16/02/2007

Jamie Bell, the 20 year-old actor from the English countryside with chiselled features, who rose to fame as the dancing Billy Elliott of Stephen Daldry’s film of the same name, plays a solitary “spy” in David Mackenzie’s Hallam Foe [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile].

Hallam (Bell) is obsessed with his mother’s mysterious drowning and spies on everyone he thinks may be involved, especially Verity, his alluring stepmother.

Hallam Foe is based on the novel by Peter Jinks, an old friend of Mackenzie’s and of producer Gillian Berrie. Mackenzie and Berrie, partners in Sigma Films for ten years, were already thinking of a cinematic adaptation before the book was even finished.

“When I read the book”, said Mackenzie, “I was impressed by how it takes you into the head of this troubled teenager. It was kind of like a fucked up Catcher in the Rye, where kids almost need to be skewed in order to survives the idol factory rubbish that pervades their world and sadly teaches them how to behave".

Mackenzie thus created a truly unique character. “I know David's interest in outsider characters", said Gillian Berrie. Referring to Mackenzie’s previous two films, she added: “Young Adam was about a character that is an outcast and never manages to integrate himself back into society, and in a different way so is Asylum [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Although Hallam Foe is also essentially an outcast, he’s at an age where he is saveable, and that gives his journey some hope."

The film will be released in the UK in the autumn by Buena Vista International, while here in Berlin Independent Films have sold rights to the film to Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Greece, Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia.

(Translated from Italian)