14/11/2007

It’s a rare treat to be distributed by an icon, as has happened to Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen. Their first feature, Jellyfish [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], winner of the Camera d’Or in this year’s Critics’ Week at Cannes, is coming out in Italy through Nanni Moretti’s Sacher Film.

For the debut filmmakers, the director of The Son’s Room [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is “a legend, a hero.” At the film’s press screening in Rome, they admitted: “The first time we came to Italy we made someone take us to the restaurant when he regularly eats and ordered the same dishes. Who could have imagined we’d have eaten dinner together one day!”

However, Moretti’s image was ruined by the rain, which prevented him from showing up at the screening on his Vespa from Dear Diary. “It was like seeing John Wayne without his horse,” said Keret and Geffen.

This kind of humorous comment sums up the surreal spirit of Jellyfish: an ensemble story that is at times fairy tale-like and owes much to a screenplay (written by the directors, both successful writers) that skilfully orchestrates the emotions of numerous characters, especially its women.

Co-produced by France’s Les Films du Poisson and Arte France Cinéma (and starring French/Israeli actress Sarah Adler), the film is set in a Tel Aviv far from the roar of the explosions.

“We were interested in showing Israel from another perspective, without bombs or the war, a situation more normal and less tense that what cinema usually depicts,” they said. Ultimately because, explains Geffen (a daughter and sister of artists, born into a well-known family of intellectuals at home), “the important things are the same the world over: being left by our boyfriends, our unresolved relationships with our parents…”.

For Sacher Film, Jellyfish – out November 16 on approximately 20 screens – precedes the scheduled January 2008 release of another award-winning debut film, the Spanish/Mexican The Zone [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (winner of the Dino De Laurentiis prize at Venice), which confirms Moretti’s interest (and that of his partners Roberto Cicutto and Luigi Musini) in emerging talents of modern cinema.

(Translated from Italian)