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MARKET France

Memento starts pre-sales on Cantet’s Foxfire

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The opening of the American Film Market was marked by Memento Films International’s announcement that it is starting pre-sales for Laurent Cantet’s new project, an adaptation of US writer Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Published in 1993, the book was previously made into a US flick in 1996, directed by Annette Haywood-Carter and starring Angelina Jolie.

Produced by Haut et Court for around €8.5m, Cantet’s fifth feature will be his first English-language production and is scheduled to start shooting next summer in Canada.

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Oates’s novel is set in a working-class district of a small town in New York State in the 1950s. In order to survive and get revenge for all the humiliations they’ve suffered, five high-school girls swear an eternal pact: they will be the Foxfire gang (foxfire being a term for pretty girls, as well as will-o’-the-wisp).

Hatred, especially of men, leads them on a merciless and savage spree. After spending time at a young offenders’ institution, Legs, their idolised gang leader, returns with the dream of them all being able to live together on a farm, according to their own laws.

But their fiendish reputation earns them more than one enemy. There are car thefts, armed threats and, to top it all, kidnapping...It all ends very badly.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2008 for The Class [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carole Scotta
interview: Laurent Cantet
film profile
]
, Cantet also claimed the New Directors Award at San Sebastian in 1999 and the Best Debut Feature Cesar for Human Resources, as well as the Lion Award in the Cinema of the Present section at Venice 2001 for Time Out. His third feature, Heading South [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laurent Cantet
interview: Robin Campillo
interview: Simon Arnal-Szlovak
film profile
]
, screened in official competition at the Mostra in 2005, where it scooped Best Male Newcomer.

Memento Films International, who scored successful sales with The Class, thus adds an impressive asset to its line-up, where highlights already include Dominik Moll’s The Monk and Pawel Pawlikowslki’s The Woman In the Fifth (see news).

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(Translated from French)

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