Memento Films arrives in Berlin with The Woman In the Fifth and Hello Darkness

Paris-based Memento Films International comes to Berlin with two high profile European-language titles, Pawel Pawlikowski’s next film The Woman In The Fifth featuring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, and the next project by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, a fresh UK-set take on the vampire myth which has Dominic Cooper, Julie Christie and Imogen Poots in talks to star.

Pawlikowski’s film is based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel is a Paris-set supernatural thriller being produced by Haut Et Court and co-financed by Film4. Shooting is set to start in April.

Hawke plays an American writer in Paris who embarks on an affair with an elegant and mysterious widow and who might have something to do with the murders that start taking place around him.

Hello Darkness will be Glatzer and Westmoreland’s first film since their Sundance grand prize winner Quinceanera in 2006. Bobby Allen and Alexandra Stone are producing, with Steve Golin, Todd Haynes and Adam Shulman acting as executive producers.

Cooper is being lined up to play a tough, handsome, working class vampire who cruises the pubs of Newcastle on a Saturday night to feed on drunken young women, then returns to his faithful aging hemophiliac wife (Christie). But his status quo changes when he falls in love with an upper-class science student (Poots).

Memento, which has both Puzzle and Shahada in competition here, is actively looking to complement its traditional arthouse fare with select English-language genre titles. It is screening footage at EFM of Julie Bertuccelli’s The Tree, a French-Australian co-production starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Marton Csokas, and the live action/animation mix Black Heaven also produced by Haut Et Court.

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