29/09/2009

The second session of the Belgian French Community’s Film Selection Committee has announced its results. Four feature film projects have been chosen for writing grants, and ten for production grants.

Vania Leturcq’s debut feature L’Année Prochaine (“Next Year”, produced by Hélicotronc) will thus receive a writing grant of €12,500, while the Malandrin brothers will get the same amount for their third work, Je Suis Mort Mais J’ai des Amis (“I’m Dead But I Have Friends”), whose title once more recalls the bursts of surrealism associated with their adoptive country.

Among the production grants, Joachim Lafosse has been awarded €620,000 for his fifth feature A Perdre La Raison (“To Lose One’s Mind”, produced like his previous film by Versus), based on the Geneviève Lhermitte case, a quintuple infanticide that shook Belgium in February 2007.

The Committee has also chosen to back Michaël Roskam’s Tête de Bœuf (“Beef Head”, Artémis Production/Savage Film). This is the second feature made as part of the co-production agreement between the Film and Audiovisual Centre and Vlaams Audiovisual Fund.

Five majority films have made it into the selection. These include two debut features: Géraldine Doignon’s Un Homme à la Mer (“A Man at Sea”, Fontana) and Patrick Ridremont’s Dead Man Talking (Nexus Factory); two documentaries: Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau’s Couleur Peau de Miel (“Skin Colour: Honey”, Artemis Production) and Jean-Jacques Andrien’s Il A Plu sur le Grand Paysage (“It Has Rained on the Great Landscape”, Les Films de la Drève); and Michel Mees’ new film Secrètes Injustices (Dragon Films).

Four minority titles will receive funding, including Jeanne Labrune’s new work Sans Queue Ni Tête (“Cock and Bull”), which is currently shooting in Brussels, Liège and Charleroi; and Danis Tanovic’s next project Circus Columbia.

Finally, added to his advance on receipts, audiovisual production support from the south OIF fund, and production grant for ACP countries, Mahamat Saleh Haroun also gets CCA backing for his enigmatically-entitled new project A Screaming Man Is Not A Dancing Bear (a quotation from Aimé Césaire’s "Notebook of a Return To My Native Land").

(Translated from French)