09/05/2005

The new project of the director Nicolas Philibert, specialised in documentary (Être et avoir) will be sold by the French company Films Distribution on the Film Market which takes place starting next Wednesday during the 58th Cannes Film Festival. This project, entitled Retour en Normandie, is an actual ‘return’, since the filmmaker decided to use the same non-professional actors (peasants, mostly) who played in Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère (=’I, P.R., cut the throats of my mother, my sister, and my brother’) back in 1976. At the time Nicolas Philibert was the assistant of the director René Allio. The film was adapted from an essay the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote to explore the motivations of a 20-year-old peasant from Aunay (a small village in Calvados, Normandy) who killed his family in 1835. He was sentenced to death as a parricide but then his sentence was converted to life-imprisonment. Pierre Rivière eventually hanged himself in jail, leaving a thirty-page manuscript explaining the murder and describing the life peasants had at the time. For this new film, which will start shooting in the next few months, Nicolas Philibert renews his collaboration with the production company Maïa Films (Gilles Sandoz) and the French distributor Les Films du Losange.

After a very fruitful Berlinale, where Radu Mihaileanu’s Live and Become [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Denis Carot
interview: Didar Domehri
interview: Radu Mihaileanu
film profile] was a great success, Films Distribution is bringing to Cannes an impressive line-up. Amongst the most promising films, there is the European co-production Joyeux Noël [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Carion
interview: Christophe Rossignon
film profile] by Christian Carion (official selection, out of competition) and Cache cache [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Yves Caumon, selected for the Directors’ Fortnight. Nicolas Brigaud-Robert’s company is also selling uncompleted productions : Flandres by Bruno Dumont, La Raison du plus faible by Lucas Belvaux, Indigènes by Rachid Bouchareb (starring Djamel, Roschdy Zem, Samy Nacéri, and Sami Bouajila) and Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley. Amongst the fully-completed productions, brand new ones and less recent ones, a few films are worth mentioning : Voici venu le temps by Alain Guiraudie, Ultranova [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bouli Lanners
film profile] by Bouli lanners, Cavalcade by Steve Suissa, Vento di terra by Vincenzo Marra, and Un fil à la patte by Michel Deville.

(Translated from French)