Ronnie lives in a small sleepy village and is the owner of a small company for deep-frozen goods. Daydreams, contact ads, the firemen’s brassband, the weekly visits at his shrink and his buddy Lars’ cynical remarks about air guitar and vinyl-records are the highlights of Ronnie’s life. Already, as a kid, he suffered from being under the pressure of his power- and manhood-fixed mother. Ronnie’s feelings are as deep-frozen as his goods. Until the day, a wonderful being – one of the female kind – strands in the village. The local priest hires the young girl, a groupie with the name of Zoya, as housekeeper and within days, Zoya turns the whole manship of the village mad and horny. Also Ronnie falls for Zoya and, well yes, lucky for once, marries her. However, since the presence of Zoya, strange things have happened in the village. Everybody who tries to search in Zoya’s unkown past dies, disappears. Slowly that well-known fear sneaks into Ronnie’s body: men’s fear of women.
Read MoreBLACK SUN
Co-produced by Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men, Y tu mamá también) and John Battsek (Searching for Sugar Man, One Day in September), Black Sun tells the story of Hugues de Montalembert, a French artist and filmmaker living in New York, who was blinded during a violent assault in 1978.
Combining de Montalembert’s audio narrative with signature 16mm visuals, the film articulates the immediate and longer-term consequences of the attack as de Montalembert reflects on his perception of the world. A portrait of an unique man and his remarkable reaction to a life-changing trauma, Black Sun is a poetic cinematic meditation on an extraordinary life without vision.
Read MoreMONDO VENEZIANO, High Noon in the Sinking City
For Luxembourg’s participation in the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale, artist and filmmaker Antoine Prum wrote and directed a medium length film (32’00’’) shot in High Definition (HD) technology and transferred to 35mm film by PTD. Mondo Veneziano, High Noon in the Sinking City addresses a wide variety of theoretical discourses currently on the contemporary art agenda, confronting them with a series of unexpected and spectacular events. Cast in an abandoned Venice, Mondo Veneziano narrates a meeting of four protagonists, representative of key players in the art world, who appear to conduct a complex theoretical debate. But their soliloquious confrontation — an insidious patchwork of quotations from recent specialist literature, paraphrasing the widely used “post-modern” technique of sampling — is interrupted by a string of bloody killings, largely inspired by common cinema genres such as gore or splatter movies. The Venice that serves as a backdrop to the characters’ intellectual and physical joust is in reality a large-scale film set located in a southern town in Luxembourg, which has served in numerous feature films. Mondo Veneziano does not attempt to conceal the backlot; rather, the city itself becomes something of a quotation, much like the protagonists, who are depicted as actors rehearsing their comic-style figures for a final showdown. Alternating sinuous discursive phases with resolute physical action, Mondo Veneziano is a part serious, part caustic comment on a professional milieu.
Read MoreTOUR DE FORCE
For their debut film, directors Antoine Prum and Boris Kremer stuck to the heels of Luxembourg strongman Georges Christen bending, towing and twisting his way through Russia. Proud holder of 23 Guinness Book World Records in feats of strength – such as bending nails, towing trains, planes, and ships with his teeth, or tearing up the yellow pages – this modern-day gladiator has been touring his unique PowerShow for more than twenty years. Muscles, sweat, and blood make his performing routine a unique mixture of genuine power and vintage-style entertainment, appreciated by audiences the world over. Looking back on an impressive track record, Christen felt the time had come for the ultimate challenge… Russia, the country of a strongman’s childhood idols, provides the backdrop to this unconventional film, a road movie that is at once melancholic and jubilatory. In a succession of tableaux vivants, TOUR DE FORCE draws an intimate picture of Russia today, caught between the burden of history and the repercussions of fast-paced Westernisation. A parade of truer-than-life characters and faces completes this modern-times ballad of the itinerant artist, where reality at times appears to outdo fiction.
Read MoreLA REVANCHE
Luxembourg is a small country in the heart of Europe. It’s a multi-cultural society, foreigners representing almost 40% of its population. It’s famous for its forward-thinking social policies and – especially – for its financial services. It used to be known for its steel industry – and it still boasts one of the most important media groups in the world. But it’s certainly not known either for soccer or unemployment. So this is «Revanche’s» recipe: take Luxembourg’s unemployed. Put them in business suits. Encourage them to create an international football club which begins to win all its matches. Into this strange mix, throw in a bunch of international criminals, and a bevy of glamorous Eastern European dream creatures all looking for husbands, fame and fortune. The result is a delicious humanist fable, a comedy in which love conquers money. The film takes place in the Great Region (Saar-Lor-Lux)…
Read MoreWORKINGMAN’S DEATH
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. They must be content with encouraging one another that backbreaking work is better than no work at all… In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down. Blood, fire and stench are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pakistani men use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed… Five portraits of heavy manual labor, increasingly less visible in our technological 21st Century.
Read MoreLE CLUB DES CHÔMEURS
The story is set in the industrial south of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The decline of the steel industry has left a wake of unemployment, but the state is determined to retrain all the scrapped steelworkers. There is, however, a pocket of resistance! The Unemployment Club. To be a member of this exclusive band, you must be unemployed; swear not to look for employment; commit to remain unemployed at all costs; stay off the books forever; and work harder at remaining out of work than ever you did when you were in work. A bittersweet comedy about a band of marginal cozily ensconced in the Welfare State. Love. Hatred. Treachery. Humor. The Unemployment Club may be a small picture but it deals with big emotions. And asks provocative questions.
Read MoreGLOBI & THE STOLEN SHADOW
Teenagers Lucinda and Benji are rock musicians. When the villain, Maestro, steals Benji’s shadow, the boy can no longer play a note. Worse, he begins, physically, to fade away. The hero, Globi, tracks Maestro to a subterranean Gothic opera house, where he discovers that Maestro steals musicians’ shadows in order to control all the world’s music. Globi and his friends must reunite the shadows with their musicians, and so save all the world’s music. GLOBI is essentially a movie for children and it therefore deals with its potentially complex premise – the theft of shadows – in a clear, accessible way. The older and more sophisticated members of the audience will be piqued by the significance of shadows … the shadow world … the shadow as an analogy for the soul … while the younger members will simply see the shadow thefts as part of the drama and the comedy. And, of course, GLOBI is at heart a comedy. Like all good comedy, it has real drama and conflict at base – but it never loses its sense of humor; it never takes itself or its characters too seriously; and it retains a great feeling for the fun in every situation. Much of the movie’s humor is physical, some of it slapstick. Its characters – particularly Globi, Maestro and the Rat, are astonishingly expressive in visual terms – that expressiveness fully exploited in the animation.
Read MoreKIRIKOU ET LA SORCIÈRE
In a little village somewhere in Africa, a boy named Kirikou is born. But he’s not a normal boy, because he knows what he wants very well. Also he already can speak and walk. His mother tells him how an evil sorceress has dried up their spring and devoured all males of the village except of one. Hence little Kirikou decides, he will accompany the last warrior to the sorceress. Due to his intrepidity he may be the last hope of the village.
Read MoreMEGACITIES
Earth is beautiful. It’s people who make it horrific. Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow, New York: seductive yet repellent monsters. The contradiction insinuates itself into the daily lives of those who populate these megacities. The film’s twelve chapters tell the tales of: Shankar, the Bioscope Man; Modesto, the chicken feet vendor; Baba Khan, the paint recycler; Nestor, the trash scavenger; Oleg, Borya, Kolya and Misha, the street kids; Cassandra, the performer; Larissa, the crane driver; Toni, the hustler. Day in, day out they all set about their struggle for survival with ingenuity, intelligence and dignity. And they all share a single fantasy: the dream of a better life. MEGACITIES is a film about work, poverty, violence, love and sex. A film about the beauty of people.
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