07/04/2005

Tonight, for the great opening of the 23d Cognac Thriller Film Festival , Matthew Vaughn’s feature, Layer Cake (UK) will be screened. Until next Sunday (10th April), a selection of seven films, four of which are European, will compete. Against the big challenger Infernal Affairs III, by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (Hong-Kong), the European contestants still have good chances. Besides Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), Europe is represented by the German film Soundless by Mennan Yapo, The Third Wave by Anders Nilsson (Sweden), and El Crimen Ferpecto by Alex de la Iglesia (Spain). This year’s President of the Jury is the American director Joël Schumacher ; the jury includes, amongst others, the actors Sergi Lopez and Anna Mouglalis and the directors Patrick Braoudé and Jean-Loup Hubert.

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The section entitled ‘Young Blood’ consists in a series of unconventional works ; young European directors will definitely impress this section’s jury and its President, Pierre Lescure. The Danish film Pusher II [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Nicolas Winding Refn, Shane Meadows’s Dead Man's Shoes (UK), and Frédéric Balekdjian’s first feature, Les Mauvais Joueurs [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (presented in one of the sections of the Berlinale) should particularly attract attention.
The other highlights of the festival are the short film competition (with Richard Anconina as President of the Jury), the TV-movies section, and a tribute to the American novelist Dennis Lehane —whose Mystic River Clint Eastwood put on the screen.

(Translated from French)