Doc & Film: signing and on the rise

by Fabien Lemercier

10/05/2012 - The Film Market at the 65th Cannes Film Festival (from May 16 to 27) is looking fruitful for French international sales agency Doc & Film International, as it has four feature films in the festival’s most prestigious selections this year, besides its three films in the alternative ACID programme and a further flurry of new offerings.

In the Official Selection, Daniela Elstner’s team will sell La Playa DC (photo), a first feature by Juan Andrés Arango, co-produced by Colombia, Brazil, and France, and selected for the Certain Regard. Its documentary Les invisibles (lit. "The invisibles") by Sebastien Lifshitz, about homosexual men and women born between the two world wars who were pioneers in defending their rights to live freely in a then very hostile society, will be shown in a special screening.

Doc & Film also has two films at the Directors’ Fortnight: Opération Libertad [trailer, film focus] by Swiss filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff about a small group of revolutionaries who held up a bank in 1978 and filmed themselves on tapes that then resurface 30 year later, and Le repenti by Algerian director Merzak Allouache, that follows a young jihadi’s complicated return to civil life after he is released in an amnesty (co-produced with the French JBA).

The ACID programme will screen three films from the Doc & Film line-up: award-winning Franco-Qatari documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me by Namir Abdel Messeeh (that also went to the Panorama at the Berlinale), Room 514 by Israeli filmmaker Sharon Bar-Ziv (who recently received a special mention from the jury at Tribeca) and French film Ab Irato by Dominique Boccarossa (a Les Films d'Ici and ABB Reportages production), to be shown in a special screening.

As for its films in post-production, they include A Child by You by Jacques Doillon (read more), the documentary Cong Binh by Vietnamese filmmaker Lam Le, and Sex and Love in Times of Crisis by Eric Pittard (read more).

Finally, the following films will also be added to the line-up: Tenderness by Marion Hänsel (read more - starring Olivier Gourmet), Berthe Morisot by Caroline Champetier (who was notably director of photography for Of Gods and Men [trailer, film focus], as well as four documentaries: French-Israeli-Swiss co-production Once I Entered a Garden by Avi Mograbi (selected in 2005 for Cannes and in 2008 for Venice), El Impenetrable by Daniele Incalcaterra, The Wings of Johnny May by Marc Fafard, and Holy GRA by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi.

(Translated from French)