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Noir and the 70s |
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| 05/12/2008 |
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This morning saw the first of many encounters with the guests of the Courmayeur Noir in Festival, which take place daily at the Jardin de l’Anges at 12:30 pm.
Today’s guests included Marion Aldighieri, co-writer of her husband Gonzalo Arijón’s film, Stranded, the first film presented at the festival of the Doc Noir section, programmed by Luciano Barisone and Carlo Chatrian,.
The documentary looks at the survivors of a 1972 plane wreck in Chile, a Uruguayan rugby team who to keep from dying from hunger were forced to eat the bodies of their friends who did not survive.
“The film’s main characters are childhood friends of my husband Gonzalo,” said Aldighieri, “and the idea came about after seeing Frank Marshall’s film Alive, which was based on this story. The survivors of those events did not feel they were represented [by the film], so we felt it was necessary to tell the story in a manner closer to the truth. Of the 16 survivors, seven decided to take part in this [project], and each of the interviewees spent 24 hours with the director, in the places where the accident took place. It was not easy to convince them to relive their experiences; it took some of them a long time. This is why the film took three years to make.”
“They were people of a certain social class,” added Aldighieri. “Gonzales was not rich like they were, but was very close to many of them. In the 1980s he fled to France to escape the military dictatorship, but always felt the need to speak of the situation in Uruguay. Finding these old friends again, talking to them after all those years, was yet another approach to speaking about Latin America.”
Another film to come from a true story was last night’s opening competition film, Roger Donaldson’s The Bank Job, presented by actor James Faulkner – with 100 films to his name, this character actor of a thousand faces has appeared in, among others, The Diary of Bridget Jones and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd. In the film, he plays a small-time con artist who can pass for an aristocrat and who experienced the times and places of the film firsthand.
“Three days after the robbery I went to see the bank,” the actor told the audience. “I lived a mile from that street and when I saw how it was reconstructed on set I was scared. I expected to see myself appear from around the corner, 30 years younger.”
This entertaining film is based on a scandal in England that broke out briefly after the bank’s security deposit boxes were looted, in which numerous compromising photographs of a notable member of the British Royal Family were hidden. Media reports of the robbery were immediately squelched by the British secret service. Part of the film’s charm is trying to figure out where the truth ends and fiction begins. Also engaging are the characters at the heart of the film: on a group of petty thieves who outwit the mafia, bad cops, good cops and the Royal Family.
The film will be distributed in Italy in April by La Pantera, headed by Mark Holdom, who was also in Courmayeur. “I saw the film at the American Film Market,” he said, “and loved it. It’s got action, sex and suspense.”
The Jardin de l’Ange also saw the presentation of the film jury, made up of actresses Valentina Lodovini and Astrid Berges-Frisbay, director Pablo Trapero and writers Don Winslow and Richard Price, who will award the Black Lion to the best film of the festival competition.
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