RELEASES France
Pusher trilogy: "He who lives by the sword, shall die by the sword"
by Fabien Lemercier
26/07/2006 - Danish films seem to be on a mission to invade French screens this summer. After Les Films du Losange, released on August 17, 2005 the first two parts of the trilogy by Per Fly, The Bench and Inheritance, Les Acacias will today release the Pusher trilogy by Nicolas Winding Refn – Pusher (1996), Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands [trailer] (2004) and Pusher III: I’m The Angel of Death [trailer].
With excellent box office takings in Scandinavia, the explosive trilogy on the world of crime by the 35 year-old director had its French premiere in April at the Cognac Detective Film Festival.
The original Pusher starred Kim Bodnia, well-known Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (Torremolinos 73 [trailer], I Am Dina [trailer] and three films by Anders Thomas Jensen, including Adam’s Apples [trailer, film focus] - see Focus) and Croatian actor Zlatko Buric.
While Mikkelsen played the leading role in Pusher II, Buric (Dirty Pretty Things by Stephen Frears) is the only actor to have starred in all three films and heads the bill in Pusher III. The latest film, a descent into the emotional hell of a drug dealer who has a head-to-head confrontation with his father, the boss of the gang, recounts the downfall of a drug trafficker with as its backdrop the cynical business world. Refn has linked these three adrenaline-fuelled stories by the principle of "he who lives by the sword, shall die by the sword".
Also opening this Wednesday in France on 40 screens is the German production Antibodies by Christian Alvart, distributed by La Fabrique de Films. This feature about the confrontation between a policeman and a serial killer was selected for New Faces in European Cinema, presented by European Film Promotion at the AFI in Los Angeles in November 2005.
(Translated from French)
