24/12/2002

French cinema has always been dear to Greek filmgoers and this year will be no different with Décalage horaire scheduled for release on 27 December. Directed by Danièle Thompson and starring Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche, this comedy about two people stranded in a Parisian airport, was one of the biggest domestic hits of the season and sold over 1 million tickets over four weeks. The second Gallic film has a completely different flavour – it is Laurent Cantet’s Full-time, loosely based on the novel by Jean-Claude Romand about a pathological liar who does not have the courage to tell his family that he has lost his job. Amazingly, the man manages to conceal the truth for twenty years, until, just as his nearest and dearest are about to discover the truth, he implodes and murders them all. Greek filmgoers will also be given the opportunity to delight in Penny Panayotopouloua’s directorial feature debut, Hard Goodbyes: My Father, a Greek-German co-production that was premiered at the last Festival of Locarno. It is the story of a child who is unable to reconcile himself to his beloved father’s death.