20/10/2009

Women were the major beneficiaries at the autumn session of the second advances on receipts committee of the National Film and Moving Image Centre (CNC), which selected four screenplays for debut feature-length films by female directors. These include three narrative projects (Eve Deboise’s Paradis Perdu, Michale Boganim’s La Terre Outragée, Show-Chun Lee’s Shanghai-Belleville) and a documentary (Anca Hirte’s Les Petites Mères).

Deboise is an experienced screenwriter who has worked with Rithy Panh, Christophe Blanc and Maria de Medeiros. Her debut directorial feature, Paradis Perdu (“Paradise Lost”), is written in collaboration with Nadine Lamari and with guidance from Anne-Louise Trividic.

Produced by Blue Monday Productions, the film centres on a father and teenage daughter who live and work on a remote tree farm in southern France. The mother disappeared a year ago and it isn’t the first time she has run away.

A young illegal seasonal worker shows the girl another possible world, and reluctantly gets caught up in the family’s troubled history. For one day, the mother returns to find a furious and jealous husband.

Produced by Laetitia Gonzalez for Les Films du Poisson, Israeli/French director Boganim’s La Terre Outragée (“The Outraged Earth”) is set in 1986, in Prypiat, a town close to Chernobyl. A few days before the nuclear disaster, Piotr and Anya’s wedding is suddenly interrupted by a fire at the power station.

Co-written by Taiwan-born Lee and Pierre Chosson, Shanghai-Belleville, which will be produced by Juliette Grandmont for Clandestine Films, was selected for the Angers Workshops and the Emergence summer school.

It follows the lives of a group of Chinese immigrants who live illegally in the Belleville area of Paris, an "Eldorado" where they all hope to find a better life. The director has previously explored this subject in several documentaries.

(Translated from French)