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CANNES 2009 Directors’ Fortnight

Ne Change Rien goes into the studio with Jeanne Balibar

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Back at Cannes three years after screening in Competition with Colossal Youth [+see also:
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– this time in the Directors' FortnightPedro Costa once again challenges viewers’ expectations with his latest film, Ne Change Rien [+see also:
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. It is the first Portuguese title to play at Cannes this year, with João Pedro Rodrigues’ anticipated third feature, To Die Like a Man [+see also:
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film profile
]
, programmed for the last day of Un Certain Regard.

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Jeanne Balibar, who in recent years reinvented herself as a singer alongside her acting career, is the heart of Costa’s new film. This is certainly not the first time that an actresses “acts” in music numbers and records a disc – another Jeanne, Moreau, did it before, to name but one – but its probably the first time that this sort of artistic evolution is filmed in a such an uncompromising way, leaving glamour behind and assuming a pure work-in-progress approach.

In fact, in nearly hours of long fixed shoots and beautiful b&W photography, Costa’s camera is never indiscrete but is omnipresent in rehearsals, concerts and singing lessons, both intimate and distant to Balibar and her entourage.

Faithful to his known rejection of formatized projects, Costa makes a film that is at once a documentary and an atypical musical, defying the codes of these two genres. There is no place for Q&A’s, choreographies or confessions before the cameras. Testing the audience’s patience in some sequences to make it up in some others – the lyric singing lesson scene is probably the most delightful – the film remains nevertheless the most easily accessible of the Portuguese director’s thus far, and also the one likely to attract more and new audiences to his work.

Already picked up for theatrical distribution in Portugal (Midas Filmes) and France (Shellac), Ne Change Rien was co-produced by Portugal’s Sociedade Óptica Técnica and France’s Red Star Cinéma, which also handles world sales.

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