A gasp of fresh air on the Croisette
18 young directors from all over the world have been selected to come to the 58th edition of the famous Cannes Film Festival (11th-22d May 2005) and inaugurate a brand new workshop, ‘l'Atelier du Festival’. This new program organised by the Cinéfondation aims at helping young directors to realise their projects by attracting the producers’ attention upon them during a series of meetings and screenings of their previous works during the Festival. At the end of March, a ‘project book’ will be available for the producers to discover the selected scripts and the 18 young directors’ profiles. Amongst them, six Europeans will try to take advantage of the great opportunity it is to attend the Festival de Cannes. There will be, for instance, Ulricke Von Ribbeck (Germany), author of the many-prize-winner short-film Am See (2001) and Aïda Bejic (Bosnia) who had already travelled from festival to festival (Montpellier, Rotterdam...) with his short film North Went Mad. Another contestant is the Belgian director Joaquim Lafosse, known for shooting his first full-length feature, Folie privée, in nine days with very little money. That previous movie was part of the offcial selection at the Locarno Festival.
The French candidate, David Lambert has already directed a 36 minute film, (L’Origine - 2000) and written the project for a full-length feature, La Prisonnière —that script won the Fondation Gan Prize in 2003. Thanks to Why Not Productions, this project is expecting to reach a 2-million-euro budget. It depicts three days in the life of a woman alone in a park slowly surrendering to madness and victimisation by her own inner demons. It reminds of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and David Cronenberg ‘s Spider.
The other two European candidates are already known by Cinéfondation, for they were part of their 2004 shooting-stars. The Spanish director Celia Galan Julve is bringing Historia del Desierto, which is based on the real story of Rosita Guzman, aka La Mocha, a woman who escaped from a prison in the Mexican desert in 1962 and became a legend. Finally, Vladimir Perisic, from Serbia but who graduated at the French Fémis in 2003, presents a radical version of his project, Boyhood, the story of an 18-year-old boy who commits a crime for 250 euros.
(Translated from French)
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