No comments

Djinn Carrenard’s second feature to open selection; genre pictures When Animals Dream and It Follows to compete in Cannes Critics’ Week.

Scroll down for full list

Djinn Carrénard’s Faire L’Amour (FLA)], revolving around the relationship between a musician and woman on parole, will open the 53rd edition of Cannes Critics’ Week, running May 15-23

The respected parallel selection, focusing on first and second works, unveiled its 2014 line-up on Monday (April 20). In total, the selection committee screened 1,200 feature-length films and 1,770 shorts.

Haitian, France-based Carrénard won France’s prestigious Louis Delluc prize for best first film in 2011 for his buzzy, micro-budget Donoma, which premiered in Cannes in 2010 in the indie-focused ACID selection.

“The director of Donoma instils in his second feature all the energy of the previous one with a sense of drama and character development that really packs a punch,” commented Critics’ Week artistic director Charles Tesson, adding it revolved around, “how to construct love and how to really make love.”

The long-gestated Faire L’Amour was to have shot in the summer of 2012, but unhappy with the production set-up the filmmaker bought back the rights for the project and put back the shoot to 2013.

French director Thomas Lilti’s Hippocrate will close the selection. It stars upcoming French actor Vincent Lacoste (Jacky in Women’s Kingdom) as a young junior doctor struggling to get grips with life on the ward.

Lapid Nadiv’s highly anticipated The Kindergarten Teacher from Israeland actress-turned director Mélanie Laurent’s Breathe will also premiere in Special Screenings. A former Cannes Film Festival Residence participant, Lapid’s debut film Policeman premiered in competition at Locarno.

COMPETITION

Seven first and second feature length films will screen in the Critics’ Week competition.

They comprise:

Italian Sebastiano Riso’s debut film Darker Than Midnight (Più Buio di Mezzanotte), inspired by the real-life tale of one of Italy’s best-known drag queens Fuxia (aka Davide Capone).
Colombian Franco Lolli’s debut film Gente de bien about a young boy who is invited to spend Christmas with a wealthy client of his carpenter father after his mother walks out on the family - an act of kindness that will have unforeseen consequences.
French Boris Lojkine’s second feature Hope. The documentary maker’s first foray into fiction, it revolves around a young Cameroonian man who hooks up with a young Nigerian prostitute after they get stuck in the Sahara on route for Europe.
American David Robert Mitchell’s second feature It Follows, described by its producers as a “a terrifying coming-of-age nightmare about sex, love and the unseen horrors that follow us.” Mitchell’s debut film The Myth Of The American Sleepover also debuted at Cannes Critics Week.
Israeli actress and filmmaker Shira Geffen’s second film Self-Made (Boreg) about two woman - one Israeli and one Palestinian - who swap worlds. Geffen won Cannes Camera d’Or for a first feature for Jellyfish in 2007.
Ukranian Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s debut The Tribe (Plemya) about a deaf mute teenager’s struggle to fit in at boarding school.
Danish Jonas Alexander Arnby’s When Animals Dream, a coming-of-age horror film about a young girl who is hunted down by the inhabitants of her remote fishing village when it emerges she is a werewolf.

Another 10 works compete in the short and mid-length competition. They include French, UK-based Gaelle Denis’ Crocodile revolving around a bereaved school teacher who ends up wrestling a crocodile, Bosnian Una Gunjak’s The Chicken, about a small girl caught up in war, and two animation works, Polish Tomasz Siwinski’s Une Chambre Bleue and Indian Gitanjali Rao’s TrueLoveStory about a young man would like his life to resemble a Bollywood film.