Demy’s Americano at San Sebastian

by Fabien Lemercier

16/09/2011 - Unveiled last Saturday at Toronto in the Special Presentations section, Mathieu Demy’s road movie Americano [trailer] is among the three French films vying for the Golden Shell at the 59th San Sebastian Film Festival, which opens today. Recently acclaimed in The Girl on the Train [trailer] and Tomboy [trailer, film focus], the son of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda is also in the cast alongside Salma Hayek, Geraldine Chaplin, Chiara Mastroianni, Carlos Bardem and Jean-Pierre Mocky.

Scripted by the director, the film traces the peregrinations of Martin, who has to leave Paris to go back to Los Angeles, the city of his childhood, to sort out the formalities surrounding his inheritance after his mother’s death. Images from his youth thus resurface and perturb him.

He goes off to Tijuana where he gets lost on the trail of a young Mexican woman he once knew and who held an important place in his mother’s life. In order to come to terms with his loss, Martin will have to revisit his past.

Americano was produced by Ciné-Tamaris and Les Films de l'Autre. Its €2.61m budget included co-production support from Arte France Cinéma and pre-acquisitions from Canal+ and Ciné+. Bac Films will release the title in French theatres on November 30 and is handling international sales.

The two other French titles in competition this year at San Sebastian are Skylab [trailer] by the ever original Julie Delpy (sales: Films Distribution – see news); and directorial duo Olivier Nakache and Olivier Toledano’s Untouchable [trailer], starring François Cluzet and Omar Sy, about the development of an unlikely friendship between a rich aristocrat injured in a paragliding accident and a suburban youth recently released from prison who is hired as a home help (Quad Productions – sales: Gaumont). Also in the line-up is Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chinese/French co-production 11 Flowers (see news).

The San Sebastian Film Festival, which will close on September 24, has also selected Hadar Friedlich’s French/Israeli co-production A Beautiful Valley (executive production: Les Films du Poisson) in the Zabaltegi-New Directors competitive section. Also screening are former Cannes titles The Artist [trailer] by Michel Hazanavicius and Where Do We Go Now? [trailer] by Nadine Labaki in the Zabaltegi-Pearls line-up; Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat [trailer] and Frederik Wiseman’s Crazy Horse [trailer] in the Zabaltegi Specials; Dominik Moll’s The Monk [trailer] as a midnight screening; Jean-Pierre Améris’s Romantics Anonymous [trailer] in Culinary Zinema; and A Cat in Paris [trailer] in Films for Kids.

(Translated from French)