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The Films of the Official Selection |
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| 18/11/2008 |
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Competition
Ca$h by Eric Besnard
France, 100 min. – with Valeria Golino, Jean Dujardin, Jean Reno
Italian distributor: Moviemax
Cash is a charming, unscrupulous con man. When his brother is killed, he decides to exact revenge his way. The adventure abounds lies, bluffs, swapped identities, accomplices who turn out to be traitors and traitors accomplices. Alliances last but an instant but in order to win you have to be ready to lose it all. Because only one thing is sure: at the end of the game, there is always a loser. And the world of finance proves itself the theatre of the largest conspiracies of our time.
Le piège américain (The American Trap) by Charles Binamé
Canada, 104 min. – with Rémy Girard, Gérard Darmon, Joe Cobden
It is the mid-1960s and the Cold War is raging. The world has just witnessed the death of John F. Kennedy, and his brother Bobby will meet his own tragic fate soon. Lucien Rivard (1914-2002), a drugs and arms trafficker and the biggest criminal of Canadian history, gets trapped in a web of international political intrigues and corruption. The director of The Rocket blends documentary and reconstruction to depict the greatest conspiracy of contemporary history.
Pour elle (Anything for Her) by Fred Cavayé
France, 96 min. – with Diane Kruger, Vincent Lindon, Olivier Marchal
Lisa, Julien and little Oscar are a typical family: the parents love one another and the boy is getting ready for kindergarten like on every other morning. But their lives sare turned upside down when the bust through their door and arrest Lisa for murder. At the trial she is sentenced to 20 years in jail. Convinced of his wife’s innocence (but is she really innocent?) Julien tries everything possible to free her, through to planning her escape. Based on a true story, the film marks the director’s feature debut.
The Bank Job by Roger Donaldson
UK, 111min. – with Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows
Italian distributor: La Pantera
Based on real events from 1971: a robbery on London’s Banker Street in which the mafia, government and royal family were all involved, whose loot was never found and for which no one was ever arrested. By the director of No Way Out and the screenwriter of Across the Universe comes a thriller that begins as a story on a simple hold-up and turns into an international conspiracy.
Los bastardos by Amat Escalante
Mexico/France/US, 90 min. – with Jesus Moises Rodriguez, Rubén Sosa
Twenty-four hours in the lives of Fausto and Jesus, two illegal Mexican day laborers in L.A., who like many of their compatriots wait every day for menial work. Today, the job they are given is well paid compared to their usual wages. A man asks them to kill his wife. Jesus leaves home with a gun in his backpack. The film garnered acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival and was produced by Carlo Reygadas, with whom Escalante has worked in the past.
Sono viva by Filippo and Dino Gentili
Italy, 87min. – with Massimo De Santis, Marcello Mazzarella, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Giorgio Colangeli
Production: Metafilm
Rocco, a broke and emotionally troubled young man, agrees, for a considerable lump of money, to spend a night watching over the dead body of the young Silvia, the daughter of the owner of the villa. The film is the hit debut by a two brothers who have worked extensively on successful television shows as screenwriters as well as with feature director Carlo Lizzani and Robert Faenza. It was discovered at the London Film Festival.
Whisper by Stewart Hendler
US, 94 min. – with Josh Holloway, Sarah Wayne Callies, Blake Woodruff
Italian distributor: Eagle Pictures
Upon being released from prison, Max wants to start over with his fiancée Roxanne. However, it isn’t easy for an ex-con to get a bank loan for a new restaurant. Thus, they agree to kidnap the eight-year-old David, the son of one of the wealthiest women in the state. A high-tension thriller that veers towards the paranormal by one of America’s most anticipated up-and-coming directors, and a prizewinner at the Sundance Film Festival.
Frozen River by Courtney Hunt
US, 97min. – with Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Michael O'Keefe
The film denounces the illegal exploitation of workers. Ray Eddy is a mother of two whose husband has left her. To get by she, she and a single Mohawk mother help smuggle workers into the US through a border crossing in Canada along the frozen St. Lawrence River. Expanded from her short film of the same name, Courtney Hunt’s feature debut won the Sundance Film Festival.
Det som ingen ved (What No One Knows) by Søren Kragh-Jacobsen
Denmark, 99 min. – with Anders W. Berthelse, Maria Bonnevie, Ghita Nørby
Part spy story, part family thriller, the film centers on Thomas Deleuran, a man whose marriage is falling apart. When his sister Charlotte dies in a drowning accident, he finds among her things documents proving that their father was in the secret service, which Charlotte was furthermore investigating. The return of the director of the Dogma film Mifune.
Out of competition
My Name is Bruce by Bruce Campbell
US, 90 min – with Bruce Campbell, Grace Thorsen, Taylor Sharpe, Ted Raimi
Written, directed, produced by and starring Bruce Campbell, the favorite actor of Sam Raimi and an entire generation of independent directors, the film pays homage to the American B-horror movie. Campbell, playing himself, is a down-and-out actor forced to make straight-to-video films. Kidnapped from a set one day, he is forced to fight the terrible Guan-di, a ghost who contains the rage of hundreds of Chinese workers killed in an American mine because of their employers’ callousness.
Quarantine by John Erick Dowdle
US, 89 min - con Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, Jay Hernandez, Rade Serbedzija
A remake of Spanish title REC, the film transports the story to Los Angeles, where television reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman are assigned to spend the night shift with a local fire department. After a routine 911 call takes them to a small apartment building, they find police officers already on the scene: there is blood everywhere and the building is quarantined once they enter. A film graduate of NYU, the director made his feature debut with Full Moon Rising, and since then has worked with his brother Drew, who produced and co-wrote Quarantine.
Chugyeogja (The Chaser) by Na Hong-Jin
Corea, 125 min - con Yun-seok Kim, Yung-woo Ha, Yeong-hie Seo
A serial killer murders prostitutes à la “Jack the Ripper,” mutilating them with scalpels, butcher’s hooks and hammers. He will cross paths with Jung-ho, a cop-turned-pimp who is angry because his girls keep disappearing without clearing their debts. One night Jung-ho gets a call from a client to whom he sends the young Mi-jin. When the girl is already with the client, Jung-ho realizes his phone number is the same one from which the other girls received their last calls before vanishing… A striking debut which audience hit, the film has been compared to Old Boy.
Special Screenings
“A Passion for Conspiracy” event:
We Want the Colonels by Mario Monicelli
with Ugo Tognazzi, Claude Dauphin and Duilio Del Prete (Italy, 1973, 100’)
An ultra-right-wring congressman no longer agrees with his party’s politics and convinces several colonels to join him in organizing a coup d’etat. But the coup is hard to pull off, also because the Minister of the Interior finds out about the plot and organizes a counter-coup.
Tribute to Emidio Greco:
A Simple Story
Italy, 1991, 91 min – with Gian Maria Volonté, Ricky Tognazzi, Ennio Fantastichini.
From the novel by Leonardo Sciascia.
The Courmayeur Noir in festival, together with the National Film Museum of Turin, pays homage to one of the Italian directors who in his work has most often used the techniques of the mystery for a metaphysical investigation on the individual and society.
On the eve of a holiday, aging diplomat Giorgio Roccella, returned to Italy after a long absence, calls the Monterosso police to report he has found something strange in his isolated villa. One of the officers is ready to look into the matter but his commander tells him to wait until the following day because the call could be a prank, and to not call him in either case because he’s going to the country. But the following morning the officer and a colleague find Roccella dead in his villa (killed by a Mauser lying at his side), his arm on a piece of paper on which is written 'I found…'.
Il solitario by Francesco Campanini
Italy, 2008, 90 min – with Luca Magri, Massimo Vanni, Francesco Siciliano, Francesco Barilli
A three-billion-lire hit. A bloody hold-up. A sole survivor. Hunted down by fate and ruthless gangsters, Leo Piazza finds himself with a “hot” suitcase on his hands. Forced to go into hiding, time is running out. The killers want him dead so they can retrieve the loot and the showdown draws near… A nocturnal and silent anti-hero, Piazza moves like a zombie, like the living dead, in an urban noir that recalls the atmospheres of Jean-Pierre Melville’s films. An independent remake of Nel cuore della notte, also starring Luca Magri as the central gangster, the film marks the feature debut of Francesco Campanini.
Vampir Cuadecuc by Pere Portabella
Spain, 1970, 72’ – with Christopher Lee, Soledad Miranda, Herbert Lom, Jack Taylor
The 'making of' of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula. Through the story of the vampire and within the parameters of avant-garde art, Portabella manages to blend documentary and fiction, experimental and genre cinema, aesthetic and political criticism, without detracting anything from the suggestive and disturbing atmospheres in Bram Stoker’s story.
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