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INDUSTRY Luxembourg

The "Made in/with Luxembourg" section boasts a diverse range of productions

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- The Luxembourg City Film Festival has become the ideal showcase for the state of film production in the Grand Duchy

The "Made in/with Luxembourg" section boasts a diverse range of productions
Ashcan by Willy Perelsztejn

The Luxembourg City Film Festival has become the ideal showcase for observing the state of national film production. Part of its programme is reserved for this purpose via the category known as "Made in/with Luxembourg.” The section’s title is to be understood in its broadest sense, as it brings together both films shot in the region and those produced in collaboration with other European companies (Germany and Belgium, mostly). 

The latest edition of the Luxembourg City Film Festival has brought together feature films, documentaries, TV series, as well as short films, animated feature films (The Breadwinner [+see also:
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trailer
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by Nora Twomey) and virtual reality films (Finding Jacob by Olivier Pesch). The Luxembourg film industry specialises in visual and sound technology, with this inclination fitting broadly into the context of the voluntary policy in place for thirty years in Luxembourg in favour of contemporary content.

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The "Luxembourg video clip night" was dedicated to short films. Of the six films screened on this occasion, four of them were exclusively national productions - Acheron by Thoma Forgiarini, And Then You by Kim Schneider, Dem Mich seng Kichen by Diana Nilles and Traces by Cécilia Guichart – and only two were international co-productions: Iridescence by Eileen Byrne and Jää by Anna Hints, whose clean landscapes are occasionally reminiscent Gerry by Gus Van Sant.

It is within this category that the Luxembourgish director Govinda Van Maele got some practice in before creating his first feature film Gutland [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Govinda Van Maele
film profile
]
. Shot in the Luxembourg countryside and selected as part of the festival's official competition, the film received two million euros from the Film Fund Luxembourg – the National Audiovisual Production Support Fund managed by Guy Daleiden. The opening shots of this story about a fugitive are outstanding due to the maturity of the young filmmaker. By never engaging in smug idealism or easy disdain for the rural population and its cultural particularities, Van Maele always finds the right balance. He does not hesitate – just like David Lynch – to invest in muddled sexuality and even engages, in the last part of the story, in a brief digression into the fantastic. The duo composed by the excellent German actor Frederick Lau and Vicky Krieps works perfectly. Solar and pagan, the Luxembourgish actress stands out yet again – after her performance alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson - with a high-flying performance full of freshness and spontaneity. 

Another leading Luxembourg actress, Désirée Nosbusch delivered a remarkable performance in Bad Banks by Christian Schwochow. Discovered during the last Berlinale, the film was shown in six parts on the channel Arte. Alongside this daring news topic (the taboo of the European financial markets), the other films seemed fairly conventional. Supported by the Film Fund and the National Audiovisual Center, the medium-length documentary Schwaarze Mann by Fränz Hausemer adopts a much more conventional form, as does the costume drama Mary Shelley [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
by Haifaa Al-Mansour, which doesn't quite succeed in avoiding the dregs that traditionally taint the genre. Only Ashcan [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
 by Willy Perelsztejn stood out aesthetically for including excerpts from a play which was performed in parallel at the National Theatre of Luxembourg (Codename Ashcan).

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(Translated from French)

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