09/06/2009

Four screenplays for debut features were selected by the National Film Centre’s advances on receipts committee at its spring session.

These include Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Epine (“Beautiful Thorn”). Produced by Frédéric Jouve for Les Films Velvet, the film will start shooting in October and star Léa Seydoux (The Beautiful Person [+see also:
trailer
film profile]).

Selected at last summer’s Angers Workshops, the young director (born in 1980) has written a screenplay set in and around Paris in the 1980s and centring on 16-year-old Prudence Friedmann, who has just lost her mother. Left to her own devices in the family apartment, she enjoys this sudden freedom along with her new friend Marilyne.

They both start frequenting the dangerous illegal racing track at Rungis, where big-engined cars and souped-up motorbikes drive round chaotically. Here, Prudence meets 20-year-old Reynald, who charms her, but the feeling isn’t mutual.

In reality, the young girl tries to deaden her senses with the noise of the engines and drown out the silence left by her mother’s death. A few weeks away from her baccalaureate, she realises that her mother isn’t coming back.

The CNC also confirmed its pledge of an advance on receipts for Jean-Jacques Jauffret’s Après le Sud (“After the South”, produced by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire for Explicit Films - set to shoot this summer); Angel et Tony by Alix Delaporte (Lion for Best Short Film at Venice 2006 for Comment on Freine dans une Descente), produced by Hélène Cases for Lionceau Films; and Namir Abdel Messeeh’s La Vierge, les Coptes et Moi (“The Virgin, the Copts and I”), which has not yet found a producer.

(Translated from French)