The Hideaways in world premiere at Tribeca

by Fabien Lemercier

21/04/2011 - Agnès Merlet’s fourth feature, French/Irish/Swedish co-production The Hideaways will be unveiled today in the Spotlight section at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, which opened yesterday. The director of The Son of the Shark (nominated for the Best Debut Film César in 1994), Artemisia (nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 1998) and Dorothy Mills [trailer] (50,000 admissions in France in 2008 and 350,000 worldwide in 2009) continues her original career with a new, English-language romantic drama blending realism and the supernatural.

Starring Harry Treadaway, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Susan Lynch and Kate O'Toole, The Hideaways is scripted by Nick Murphy. It centres on James who has inherited strange powers that affect the men in his family (his father blows the electricity when he’s afraid, his grandfather goes temporarily blind when he thinks about sex).

When James, 10, explores his powers he unintentionally kills his father and grandmother, then is sent to a reformatory where he infects those who make fun of him with a fatal disease. He then starts living an isolated existence in the forest. Years later, he is discovered by Mae, a young cancer patient who has escaped from hospital.

The Hideaways was 60% produced by France (Fidélité Films), 30% by Ireland (Octagon Films) and 10% by Sweden (Filmgate) for €6.6m, including backing from Eurimages. International sales are being handled by Wild Bunch.

Running until May 1, Tribeca will show other French productions in its Spotlight section, including Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank [trailer], Cédric Klapisch’s My Piece of the Pie [trailer], Julien Leclerq’s The Assault [trailer], Massy Tadjedin’s co-production Last Night [trailer] and Pierre Thoretton’s documentary Mad Love.

Moreover, the Viewpoints line-up features David Dusa’s Flowers of Evil [trailer], while the world competition is showing Mateo Gil’s French/Spanish/US co-production Blackthorn and Jean-Pierre Améris’s Romantics Anonymous [trailer].

(Translated from French)