22/10/2009

Shooting starts next Monday in the Paris area on Géraldine Bajard’s debut feature, The Edge, co-produced by France and Germany.

The cast is headed by Melvil Poupaud (A Christmas Tale [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) and Hippolyte Girardot (who this summer shot Angelo Cianci’s Ici).

Written by the director (who trained at Berlin’s DFFB Film School), The Edge centres on François, a newly graduated young doctor who leaves Paris and settles in a new town. He soon becomes a target for the local group of teenagers who seem to drown their boredom in petty games of seduction and manipulation, without considering the consequences.

When one of these games goes wrong and a young girl is found dead, François is caught in the trap of these youngsters who decide to blame him for the accident.

The Edge is produced by Tom Dercourt for Cinéma Defacto. The €2.5m budget includes co-production support from Germany’s 23/5 Filmproduktion, an advance on receipts from the National Film and Moving Image Centre (CNC), and pre-sales from Canal+ and Ciné Cinéma. The film also has backing from the Ile-de-France region, where shooting will take place until December 12.

French distribution is still under negotiation, while international sales will be handled by Germany’s The Match Factory.

Cine Defacto also has three titles in post-production: the co-productions Adrienne Pal by Hungary’s Agnes Kocsis (see news) and All Good Children by the UK’s Alicia Duffy (see news), and the executive production Nos Résistances (“Our Resistances”) by Romain Cogitore, starring François Civil, Grégoire Colin, Grégory Gatignol, Juliette Lamboley and Michel Vuillermoz.

The latter film, centred on a young 19-year-old who reluctantly joins the resistance movement in summer 1944, won the CNC’s first prize for Most Promising Screenplay by a New Talent. It was produced with backing from the Lorraine and Alsace regions, will be released in France by Shellac and is sold internationally by Films Distribution.

(Translated from French)