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CANNES 2005 Directors’ Fortnight

Alice, in the land despair

by 

In competition to the Camera d'Or, Alice [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marco Martins
interview: Nuno Lopes
film profile
]
by Marco Martins, is an intense portrait of loss and hope with outstanding performances by two young talents: Nuno Lopes and Beatriz Batarda (Le Rivages des Murmures).

The film was presented in the sidebar section Directors' Fortnight and received a warm reception by both critics and audiences, who seemed incapable to remain indifferent to the director's ability to build a psychological tale in which the characters’ suffering is explored until the limits of endurable. Martins' camera is not afraid to throw us into the limbo of a father's quest for his missing 4 year old daughter, Alice. Everyday, Mario (Nuno Lopes) distributes missing-poster leaflets and checks out the surveillance cameras he installed in some strategic spots, like his friends windows, roofs and airport! This routine, which is about to become a dangerous obsession, openly contrasts with his wife's passive despair. The film flies from their suffocating present back to 193 days before, exactly the day Alice disappeared. The director manages to portray the couple's loss in an unusually accurate way, capturing their fragile balance between hope and insanity. Worth to underline also the beautiful photography of Carlos Lopes, which dives the film into a blue / grey depressing atmosphere, entirely synchronized with the characters' state of mind.

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Martins, who graduated from the Lisbon film School in 1994 and worked in production with Wim Wenders and Manoel de Oliveira is to become the most recent promise of Portuguese seventh art, and Alice is undoubtedly the most breathtaking first opus the national industry produced in the last years.
The film was produced by Paulo Branco for Clap Filmes with the support of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and ICAM and public TV broadcaster RTP. The international sales are managed by Gémini Films.

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