Mexican Dramas 'Heli,' 'Halley' Win Awards at Munich Film Festival

The brutal drama on Mexico's drug wars won the best director's honor in Cannes.

Romantic comedy “Love Steaks” from director Jakob Lass sweeps the German newcomer honors.

Mexican cinema took pride of place at this year's Munich International Film Festival, with Amat Escalante's drug drama Heli adding the festival's Arri/Osram best international film honor to his best director's win in Cannes and his fellow countryman Sebastian Hofmann taking the CineVision prize for his debut, the horror tale Halley. The CineVision award, meant to honor cinematic innovation, was also presented, ex aequo, to Slovakian director Mira Fornay for his second feature film, My Dog Killer.

In the German film section, Jakob Lass' feature film debut, Love Steaks, a romantic comedy about a couple who fall in love at a health spa, swept the Forderpreis Neues Deutsches Kino honors, winning best director, best screenplay (Lass with co-writers Timon Schappi, Ines Schiller and Nico Woche), best production (for producer Golo Schultz) and best acting honors for stars Lana Cooper and Franz Rogowski.
German director Fatima Geza Abdollahyan also took home multiple honors for his documentary, Freedom Bus, a look at Egypt ahead of the 2011 elections. The film won Munich audience award as well as the One Future Prize presented by Munich's Interfilm Academy.

Palme d'Or Winner 'Blue is the Warmest Color' Heads to Munich Festival

Abdellatif Kechiche's lesbian love story will have its German premiere in Munich.

The Munich International Film Fest this year will also screen other Cannes competition titles, including "Heli," "The Past" and "Only God Forgives."

COLOGNE, Germany - The Munich International Film Festival, Germany's number two movie festival, is following in Cannes' footsteps this year, cherry-picking part of its competition lineup, including this year's Palme d'Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color.

Abdellatif Kechiche's lesbian love story will have its German premiere in Munich in the festival's competitive CineMasters section, where it will be joined by half a dozen other Cannes competition titles, including Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives starring Ryan Gosling; Zhangke Jia's controversial Chinese drama A Touch of Sin; The Past from Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation); James Gray's The Immigrant, Heli from Cannes best director winner Amat Escalante and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty.

Sorrentino will also receive a retrospective at this year's Munich Festival, as will Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose latest, The Dance of Reality, also screens in the CineMasters section. Oscar-winning actor Michael Caine will receive the festival's lifetime achievement honor, the CineMerit award.
The 2013 Munich International Film Festival runs June 28-July 6.

'Blue Is the Warmest Color' Author Slams Film's 'Ridiculous' Sex Scenes

"Blue Is the Warmest Color."

Julie Maroh, who wrote the graphic novel on which the Cannes critical darling is based, criticizes director Abdellatif Kechiche for depicting a lesbian love scene as unrealistic and pornographic.

Blue Is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche's film about young lesbians falling in love, might have won critical acclaim -- and the coveted Palme d'Or -- at the Cannes Film Festival, but the author of the graphic novel on which the French feature is based offers a harsh review of its explicit sex scenes.

Julie Maroh, the 27-year-old scribe of Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude, aired her frustrations on her blog after the film took the Palme d'Or on May 26. Earlier that day, protesters stormed the streets of Paris to denounce a law permitting gay marriage and adoption in France. (Cannes jury president Steven Spielberg insisted politics played no part in the decision to hand Blue the top prize.)
"This was what was missing on the set: lesbians," wrote Maroh in her post (via The New York Times), adding that director Kechiche and his stars, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, are "all straight, unless proven otherwise." Maroh called the movie a "brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn."


Maroh joins the chorus of other critics who view Blue as voyeuristic and projecting male fantasies of lesbian sex rather than a realistic depiction. In a review of the film, the Times' Manohla Dargis said one 20-minute love scene "feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else," and expressed disappointment that Kechiche "seems so unaware or maybe just uninterested in the tough questions about the representation of the female body that feminists have engaged for decades."
Meanwhile, THR's Jordan Mintzer took another stance, lauding Kechiche for showing through raw, lengthy scenes "that sex and love can, in the best cases, become one and the same, uniting two people who might actually have less in common than they believe."

Maroh's acclaimed 2011 novel will be published in English later this year, around the time when the big-screen adaptation hits French theaters in October. (There is no release date yet for the U.S.; Sundance Selects has acquired the stateside rights.)
Maroh said in her blog post that Kechiche had snubbed her while shooting the film, and thanked "all those who appeared surprised, shocked, disgusted" by his failure to mention her while accepting the Palme d'Or.
“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous," Maroh said of reaction to the film, according to the Times. "And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen."

Cannes: Sundance Selects Nabs U.S. Rights to Roman Polanski’s 'Venus in Fur'

The film, which stars Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric, made its world premiere in competition at the festival.

Sundance Selects has acquired U.S. rights to Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur.

With a screenplay by Polanski and David Ives and based on the critically acclaimed Tony Award-winning play by Ives, the film stars Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric and was produced by Robert Benmussa and Alain Sarde.

The film made its world premiere in competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
Set in modern-day Paris, Venus in Fur follows writer-director Thomas (Amalric) and a pushy, foul-mouthed actress named Vanda (Seigner) who bursts into auditions in a whirlwind of erratic energy. Vanda’s emotionally charged audition for the gifted but demanding playwright becomes an electrifying game of cat and mouse that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, seduction and power, and ultimately, attraction and obsession.
Sundance Selects made a splashy showing at this year's Cannes. In addition to Venus in Fur, the distributor also acquired Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme D’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color; Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Jury Prize winner Like Father, Like Son; Clio Barnard’s Directors Fortnight title The Selfish Giant; Francois Ozon’s Young & Beautiful; and Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night.
“Venus in Fur proves once more why Roman Polanski is one of the world’s premier auteurs," Sundance Selects/IFC Films president Jonathan Sehring said. "It is a brilliant cinematic adaptation in every way and features two powerful performances from Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric. We are honored to have the chance to work with Roman, Robert and Alain and everyone involved with this film.”

Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003 for his film The Pianist. His other acclaimed films include Tess, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Ghost Writer and Repulsion.
Venus in Fur marks the onscreen reunion of Amalric and Seigner, who starred opposite one another in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
The deal for the film was negotiated by Sundance Selects/IFC Films' Arianna Bocco. Resolution's Jeff Berg repped the filmmakers.

2 Autumns, 3 Winters: Film Review

"2 Autumns, 3 Winters."

The Bottom Line

Style outshines substance in this well-acted French indie.

Venue

Cannes Film Festival (ACID)

Director-screenwriter

Sebastien Betbeder

Cast

Vincent Macaigne, Maud Wyler, Bastien Bouillo, Audrey Bastien

Sebastien Betbeder's indie dramedy premiered in the Cannes ACID sidebar, where it was picked up for U.S. release by Film Movement.

CANNES -- A quirky French indie that gets by more on style and sass than on its storytelling skills, writer-director Sebastien Betbeder’s 2 Autumns, 3 Winters (2 Automnes 3 Hivers) follows the travails of three 30-something Parisians suffering through the usual love squabbles and existential crises, not to mention some major medical malfunctions that are fairly uncommon for such a low-key kind of dramedy. With endearing performances and crafty 16mm imagery, but also a tad too many winks to the camera, this Cannes ACID sidebar selection should see additional fest and niche art-house play, including an upcoming stateside release from Film Movement.

One of several Cannes features starring indelible Gallic actor Vincent Macaigne (Age of Panic), Betbeder’s sophomore effort – following 2012’s TV-made Nights with Theodore – has both the whimsical, free-form feel (as well as the hospital setting) of Valerie Donzelli’s Declaration of War, and the nonchalant bourgeois musings of Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski, tracking the itinerant lives of three former art students as they hook up, break up and somewhat fall apart in the City of Lights.

Divided into dozens of brief chapters – which often give the impression of watching a string of short films instead of an actual feature – the story begins with good-natured loser, Arman (Macaigne) and stone-faced beauty, Amelie (Maud Wyler, Low Life) literally bumping into one another during a morning jog. We then follow each of them separately until destiny, in the form of a rather phony late-night mugging, brings them together once again, and this time for what could be the long run.
Meanwhile, Arman’s art school buddy, Benjamin (Bastien Bouillon, The Players), suffers from a stroke that causes him to be laid up for weeks in the hospital, in an inspired turn of events that adds substance to what’s otherwise a fairly standard tale of the post-grad blues. Eventually, Benjamin recovers and falls for his physical therapist, Katia (Audrey Bastien), and for a moment the two couples seem to be headed for a bright future, until reality – and another unexpected medical event – comes back to bite them.
Filled with oodles of visual flourishes, including a mix of grainy 16mm and HD cinematography (by Sylvain Verdet) and nonstop moody music by French singer-songwriter Bertrand Betsch, 2 Autumns often lets its cute and eccentric stylings get in the way of the story itself, which, once you strip away all the accouterments, feels rather underdeveloped.
Where Betbeder does succeed is in some of the pared-down scenes involving the uber-talented Macaigne, whose nervous but touching performance—especially during an extended dinner sequence—reveals much more about his character than all the voice-overs and camera lens confessions. Likewise, Wyler manages to turn the loosely sketched Amelie into an intriguing sort of muse, although the film’s mostly male-centric point of view tends to keep her burgeoning inner demons at bay.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
Production companies: Envie de Tempete Productions
Cast: Vincent Macaigne, Maud Wyler, Bastien Bouillon
Director, screenwriter: Sebastien Betbeder
Producer: Frederic Dubreuil
Director of photography: Sylvain Verdet
Production designer: Melodie Nishida
Music: Bertrand Betsch
Editor: Julie Dupre
Sales Agent: Alpha Violet
No rating, 93 minutes

Cannes: Film Movement Takes Camera d'Or Winner 'Ilo Ilo'

"Ilo Ilo"

The film, directed by Anthony Chen, will be released in the first quarter of 2014.

Film Movement has acquired North American rights to first-time feature director Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo, which won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival where it played in the Directors Fortnight.

The first Singaporean feature film to win a major prize at Cannes, the film, which is in Chinese, English and Tatalog, tells the story of a dysfunctional family in Singapore that brings in a Filipino nanny who tries to bring order to their lives.

The distributor plans a New York theatrical opening in the first quarter of 2014, with a limited national roll-out to follow as well as a day-and-date VOD premiere.
“As a company that prides itself in supporting first-time filmmakers and discovering new talent, we are truly honored to have acquired Anthony Chen’s beautiful film, and are confident that the Camera d’Or is only the first award in what we’re sure will be a long list of well deserved prizes in the near future,” Adley Gartenstein, Film Movement president, said.
The acquisition was negotiated by Gartenstein and Tanja Meissner, head of international sales at Memento Film International.

Cannes Winner Rithy Panh Launches Heritage Film Festival in Cambodia

Getty Images

Rithy Panh

The Un Certain Regard awardee has teamed up with preservationists Technicolor Foundation to preside over an eight-day event starting Saturday.

HONG KONG – Films by Walt Disney, Rene Clair, Satyajit Ray and the late Cambodian monarch Norodom Sihanouk will be among those screened at what is billed as Asia’s first cinema-heritage festival in Phnom Penh.

The inaugural edition of Memory! was launched in a press conference Wednesday morning at the Bophana Center, the film and audiovisual resource institute founded by Rithy Panh, the Franco-Cambodian director whose latest movie, The Missing Picture, was awarded the top prize last week in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.

Organized by Bophana and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, a French organization established in 2006 to preserve, restore and promote films around the world, the festival will screen 40 films from June 1-9, as well as host a series of seminars and workshops for industry professionals, scholars and local students.
Most of the films will be shown on 35mm prints – which in itself is a daunting task in Cambodia, where equipment catering for the format “is all gone,” said Severine Wemaere, managing director of the Technicolor Foundation and, alongside her colleague Gilles Duval, one of the festival’s three general delegates alongside Panh.
Projection equipment was shipped to Cambodia from France and was installed at Phnom Penh’s Chaktomuk Theater, the festival’s main venue alongside the Bophana Center, said Wemaere.
The program comprises a widely varied slate of films, ranging from well-known English-language classics such as Fantasia, The Red Shoes, Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story, to recently restored movies such as Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holidays and shorts by the Lumiere brothers (The Serpentine Dance, 1896), George Melies (A Trip to the Moon) and Rene Clair (Entr’acte, 1924).
More importantly, the festival will also feature gems from around Asia, including Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951), Usmar Ismail’s After the Curfew and Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room (1958), as well as less-acknowledged films from Southeast Asian directors like Pham Ky Nam (Ms Tu Hau, 1963) and Cambodian veteran Ly Bun Tim (Sobasith, 1965).
Of even more interest will be two films directed by the late Cambodian monarch Sihanouk. Rather than merely bombastic epics, both Apsara (1965) and The Joy of Living (1969) depict prince, princesses and generals as flawed individuals, indulging in material excess or in illicit love affairs.

Supported by the Cambodian government and the country’s national film commission, all screenings are free so as to raise the local public’s awareness of the historical value of the medium, which the Khmer Rouge nearly wiped away during its rule from 1975-79.
And what Pol Pot’s men didn’t finish, the tropical climate did – with Cambodia boasting of no state-of-the-art film preservation facilities, and prints of Cambodian films giving way to the elements. While copies of Sihanouk’s films were stored at film archives in France – the country’s former colonial rulers – works like Ly Bun Tim’s Sobasith, for example, were kept in unsatisfactory conditions, said Wemaere
But Wemeare also emphasized how Memory! is more than just a platform for showcasing Cambodian film heritage, with the event described in its publicity material as an “international film heritage festival” and the first of its kind in Asia.
The festival has invited archivists and film professionals from around the world to attend the event and its conferences, Wemeare said, with delegates ranging from Douglas Laible, managing director of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, and L’Immagine Ritrovata head Davide Pozzi to representatives from film archives and organizations in Europe and Asia (among them officials from established filmmaking powers like China and Japan, to countries such as Myanmar, Laos and Mongolia).
“They all have films for each other, and we all have the same constraints,” said Wemaere. “There’s the heat, the blocked copyrights or films disappearing because of different historical reasons.”
And Memory! is taking place just as Cambodian cinema is getting more attention in the film festival circuit, what with Panh’s latest win at Cannes and also the critical success of The Golden Slumber, a documentary about the struggle of the country’s filmmakers as they weather political turmoil and then critical-mass neglect of their work.
The film was made by the young Paris-based Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou, who is working as a coordinator for the festival this time around and has written a very extensive essay about Cambodian cinema in the festival’s very substantial and illustrative catalog. Chou’s participation bodes well as a precursor of interest from a younger generation of filmmakers and filmgoers, Wemeare said. “It’s a good thing that he’s willing to share that,” she said – and it’s what she hopes Memory! could achieve when the festival kicks off Saturday.

Singapore Broadens Censorship of Online News

Anthony Chen's "Ilo Ilo" is the first Singaporean feature to win a major award at Cannes.

The clampdown has put a damper on the government's celebration of its support for Singaporean director Anthony Chen's "Ilo Ilo," which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes on Saturday.

The Singaporean government on Tuesday introduced new measures designed to control Internet news sites that report regularly on the city-state’s politics and current affairs. The move has led to a wave of criticism from local media outlets and opposition political groups, which have labeled the measures “regressive” and harmful to the territory’s already curtailed press freedoms.
The regulations will initially affect 10 news sites that cover Singapore, including a site owned and operated by Yahoo and several outlets run by two local media groups with ties to the Singaporean government.

The new rules, introduced by Singapore’s Media Development Authority, require that the sites apply for individual licenses, which will be renewed annually. The sites will then need to pay a “performance bond” of about $40,000 (50,000 Singaporean dollars) and are required to remove any content deemed objectionable within 24 hours. The censorship framework is an extension of existing regulations for all Internet sites in the country, which ban any content perceived as offensive to morality, state security, public interest and social harmony.

Many observers expect that the regulatory regime will soon be broadened to apply to additional local news sites, as the rules are loosely defined as applying to all sites that report on Singapore at least once a week and receive a minimum 50,000 unique visitors a month from within the city-state.
A government minister told local press that the MDA plans to pass laws next year to include overseas sites that report on Singapore under the new licensing requirements.
"We are not in a position to respond until we receive the actual license conditions for review," Alan Soon, Yahoo's Singapore country manager, said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
Alex Au, a prominent local political blogger, told the Journal that new laws will “have a chilling effect on the online media," since regulators will be able to issue censorship requests without transparency or public scrutiny.
In public statements made Wednesday, opposition parties Singapore Democratic Party and National Solidarity Party called the new regulations a “regressive” move that will hamper the development of the local media industry.
Singapore has been run by a single party -- the People’s Action Party -- since 1959. In the 2011 Singapore general election, the PAP won 81 of the 87 contested seats in the Singaporean parliament. Despite its repressive grip on local media, the PAP has been credited with steering the country into a period of widespread wealth and prosperity. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group last year, one in six Singaporean households have disposable private wealth of over $1 million, excluding property, businesses holdings and luxury goods.

But many observers are now saying the tight control of the media is no longer justifiable, given the territory’s high level of development and stability.
"It's hard not to see how this is another attempt to control media -- local and international -- by the Singapore government," Bob Dietz, Asia coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S. based press-freedom watchdog, told the Journal in its report. "Its justification used in the past that strict media controls are necessary to squelch violent political dissent is simply no longer valid. It's hard to argue with Singapore's economic success. But the disconnect between its economic freedom and media freedom seems to be growing too large."
In a case of one step forward, one step back, the clampdown and its backlash comes just as the Media Development Authority was celebrating a milestone in its success at nurturing Singapore’s growing screen industries.
Three days before the new Internet censorship scheme was introduced, Singaporean director Anthony Chen won the prestigious Camera d’Or for his debut feature Ilo Ilo at the Cannes Film Festival, where it played in the Directors Fortnight. The film, which was supported by MDA grant schemes, is the first Singaporean feature to win a major award at Cannes.
“Our focus in nurturing local filmmakers is beginning to bear fruit,” Yeo Chun Cheng, assistant CEO of MDA recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “Singapore has gone from producing six features in 2009 to 12 in 2012.”
Share of box office for domestic Singaporean films also grew from $5.06 million to $8.03 million over the same period. Last February, local hit Ah Boys to Men 2, from director Jack Neo, became the highest grossing Singaporean movie ever, earning $6.36 million and topping Hollywood imports such as Spider Man 3 and Harry Potter & The Deathly Hollows on the all-time local charts.

'The Great Beauty' Director Paolo Sorrentino Gets Munich Retrospective

Sorrentino's latest, a portait of today's Rome, premiered in competition in Cannes.

In addition to Sorrentino's latest Cannes entry, Munich will screen works such as “Il Divo” and “This Must Be the Place.”

COLOGNE, Germany – Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, whose latest, The Great Beauty was a critical smash in its Cannes competition debut, will receive a retrospective of his life's work at next month's Munich International Film Festival.

The Munich festival, which runs June 28-July 6, will present This Must Be The Place in its German premiere and will screen a wide range of Sorrentino's early work, including the Oscar-nominated Il Divo (2008), Sean Penn/Frances McDormand-starrer This Must Be The Place (2011) and the director's first two features: One Man Up (2001) and The Consequences of Love (2004). The retrospective will also include a selection of Sorrentino's early short films.
The director will attend the festival and take part in a public Q&A about his life and work.

Henri: Cannes Review

The Bottom Line

Local color enriches a gently comic, slightly underpowered tale of unlikely friendship and quasi-romance.

Venue:

Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight, Closing Film)

Cast:

Pippo Delbono, Candy Ming, Jackie Berroyer, Simon Andre, Gwen Berrou

Director:

Yolande Moreau

Pippo Delbono and Candy Ming star in popular Belgian actress Yolande Moreau's second film as director, the closing film of the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes.

A low-key French-Belgian charmer with its heart in the right place, Henri somehow never quite manages to click into proper romantic or comic gear. A second outing as writer-director for ever-popular Belgian actress Yolande Moreau, a colorfully lively presence in French cinema for nearly three decades, it was warmly received as the closer of Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, indicating domestic potential as a mid-range crowd-pleaser during its pre-Christmas release.

Further festival bookings will follow for a film aiming squarely at an oldish demographic. And while significantly wider success along the lines of Intouchables or Welcome to the Sticks is improbable, Henri may nevertheless emulate those box-office smashes by attracting Stateside remake interest. Such a redo would have to do sharpen the somewhat wispy contours of Moreau's screenplay, which under-uses two potentially distinctive screen presences in the form of leads Pippo Delbono and Candy Ming.

Italian theater-innovator Delbono, exuding a John C. Reilly vibe here, has carved an international reputation with stage-works that combine carnival, dance and music to energetic and often dazzling effect. Not that you'd suspect such shenanigans here, so persuasively does he incarnate the schlubby, doughy, fiftyish Henri Salvator, who with his wife Rita ('Lio') runs a village pub not far from the French border. When Rita dies unexpectedly, the widower drifts morosely into a boozy rut, to the chagrin of grown-up daughter Laetitia (Gwen Berrou).
At the urging of his barfly cronies Bibi (Jackie Berroyer) and Rene (Simon Andre), Henri employs Rosette (Ming), a twentysomething woman resident in a local care-facility for the mentally handicapped, to help with running the bar. Naive in sexual matters, the sweetly meek Rosette is fascinated by all things romantic, which yields awkward consequences for the monosyllabic, increasingly drink-befuddled Henri.
Moreau, 60, enjoyed great personal success with When The Sea Rises (2004), co-written and co-directed with Gilles Porte. Landing Cesar awards for Best Actress and Best First Film, it even landed fleeting U.S. arthouse run, faring respectably on a handful of screens. She later found her signature role as the eponymous housekeeper-turned-painter in Martin Provost's Seraphine (2009), notching a second Best Actress Cesar, while in recent years also she's become part of the stock company of anarchic cine-provocateurs Gustave de Kervern and Benoit Delepine. The latter are responsible for all three previous big-screen appearances by ethereally off-beat Ming, an autistic poet, sculptor and singer usually billed as 'Miss Ming.'

Given the unorthodox backgrounds of Delbono (Tilda Swinton's boorish husband in Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love) and Ming, plus Moreau's track record of envelope-pushing collaborators, Henri is a surprisingly safe-hands, middle-of-the-road affair, one which never really engages with its valuable central theme: the sexual life of people with mental handicaps and/or health issues.
"We joke about it, but we don't cross the Rubicon" says Bibi, when there's the suggestion that Henri and Rosette's relationship might have gone beyond friendship and/or accepted employee-employer interactions. Henri's way of dealing with this tricky situation involves leaving his village for a spell at the Dutch seaside with Rosette in tow, but there's always a sense that the film is choosing to handle potentially controversial material in a muted, arm's-length manner.
Returning to the chilly, flat, gray terrain explored in her debut, Moreau is on safer ground when it comes to evoking the peculiarities and character of this often-overlooked corner of northern Europe. Henri's pigeon-racing hobby gives us privileged peeks into one of Wallonia's most popular sport, and while Moreau's M.O. eschews directorial flights of fancy, her use of very slight slow-motion when the birds are in flight successfully conveys both Rosette's wonderment and the belated budding of the lass's delicate sensuality. Moreau's own virtuouso cameo as a motormouth party-organizer, meanwhile, provides a welcome burst of hilarity in a picture which is otherwise content to milk the occasional chuckle.
Venue:  Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight - Closing Film)
Opens (France):  December 4 (Le Pacte)
Production companies:  Christmas In July, Versus, France 3 Cinema, F Comme Film
Cast:  Pippo Delbono, Candy Ming, Jackie Berroyer, Simon Andre, Gwen Berrou
Director/Screenwriter:  Yolande Moreau
Producer:  Julie Salvador
Director of photography:  Philippe Guilbert
Production designer:  Marc-Philippe Guerig
Costume designer:  Alexandra Charles
Editor:  Fabrice Rouaud
Music:  Wim Willaert
Sales: Le Pacte, Paris
No MPAA rating, 107 minutes

Ed Hardy Designer Christian Audigier Now Acting in Movies

"Five Thirteen"

A Cannes billboard promoting Christian Audigier's role in the low-budget "Five Thirteen" marked the start of a film career; the newly minted actor tells THR, "It's taking off."

Cannes festival goers did a double take when they saw Von Dutch and Ed Hardy designer Christian Audigier's name and face emblazoned on a movie billboard on the Carlton hotel's facade.
The popularizer of rhinestone trucker hats and skull T-shirts is now acting. Turns out the director of the low-budget Five Thirteen, which was at market, asked the French garmento to play a French entrepreneur alongside Tom Sizemore in the Miami-set thriller.

Audigier recently wrapped another film, Death Squad, in which he plays a tough guy in and out of jail. "I've had a lot of people calling me since Cannes," he says of his second career. "It's taking off."