calm hides a well of sadness.

The desert landscape is one moment the place which one has dreamt of, the next the place where one has lost those one loves, and finally, the place where one comes to die. The final sequence, the only moment of lyricism in this contemplative road-movie, thus takes on the dimension of a distraught flight from death - without a doubt failed in advance, but necessary all the same. It is not until this point that the film, with an extreme sobriety, finds its meaning and reaches its resolution. The technical clumsiness, particularly in the uneven image, becomes touching and the sobriety gives a fable-like dimension to this story of human existence fleeing from death.

Chloé Averty

© Photo by Carlos Val Naval

PICTURE OF THE DAY

Maradona and the Non-Sweating Orchestra!

Youth Prize: Video Workshop

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the big swindle

s part of the ‘60 at Cannes’, the young participants from all over Europe have the opportunity to take part in one-day filmmaking workshops. Each international team realises a short reportage related to one film from the Critic’s Week, Director’s Fortnight or Un Certain Regard programmes.

The young cinephiles watch a film, before making an interview with the director and expressing their own thoughts about the film to the camera in various creative ways. Making these short reportages is not only a comprehensive and educational experience, but also a great way to meet professional filmmakers and learn more about their visions.

When finally edited together, these short films (around a dozen) give a wide picture not only of this year’s Cannes Festival programme but also the diverse views of the new generation and their thoughts about current filmmaking. The films can be seen online on the official Prix de la Jeunesse website or on the site France 5.

3 questions to:

Helena Mielonen

Brigitte Faure

By Andreas Schenk

French Production Manager Brigitte Faure leapt into the audiovisual universe after studying at business school. She has worked with, amongst others, Patrice Leconte (L’homme du train) and recently Anne Fontaine (Nouvelle Chance).

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fter all these years, you don’t seem to have lost your motivation.

What is it that pushes you to continue?

Alongside the artistic aspects, there is above all the diverse range of personalities and opinions that one meets on a film set. There is also a professionalism and passion which animate this field that I love. Crew members can be so motivated that they accept work despite minimal salaries. One of the tasks I care about the most is ensuring good working conditions for everyone, for the good of their projects.

Les filles de feu Jean-Sébastien Chauvin

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e don’t emit cries of orgasm or anguish like the two heroines of Les Filles de feu. However, we do hold ourselves back from sighing… with dismay. What did Jean-Sébastien Chavin want to evoke in this film: the mystery of lesbian desire, the lightning of impulses? The director seems overwhelmed by his subject, despite attempts to represent the female face as a motif of desire. Visibly, Chauvin is fascinated by Sapphic landscapes, whilst the viewer is looking for what is hidden beyond them.

On the horizon, nothing happens.

There is no smoke… without fire.

Joanna Gallardo

What steps do you advise them to follow?

Do internships. The big film schools also offer good opportunities for opening doors. These establishments allow students to meet other young cinephiles, creating and enlarging their networks.

© Photo Johanna Kinnari

Do you have any ideas to communicate to young people?

Yes, I want to transmit the taste for cinema, the passion and all the energy necessary for these careers. Above all they must never give up before reaching their goals. Sometimes, falling down can hurt, but one learns with time.

c’est un choix

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