13/01/2009

Six debut feature film projects were selected at the last 2008 session of the National Film Centre (CNC) advances on receipts committee. These include actress Eva Ionesco’s I'm Not A Fucking Princess, which will be piloted by Love Streams Agnès B. Productions in co-production with Romanian company Libra Films for an estimated €3.5m.

The daughter of famous and controversial photographer Irina Ionesco took inspiration from her own life for the film co-written by Philippe Le Guay and Marc Cholodenko. The story centres on Violetta, who lives with her grandmother, a Romanian expatriate, and whose mother Hanna decides to become a photographer and liberate herself from her partner, a well-known painter and erotomaniac.

Wishing to stay by her mother’s side, Violetta becomes her favourite model and spends moments of pure magic with her and the camera. Isabelle Huppert’s name has been put forward for the project’s cast and domestic distribution will be handled by Shellac.

An advance on receipts will also go to Géraldine Bajard’s La lisière (“The Edge”), which will be shot in the summer on a budget of €1.8m (production Cinéma De Facto). The film tells the story of a young doctor trapped by a group of teenagers.

The CNC is also backing Friends from France by Anne Weil and Philippe Kotlarski. Piloted by Les Films du Poisson, the film centres on two cousins, Jérôme and Carole, who travel to Leningrad in the summer of 1977. In love with his cousin, Jérôme accompanies her on her mission to bring help and comfort to Jewish dissidents on a trip which completely changes their lives.

The other three selected projects are French-German director Lars Blumers’ Car Jacking (Cassidy Production), Bruno Rolland’s Léa (Paraiso Production) and Pascale Lamche’s documentary feature Auto-graphe (production Force Majeure).

(Translated from French)