13/12/2022 - Guillaume Renusson delivers a great feature debut which follows the brilliant Denis Menochet and Zar Amir Ebrahimi as they’re hunted in the mountains on the French-Italian border

"I don’t want money and I don’t want trouble". Engulfed in his overwhelming grief as a widower, Samuel hadn’t banked on a wholly unexpected encounter in the middle of nowhere on the Italian side of the Alpine mountains, where he owns a remote chalet. It’s at this turning point in his life that Afghan woman Chehreh comes onto the scene, trying to cross the border into France illegally, traversing thick, deep snow in jeans and trainers. Such is the starting point of Guillaume Renusson’s thrilling first feature White Paradise [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a very physical and realistic genre film about a people hunt in "the big white", screened in the 14th Les Arcs Film Festival ahead of its French release which will be steered by Ad Vitam from 4 January 2023.

In the eyes of Samuel (Denis Menochet), migrants wandering around in the icy cold proximity of the border, hiding from and evading vigorous police stops, are nothing more than ghostly presences glimpsed fleetingly through a bus window. Our man, a French citizen on sick leave who’s nearing the end of his recovery, had been plunged into deep personal distress, verging on clinical depression, as a result of his wife’s death several months earlier in a car accident, not far from the chalet which the couple owned in Italy. Entrusting his little girl to his brother’s care, Samuel returns there one weekend to face up to this crippling karma. But during the night, an Afghan migrant woman called Chehreh (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, rewarded in Cannes for Holy Spider [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Ali Abbasi
interview: Zar Amir Ebrahimi
film profile]) breaks into the house. A chain of events ensues, catapulting Samuel into an arduous adventure, because three of the locals he knows are determined to stop the migrant woman from crossing the border ("this is our home"). Samuel only wanted to point Chehreh in the direction of France across the snow-covered mountains, but these locals accuse him of being a smuggler. A hunt (by way of a drone, snow bike, dog, gun, etc.) subsequently begins in this hostile, natural landscape.

Of a rare physical intensity, White Paradise charts the stages of this veritable Way of the Cross walked by the two protagonists (courtesy of a brilliant screenplay penned by the director alongside Clément Peny) as they plough their way through powdery snow, glacial nights and undergrowth, passing through a deserted ski resort out of season and forced to fight their pursuers in highly brutal fashion. But the two escapees (who deliver wonderful acting performances) also learn to move beyond their initial mutual distrust and get to know one another (Chehreh was a primary school teacher who was separated from her husband – a former translator for the French Army in Afghanistan - during her migratory journey towards Europe). A wonderfully made genre film, highly original in the French cinema landscape, White Paradise uses small, intelligent touches – always revolving around action - to drip-feed its humanist view of the different facets of the tense migratory situation on the French-Italian border. It’s a blend which results in a gripping, modern-day, social western, in which the eyes of its French protagonist are ultimately opened, allowing him to rebuild his life and find some sort of redemption through helping others.

White Paradise is produced by Baxter Films and Les Films Velvet, with international sales in the hands of WTFilms.

(Translated from French)