16/11/2007

Premiering in Luxembourg today, the latest feature by local director Paul Kieffer, Nuits d’Arabie [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (“Nights of Arabia”), is one of the rare films made in the Grand Duchy that is also partially set there and has a Luxembourg actor as its protagonist: 2007 Shooting Star Jules Werner.

Kieffer has explained that Nuits d’Arabie is a “classical melodrama transposed to contemporary Luxembourg,” and, as can be gleaned from the title, includes an element of fairy tales and wish fulfilment, which grows stronger as the film progresses.

Werner plays Georges, a train conductor who happens upon Yamina (Sabrina Ouazani from Games of Love and Chance [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), a young Algerian girl, on one of his train rounds. Through several chance encounters, they strike up a friendship that will call into question Georges’s comfortable life – including his girlfriend (Anne Marie Solvi). A lustrative voyage to Algeria in pursuit of Yamina is the result of Georges’s irrational decision to follow his heart.

Nuits d’Arabie was shot on location in Luxembourg and Algeria and features some fine camerawork by Jean-Louis Sonzogni, including a spectacular sequence in Algeria in which Georges, who is on a train, believes he sees Yamina on a bus that is speeding along a parallel road. It nicely unites several themes of the film and might pinpoint the moment in which, though the two are travelling along parallel lines, Georges prefers to think of their two trajectories as meeting one another in the distance.

Nuits d’Arabie was produced by Claude Waringo for Samsa Film, in co-production with Artémis in Belgium and Austria’s Allegro Film. The film had backing from Entre Chien et Loup, Araneo Belgium, the Film Fund Luxembourg, the Austrian Film Institute, MEDIA and the Belgian Tax Shelter.