Frontières: Neo-Nazis and robbers

by Fabien Lemercier

12/02/2007 - Xavier Gens’ debut feature Frontières (lit. “Borders”), a film currently being sold by EuropaCorp at the European Film Market at the Berlin Film Festival, has already been enthusiastically received by horror-thriller fans.

Film professionals are closely following the development of a French “school” of the genre, which combines low production costs with strong international sales potential, as shown recently by directing duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them [trailer], as well as by its precursors, Eric Valette’s Maléfique and Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance.

Starring Aurélien Wiik, Karina Testa, Patrick Ligardes, Samuel Le Bihan, Yasmine Belmadi, Ouassini Embarek, Dominique Bettenfeld, Maud Forget and Estelle Lefébure, Frontières is set when the extreme right makes it to the second round of the French presidential elections, an event accompanied by riots.

To help a young pregnant woman, forced at all costs to hide her pregnancy from her family, her friends go on a spate of robberies in an attempt to get the necessary funds together to help the woman travel to the Netherlands for an abortion. Fleeing the police, the small group finds refuge in an old factory in a forest near the Luxembourg border. However, they have, in fact, ended up in a hostel run by dangerous neo-Nazi cannibals.

Produced by Laurent Tolleron for Cartel Productions, the €1.9m Frontières has a 36-day shoot and includes co-production funding from EuropaCorp, StudioCanal, Chemin Vert, BR Films and Swiss outfit Pacific Films.

EuropaCorp will release the film on French screens in June, while Optimum Releasing will handle its UK release.

Meanwhile, Luc Besson will give Gens the rights to direct an adaptation of the video game Hitman. Based on the life of a hired killer who targets criminals, the film begins lensing this spring. Timothy Olyphant, the lead in the TV series Deadwood, will star.

(Translated from French)