Europe East to West at La Rochelle

by Fabien Lemercier

04/07/2005 - Opened on Friday night with Free zone [trailer] by Amos Gitaï, the La Rochelle International Film Festival offers until the11th of July a rich programme of almost 180 feature films, among them many as yet unseen and a number of features hot from the Cannes festival. On the menu for the section "Ici et Ailleurs" are L'Enfant [trailer, film focus] by the Dardenne brothers, Hidden [trailer, film focus] by Michael Haneke, Crossing the Bridge [trailer] by Fatih Akin, Battle in Heaven [trailer, film focus] by Carlos Reygadas, Le Filmeur [trailer] by Alain Cavalier, C'est pas tout à fait la vie dont j'avais rêvé by Michel Piccoli, Factotum [trailer] by Bent Hamer et Zim and Co [trailer] by Pierre Jolivet. But European output is also represented from Portugal (The murmuring coast by Margarida Cardoso), from Greece (Avant la nuit by Timon Koulmasis), from Austria (Antares by Götz Spielmann), from Luxembourg (Bye bye Blackbird [trailer] by Robinson Savary) and also from Switzerland (Signers Koffer by Peter Liechti), and not forgetting Belzec by Guillaume Moscovitz et Oublier Cheyenne by Valérie Minetto.

Elsewhere, other than the numerous tributes to the Norwegian Liv Ullmann, the festival is supported by the Media Programme of theEU and chose to dedicate a section entitled "Discovery of a Polish filmmaker living in the UK", Pawel Pawlikowski, maker of the recent My Summer of Love [trailer, film focus]. And the section "Du côté de l'Est" offers up 15 films produced between 2002 and 2005, among them Dallas among us by Robert Adrian Pejo (Hungary), Mirage by Svetozar Ristovski (Macedonia), Edi by Piotr Trzaskalski (Poland), The Death of Mr Lazarescu [trailer] by Cristi Puiu (Romania) the Czech features: Le Livre des records de Shutka by Aleksandar Manic, Vaterland, un carnet de chasse by David Jarab and Czech Dreams from the duo Vit Klusák - Filip Remunda.

(Translated from French)