Isabelle Huppert has signed to star in veteran Italian director Tonino de Bernardi’s Close-Up, set to film this summer in Liguria in Italy.
Paris-based Loco Films is on board for international sales and is launching the film at the EFM.
The French-language film will be shot with close-up camera angles and follow Huppert’s character as she takes on the role of successive female characters through several eras from the 17th century to the modern day. They will include a peasant in 1948, an early 20th-century emigrant, a witch consumed by flames in the late 17th century, a mystic and a woman navigating the challenges of war.
The producers are France’s Rosebud Entertainment Pictures and Les films du Camelia alongside Italy’s Enormous Films. It will be the 28th film by the prolific 86-year-old Bernardi. His credits include Appasionate which premiered in competition in Venice in 1999 and Medea Miracle, also starring Huppert in a twist on the Greek tragedy, that screened Giornate degli Autori in 2007.
Huppert told Screen the origins of the project lie with Medea Miracle, after which Bernardi “wanted to make another film that was just a close up of my face, using the face as a landscape, the face as a mechanism through which to tell a wider story about feminism through the centuries.”
She called Bernardi “a very special, very singular, experimental filmmaker, but he can also make films that are in relatable and that speak to our times. The questions he raises in his films, which are very topical and of real interest to people.”
Huppert said the film will dive deeply into “the theme of what it means to be a woman, what it means to feel out of place. By starting from the past, [Bernardi] can take us into the present and give us a very powerful reflection on today.”
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