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FESTIVALS Italy

FranceCinéma is noir

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This year’s edition of FranceCinéma is playing with noir. The French film industry’s dark year is being mirrored by a noir review being put on by the festival in Florence. It’s the biggest Italian showcase for productions from Paris and its surroundings and this year’s focus on noir reflects the success of that genre in French productions. The event is twinned with the Annecy festival dedicated to Italian cinema, and it is directed by Aldo Tassone. This year it will be held between November 4 to 9, and will feature around 20 films from 1937 to the present day. These include episodes from Fantomas (1913) and Vampires (1915), which kept French audiences on the edge of their seats at the beginning of the last century, then there are films by Chabrol (The Butcher and Betty), a delve into Francois Truffaut’s noir work Shoot the Pianist, and then there’s Pepe le Mokò (1936), the film by Julien Duvivier considered to be the first modern noir. There will also be a chance to discuss the relationship between noir and literature, in a round table debate featuring many guests like Emmanuelle Carrere (The Adversary), the screenwriter Jean Claude Carriere, Alain Corneau who will be accompanied by his wife, Nadine Trintignant, the director and mother of the actress Marie, to whom the festival will be paying tribute with Chabrol’s film, Betty.

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"The last season hasn’t been marvellous for French cinema – admitted Tassone – and if France has seen the market for national films hanging on, in Italy there’s been a big drop in ticket sales, from 6% last year to 2.4% this year (figures refer to the period covering December 2002-June 2003). So in spite of all of this we have found 13 films that we found very interesting".

The festival will be opened by Barbarian Invasion [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
by Denys Arcand, which was awarded for its screenplay at Cannes, followed by the comedy Bon voyage [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
by Jean-Paul Rappeneau (the film nominated by France to run for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film). The other works being shown also include A Birch Tree Meadow, starring Anouk Aimee, and Fear and Trembling, based on the book by Amelie Nothomb.

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(Translated from Italian)

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