22/04/2022 - The Catalonian maven will make his inaugural bow in the festival’s prime section with this Tahiti-set tale, headlined by Benoît Magimel

Late in the day yesterday, the Cannes Film Festival announced that Pacifiction [+see also:
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film profile], the highly anticipated new work by Spanish auteur Albert Serra, was in the last batch of titles for its now 21-strong competition section (see the news). A slight departure, or indeed advance, for one of the most idiosyncratic directors working today, Pacification will finally take Serra’s cinema into something approaching the present day, in what will be an eerie drama set in Tahiti, one of France’s last remaining overseas territories.

The plot synopsis, just revealed by its French distributor, Les Films du Losange, is deeply intriguing: on an island of Tahiti, French Polynesia, the Haut-Commissaire, a representative of the French state and a man of calculation and perfect manners, lives between the highest echelons of politics and the lowest social stratum of his co-citizens, constantly taking the pulse of a local population from which anger can emerge at any time. Especially since a rumour is insistent: we have seen a submarine whose ghostly presence would announce a resumption of French nuclear tests.

As was the case for the director’s last two features, the Cannes-selected Liberté [+see also:
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film profile]) plays the owner of a seedy nightclub, and French writer and literary critic Cécile Guilbert makes her debut as an actress, playing the role of a writer who is a “symbol of Parisian snobbery”.

As the film went through an involved post-production period characteristic of Serra’s films, the Spanish monthly Fotogramas was able to glean some choice comments for a news piece. “I wanted to talk about the contemporary world, but in a more exotic atmosphere, outside the usual urban and bourgeois context,” Serra said. “Many of the contradictions of today's world become more evident in places like Tahiti because they are societies in which the ‘new’ quickly arrives, and that modernity contrasts with the old that still survives. Present moral values conflict with those already established.” Regarding the film’s shape, he explained, “The story has several subplots, and sometimes, as in this case, I film different actors playing the same role.” The film has a lengthy provisional running time of 163 minutes.

The movie is a co-production between France’s Idéale Audience, Spain’s Andergraun Films (through which Serra himself is producing), Hamburg-based Tamtam Films and Portugal’s Rosa Filmes. Further support comes from ARTE France Cinéma, which has Olivier Père co-producing. International sales representation is from Films Boutique.