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Act 5 for Next Step and the Cannes Critics’ Week

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- Eight young filmmakers are taking part in the programme set up by the Cannes Critics’ Week to support auteurs as they make the leap to features

Act 5 for Next Step and the Cannes Critics’ Week
The eight participants in the fifth session of Next Step: Elias Belkeddar, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, Felipe Gálvez, Flurin Giger, Oliver Adam Kusio, Jacqueline Lentzou, Camille Lugan and Mikko Myllylahti

The Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week has renewed its Next Step programme for the fifth year running in order to help young filmmakers (who have taken part in the competition of this particular Cannes parallel section) to make the leap from short to feature-length territory.

Among the eight lucky individuals to have been selected for the fifth session (which includes a workshop being organised this week by the Critics’ Week in conjunction with the TorinoFilmLab) are three French directors. Camille Lugan is developing Fun, Fun, Fun (produced by Stéphanie Bermann and Alexis Dulguerian for Domino Films), the plot of which hinges on a female bicycle courier who is unhappy with the model that society offers. She rushes up and down the streets of Paris, and overcomes her boredom by cruising random men, along with her accomplice and alter ego, Tarik, with whom she is in fierce competition as they go feasting on men…

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Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has been selected with her project Anaïs in Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
film profile
]
(produced by Stéphane Demoustier for Année Zéro and by Philippe Carcassonne for Ciné@), the story of which uses a comedic tone to explore a love triangle.

Elias Belkeddar is also taking part with his project Requiem for a Madman, which is being staged by Paris-based outfit Iconoclast Films. The story immerses us in the criminal underworld of Algiers through the figure of a depressed 50-year-old gangster who takes a bunch of young crooks under his wing.

Greek director Jacqueline Lentzou is working on George (produced by Fenia Cossovitsa for Blonde), a reflection on fatherhood through the story of a young divorced father whose life is turned upside down one summer…

Finnish helmer Mikko Myllylahti has been accepted with his project The Woodcutter Story (developed at the TorinoFilmLab and produced by Aamu Film Company), a black comedy that unfurls in an idyllic village where an open-air mine appears. From then on, a series of terrible events take place that will sorely test the optimism and goodwill of a woodcutter.

German-Polish filmmaker Oliver Adam Kusio is developing Pax Europa, the plot of which revolves around a journalist and a shipyard worker who are dragged into a dangerous political action by their foster-daughter.

In Swiss director Flurin Giger’s Fasten, a man, his wife and their special-needs son arrive in a small village in the middle of nowhere, where they plan to spend their holidays. But a horrible truth gradually reveals itself…

Lastly, Chile’s Felipe Gálvez has been selected with The Settlers, a project developed at the TorinoFilmLab, and produced by Don Quijote Films, Rei Cine, Snowglobe and Ciné-Sud Promotion. Through the power of fiction, and from the perspective of the settlers, the screenplay revisits the massacre of the native Onas in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, at the end of the 19th century.

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(Translated from French)

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