Yolande Zauberman is back with M

by Fabien Lemercier

12/07/2018 - The filmmaker will be vying for the Golden Leopard at the 71st Locarno Film Festival with a CG Cinéma-produced documentary

Director Yolande Zauberman (© Festival de Cine Africano - FCAT)

Yolande Zauberman, a fairly occasional filmmaker who has been absent from screens for the last seven years, is set to make her comeback in the international competition of the 71st Locarno Film Festival (1-11 August) with her seventh feature, the documentary M [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile].

Having risen to fame at Cannes in 1989, in the Perspectives on French Cinema section, with the documentary Caste criminelle, the director came straight back to the Croisette (more specifically to the Directors’ Fortnight) in 1993 with her feature-length fiction debut, Ivan & Abraham. After two further forays into fiction with Clubbed to Death (Lola) in 1997 and The War in Paris in 2002, she returned to the documentary form with Paradise Now - Journal d’une femme en crise (presented in the Berlinale Forum in 2004) and Would You Have Sex with an Arab? [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (unveiled at Venice, in the Orizzonti section, in 2011).

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Shot in Yiddish, M follows Menahem Lang, who beckons us through a secret door to discover his home town, Bneï Brak, "the city of the men in black", the world capital of ultra-Orthodox Jews. He’s going back to a crime scene: it was here that he was raped all throughout his childhood. But it’s also a return to the places he loved so much, a rite of passage peppered with incredible encounters and rediscovered rituals... A reconciliation of sorts.

Produced by Charles Gillibert for CG Cinéma, M was co-produced by Fabrice Bigio, Yolande Zauberman and Déborah Muntzer for Phobics Films. The movie has secured an advance on receipts from the CNC and post-completion support from the Ile-de-France region. The French distribution and international sales are still under negotiation.