Meier’s L’enfant D’en Haut gets advance on receipts

by Fabien Lemercier

16/12/2010 - Seven feature film screenplays were selected in December by the second advance on receipts committee of the National Film and Moving Image Centre (CNC). Among them is L’enfant D’en Haut (“The Child From Above”), the second narrative feature by Ursula Meier, who was discovered in Cannes Critics’ Week 2008 with Home [trailer, film focus].

50% produced by France and 50% by Switzerland through Archipel 35 and Vega Films, L’enfant D’en Haut is co-scripted by the director, Antoine Jaccoud and Gilles Taurand. The plot centres on 12-year-old Simon, a child from an industrial valley who lives with a mother so young she insists on him saying he’s her little brother.

When winter comes, Simon takes the cable car connecting the plain to the ski resort, above the sea of mist, to go and steal everything the wealthy people leave unattended: luxury skis, expensive snowboards, high-tech glasses, etc. It starts out as a small-scale activity with the aim of earning a bit of pocket money.

But the involvement of foreign seasonal workers who have come looking for their share of the pie in the “white gold” industry changes the situation. His first theft of a luxury watch plunges Simon into criminality of a more serious nature and his double life becomes more and more hellish.

Advances on receipts were also awarded to Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Love (formerly known as These Two, see news – Les Films du Losange); Noémie Lvovsky’s Camille Redouble (“Camille Repeats A Year”, F Comme Film), the fifth feature by the director of Feelings (in competition at Venice in 2003); and Trois Frères (“Three Brothers”, Emael Films) by Patrick Grandperret, whose previous feature Murderers [trailer] won the Un Certain Regard Jury President’s Prize at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

The pledge of an advance on receipts was also made to Jacques Bral’s Le Noir (Te) Vous Va Si Bien (“Black Really Suits You”, Thunder Films International); and two documentary projects: Would You Have Sex With An Arab? by France’s Yolande Zauberman (Screen Runner) and Lullaby For My Father by Israel’s Amos Gitaï (Agav Films).

(Translated from French)