Lady Chatterley and Napoleon rendezvous at Tribeca

by Camillo de Marco

15/03/2007 - French director Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley [trailer], winner of five Césars, and N.: Napoleon and Me [trailer], directed by Italy’s Paolo Virzì and starring Monica Bellucci, are among the European films selected in competition at the Tribeca Film Festival (April 24-May 7) in New York.

Other European competition titles are Germany’s Vivere, by Angelina Maccarone, and Half Moon by Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi, winner of the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival and co-produced by Austria and France.

The festival founded by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal will also feature an ample selection of European directors in the prestigious documentary competition section. Films include: I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne by John Laurence; A Slim Peace by Yael Luttwak, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and We Are Together (Thina Simunye) [trailer] by Paul Taylor, shot in South Africa in Zulu and English.

From Holland arrives Between Heaven and Earth (Tussen Hemel En Aarde), directed by Frank van den Engel and Masja Novikova, while The Sugar Curtain (El Telón de Azúcar) by Camila Guzmán Urzúa is a French/Cuban/Spanish co-production. Austria’s Péter Forgács, who won an award at Tribeca in 2005 for his documentary El Perro Negro, is this year bringing Miss Universe 1929.

Lastly, the non-competitive Spotlight section, which features films by directors more well-known to audiences, will this year screen Two Days in Paris [trailer, film focus], written and directed by Julie Delpy; Invisibles, produced by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in collaboration with Doctors Without Frontiers and directed by Mariano Barroso, Isabel Coixet, Javier Corcuera, Fernando León de Aranoa and Wim Wenders; The Killing of John Lennon, written and directed by Britain’s Andrew Piddington; My Best Friend [trailer] by Patrice Leconte, starring Daniel Auteuil; This Is England [trailer], written and directed by Shane Meadows; and The Optimists, by Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic.

(Translated from Italian)