03/09/2007

Casting is underway with top bill names announced for two of the most attractive projects set to begin lensing in early 2008. First up Christian Carion’s spy thriller Farewell will star Guillaume Canet after Merry Christmas [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Christian Carion
interview: Christophe Rossignon
film profile] (see Focus), while Frédéric Schoendoerffer’s dark title Lutetia, set in Paris during the German Occupation, will feature Benoît Magimel.

Adapted from the Sergueï Kostine novel Bonjour Farewell, Farewell is also expected to offer a leading role to Russian actor-director Nikita Mikhalkov (who will this week be presenting his 12 Angry Men in competition at Venice).

Carion’s third film after the blockbuster The Girl from Paris (2001) and Merry Christmas (2005) is based on real life events in the early eighties that precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1981 and 1982, Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB lieutenant colonel, disgusted by politics and the Soviet nomenklatura, provided the French counter-intelligence with crucial information on Soviet spying in Western countries, especially in the areas of economics, the military, industry and avant-garde technological research.

It is this betrayal, dubbed the Farewell code, that Carion revisits in the film (co-written by Eric Raynaud), whose story is linked with the intervention of a French engineer and which will be produced by Christophe Rossignon for Nord-Ouest Production in co-production with Bertrand Faivre for Le Bureau.

Meanwhile, Schoendoerffer is preparing his fourth feature after Crime Scenes (2000), Spy Bound (2004) and Crime Insiders (2007). Magimel, who also starred in the director’s previous film, is expected to appear in the cast of Lutetia (see article) with German actress Diane Kruger (currently working on Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, see interview).

Adapted from the eponymous novel by Pierre Assouline, who wrote the script with the director and Isabelle Coudrier-Kleist, Lutetia tells of a dangerous love affair between the detective of a large hotel and the wife of an Abwehr general in Paris during the Occupation.

The project is being produced by Christine Gozlan for Thelma Films and Alain Terzian for Alter Films.

(Translated from French)