Writer. Editor. Film Scholar. Script Consultant
Lucile Hadžihalilovic explains how she created her oneiric exploration of birth and matter in an elusive, disquieting female world. Evolution, Lucile Hadžihalilovic’s masterful follow-up to her 2004 debut Innocence revolves around a little boy living on an island peopled only by women and other young boys. After a disturbing discovery while swimming in the sea,... Continue Reading →
French medical schools are notorious for the humiliating hazing rituals that new students have to endure, and that tradition is the framework for young writer-director Julia Ducournau’s cannibalistic rites-of-passage tale. In the self-contained space of a vet school, older students subject new arrivals to cruel games, forcing them to eat raw rabbits’ livers or crawl... Continue Reading →
The history of cinema is littered with unfinished grand projects by megalomaniac directors including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Erich von Stroheim. That Henri-Georges Clouzot should be added to this list seems, at first, surprising. One of France’s greatest directors, he established his reputation with tight, economical, superbly crafted crime thrillers throughout the 40s and... Continue Reading →
Against the depressing backdrop of a French cinema determined to be as glossy and brain-dead as Hollywood, 13 (Tzameti), the 2006 first feature by young French-educated Georgian director Gela Babluani, still stands out two years later as one of the most exciting lo-fi black and white Gallic debuts since Luc Besson’s Le dernier combat. In... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 