Champs-Elysées Film Festival launches

by Fabien Lemercier

05/06/2012 - At the initiative of producer, distributor, and exhibitor Sophie Dulac, the Champs-Elysées Film Festival will tomorrow launch its first edition in five cinemas along the "most beautiful avenue in the world": the Balzac, the Lincoln, the Publicis Cinémas, the UGC George V, and the Gaumont Champs-Elysées. Until June 12, the festival will focus on independent American cinema (with ten titles running in its competition, ten premieres, and a tribute to Harvey Weinstein), but also allow 16 European features to shine.

Three films that were in Cannes last month stand out among the ten French titles to premiere at the film festival: the creative You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet [trailer] (photo) by Alain Resnais (read the review), the documentary Journal de France [trailer] by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret (special screening in the official selection in Cannes), and the off-the-wall comedy Granny’s Funeral [trailer] by Bruno Podalydès that was well reviewed at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes (review).

Other films to be screened will include the thriller Armed Hands [trailer] by Pierre Jolivet (with Roschdy Zem and Leïla Bekhti - read more), Wrong [trailer] by Quentin Dupieux (unveiled in the competition at Sundance - read more), Quand je serai petit [trailer] by Jean-Paul Rouve (read more), The Dandelions by Karine Tardieu (read more), Bad Seeds by Safy Nebbou (read more), L’air de rien by the duo Gregory Magne - Stéphane Viard, and La clinique de l’amour (lit. “The love hospital”) by Artus de Penguern.

Presided over by Lambert Wilson and Michael Madsen, the Champs-Elysées Film Festival will hold a special evening in honour of Donald Sutherland and will close with The Parade [trailer] by Srdjan Dragojevic (review - a co-production between Serbia, Croatia, Macedoinia, and Slovenia), which won the Panorama audience award at the last Berlinale. There will also be a section called "Oscars of the World" to screen Bullhead [trailer, film focus] by Belgian director Michael R. Roskam, In Darkness by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, Spanish-Argentinian co-production The Secret in Their Eyes [trailer] by Juan José Campanella, Letters to Angel by Estonian filmmaker Sulev Keedus, and Volcano [trailer] by Icelandic director Runar Runarsson.

(Translated from French)