23/09/2002 - Florent Emilio Siri, considered to be French cinema's heir to Sergio Leone, presents his second feature at EuropaCinema

Can an empty warehouse that is used as a hiding place and a swarm of merciless killers ready be metaphors for the besieged forts and Indian attacks that directors like John Ford and Sergio Leone taught us to love? Frenchman Florent Emilio Siri, who directed Wasps’ Nest thinks so. “I drew inspiration for this film from westerns. I have heard the comparisons between me and Sergio Leone and am very flattered to be considered in the same breath as him, a master filmmaker. Wasps’ Nest is not just an action film. It contains a storytelling heritage that has been passed down from the westerns that achieved that fine balance between psychology and action.”
Presented out of competition at this year’s EuropaCinema, this film is the story of a group of special agents who are guarding a leading exponent of the Albanian mafia called Abedin Nexhep who is charged with running a prostitution scam in Strasbourg. As they are taking Nexhep to trial at the Court of Human Rights, the agents are set upon by a gang of professional assassins and are forced to seek refuge in a warehouse full of technological instruments. They enter the warehouse in the hi-tech van only to find that a group of small-time thieves in search of the definitive “hit” of their careers is also in the warehouse. As the situation degenerates, the true heroes emerge. “Wasps’ Nest is a film about friendship and solidarity, just like my first film, A Minute’s Silence was. The difference between the two is in the way they were made. I was given all the instruments I needed to express myself in my second film,” said Siri.
The cast of Wasps’ Nest includes Samy Naceri, Nadia Farès, Anisia Uzeyman, , Benoît Magimel and Valerio Mastrandrea, and the director and his writer, François Tarnowski, kept dialogue between the protagonists to a minimum.
”Good dialogue should inform, reveal the psychology of the character and enthuse the spectator with emotions. Sergio Leone did all that and more using a minimum of words. I used his example and tried to make the best possible use of the silences and looks that pass between the characters to emphasise the psychological power of the images. After all, film is, first and foremost, images!”