12/04/2010

For the past week, shooting has been in full swing in Belgium on French director Samuel Benchetrit’s third feature, Chez Gino.

After Janis and John (330,000 admissions in France in 2003) and I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (240,000 viewers in 2008), the director is trying his hand at a film inspired by Italian comedies of the 1960s. It stars José Garcia (Le Mac [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and Anna Mouglalis (Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), alongside Spanish actor Sergi Lopez, Serge Larivière, Fabrice Adde, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Marie-Paule Brauers.

Co-scripted by the director and Gabor Rassov, the film centres on Gino (Garcia), who has been living in Brussels for the past 20 years and runs a third-rate pizzeria bought with the savings of his wife Simone (Mouglalis). His dreary everyday life, dominated by family arguments with his two children Marco and Maria, is turned upside down by news of the impending death of his uncle in Italy, a fearsome "bandit of honour" who has become a multimillionaire through his illegal activities. .

Gino is promised a large inheritance. The problem is that in order to receive it Gino must prove to his uncle that he has become, as he has told him, a fearsome godfather figure ruling over all the pizzerias in Paris. Gino thus commissions a fourth-rate film director to make a documentary about him and his family that is supposed to show them as big-time gangsters.

Chez Gino is produced by Olivier Delboscq and Marc Missonnier for Fidélité Films for around €7m. The budget includes co-production support from France 2 Cinéma, Studio 37 and Belgium’s Scope Invest, and backing from the Wallimage/Bruxellimage fund. After Belgium, shooting will relocate in May to the South of France. .

Mars Distribution will release the title in French theatres, while Kinology will handle international sales.

(Translated from French)