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RELEASES France

Fear and nightmares in No Trespassing

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Among the 13 new releases hitting theatres today is another French attempt at exploring horror-thriller territory: Hélène Angel’s No Trespassing. Starring Charles Berling, Valérie Bonneton and Vasil Vivitz Grecu, this claustrophobic, paranoid drama has intrigued critics without winning unanimous acclaim. It is distributed through Epicentre Films on 38 screens.

The movie centres on Claire and Benoît, a couple who arrive in the countryside to sell the family home where Claire’s brother has recently committed suicide. Looking back at the genesis of the film, the director explained her "desire to make a B-movie, a genre film, and shoot it quickly. Fantasy and horror films activate our impulses; they’ve always interested me. There are economic constraints inherent in this type of film and it was exciting to incorporate them right from the writing stage, for instance an almost single setting and a limited number of characters.”

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She adds: “For the first time, I also wanted a woman to play the lead role. Women’s madness is in itself a sub-genre of horror films, from The Haunting to Repulsion. After the family, the couple is after all the perfect breeding ground for neuroses (…) We had to revise our Hitchcock: at what point must viewers be ahead of the character, thus feeling concerned for them or delighting in their misfortune? When must viewers know as much as the character? It’s fascinating, here we touch upon the very foundations of cinema: doubt and belief."

Produced by Les Films du Worso, No Trespassing was co-produced by Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, pre-bought by Canal + and Ciné Cinéma, and made in association with Coficup 3. International sales are being managed by Films Distribution.

Also hitting screens this Wednesday are Laure Charpentier’s Gigola [+see also:
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(Kannibal Films Distribution); Frédéric Cerulli’s Le Thanato [+see also:
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(Les Films à Fleur de Peau); Alexandre Iordachescu’s Swiss/Romanian/French co-production The Way Beyond [+see also:
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(Zootrope Films); Oscar Ruiz Navia’s Colombian/French co-production Crab Trap (distribution: Arizona Films); Debs Gardner-Paterson’s Brit co-production Africa United [+see also:
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(Pathé Films); and three documentaries: Spanish director Arantxa Aguirre’s Of Heart and Courage: Béjart Ballet Lausanne (Eurozoom); Laurent Chevallier’s La Pépinière du Désert (“The Tree Nursery in the Desert”, Les Films d’Ici); and Nurith Aviv’s Traduire (“Translating”, Editions Montparnasse).

Finally, at the box office, Jean-Pierre Améris’s Les Emotifs Anonymes [+see also:
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(“Anonymous Emotional People”) is enjoying a successful run with 925,000 admissions in 25 days (distribution: StudioCanal).

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(Translated from French)

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