Entertainment: Cannes D9 Highlights - (CFF03) Latest releases from Cannes including a thriller starring talk show host Jerry Springer
TAPE: EF03/0468
IN_TIME: 14:08:31
DURATION: 7:47
SOURCES: APTN/Various
RESTRICTIONS: No re-use/re-sale of film clips without clearance
DATELINE: Cannes. May 21, 2003
SHOTLIST
APTN
Cannes. May 21, 2003
1. Wide shot Cannes film festival
2. Various Cannes
3. Mid shot Jerry Springer, Presenter/Actor
Lucky 7 Productions
4. Film trailer - 'Citizen Verdict'
APTN
Cannes. May 21, 2003
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Jerry Springer:
''It's really a good movie and I sound a little bit surprised because I had no idea - when you're making a movie, you're doing your scenes, they're out of context, you're not seeing the whole movie at once and you have no idea really. And this is the first time - I've been in movies before - but this is the first time I'm playing someone other than me and it's a totally different type of character, in terms of, I mean, this is a really evil guy."
Lucky 7 Productions
6. Film trailer - 'Citizen Verdict'
APTN
Cannes. May 21, 2003
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Jerry Springer:
"The reality television we have today with 'Big Brother' and the other one where they vote you off the island, we're now getting voters to vote you out of the house and off the island. All of a sudden it's not to much of a stretch to say, 'Hey what happens if we had trails and the people get to vote you off the planet Earth by a guilty verdict and executing you?' So it's very scary and it shows what can happen if we let television get out of control."
Lucky 7 Productions
8. Film trailer 'Citizen Verdict'
APTN Material
9.
SOUNDBITE (English) Jerry Springer:
"I'm amazed and they said I had no culture, I'm an opera. I got culture, you know what I mean."
Swipe Films
12. Film Clip 'Osama'
APTN Material
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Siddiq Barmak, Director:
"Actually this story shocked me the first time in two thousand. I wrote this later which was published in Afghan newspaper and Peshawar and Pakistan. This was a story about a little girl who was eager to go to school but girls were not allowed to go to school and this school was underground and she cut her very beautiful hair to go to school so that was the main basis of our script."
Swipe Films
14. Film Clip 'Osama'
APTN Material
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Siddiq Barmak, Director - about trying to show the suffering of Afghan people:
"We had one goal - to show our pain and to show the suffering of Afghan people during Taliban and the effect of extremism and fundamentalism in our society. So that's why we made the film which everywhere you can see horror and fear, and especially this horror followed women in society. Not only women but the man also, the boys also."
Celluloid Dreams
29. Film Clip 'Les Triplettes De Belleville'
APTN Material
30. SOUNDBITE (English) Sylvain Chomet, Director:
"Everything is about movement and mime so the ideas are actually coming more from observation of real life, of real characters and then caricaturing them in the animated film. So i really so a dog like that, this enormous dog belongs to a restaurant and it was fed with the remains from the restaurant and he was like thirty kilos and he was very old and had these very skinny legs and he was shaking all over the place and it was like a big, big stomach on legs."
Celluloid Dreams
31. Film Clip 'Les Triplettes De Belleville'
APTN Material
32. SOUNDBITE (English) Sylvain Chomet , Director:
"We started to really see sequences and shots in colour very very late and some people were there today from the film who haven't seen the film. But we saw, in the production, we saw a lot of live tests and we did things that we were really feeling , like the storm stuff and with the animation a lot of different bits of the film but it really came to life on the editing table."
Celluloid Dreams
33. Film Clip 'Les Triplettes De Belleville'
JERRY AND THE FILMAKERS
Out of competition, but catching the imagination of the international movie cognescenti who have de-camped to the French Riviera, are a clutch of films from around the world. They include:
GO JERRY, GO JERRY
Not only the subject of the smash hit West End musical 'Jerry Springer the Musical', talk show host Jerry Springer has now turned his hand to acting. Springer generated early publicity in Cannes this week for his first feature 'Citizen Verdict,' a political thriller about the world of Reality TV.
Springer plays Marty Rockman, notorious producer of the hit reality show 'So Sue Me', who develops a new concept in Reality TV - 'Citizen Verdict.' Each week a real criminal will be tried before the American people, but this time they're also the jury - and if the defendant is voted guilty in a death penalty case, Rockman will televise the execution.
'We have 'Big Brother' and 'Survivor', which have been international hits, where the people at home get to vote off their favourites off the island or out of the house. In this movie the people at home get to vote someone off the planet in a sense determining guilt or innocence' says Springer. 'It seems extreme, and from my point of view it obviously is, but it really might be the next step in reality TV'.
The film co stars Armand Assante as the lawyer defending the accused in a battle for his life and is directed by Philippe Martinez.
OSAMA
Osama is the first feature film to come out of the post Taliban era of Afghanistan. The film, written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, looks at the Taliban's control of Afghanistan and begins at the start of the Taliban regime, as a young girl (Marina Golbahari) and her mother Zubaida Sahar accidentally get swept up in a women's demonstration for the right to work. The demo is swiftly dispersed by the Taliban.
The film follows the attempts by the mother to support her family - grandmother and daughter - without a man to work. The daughter is disguised as boy so she can work, but after taunting by her male school friends who call her effeminate, she insists she is a boy called Osama.
The film was shot in Kabul late last year and features all amateur actors. Inspired by a true story of a girl who was so desperate to go to school, she dressed up as a boy she could attend.
LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE
Meanwhile, 'Les Triplettes de Belleville' by French animator Sylvain Chomet, has impressed the critics with its quirky style.
The film tells the rather bizarre story of a grandmother trying to cheer up her grandson after his parents die. She buys him a puppy and a train set but this fails to impress him at all. However, things change when she discovers he has a fixation with bicycles as the only photo he has of his parents consists of them posing with a bike.
The narrative then fast forwards to several years later and now the boy is a professional cyclist, the grandmother has assumed the role of his trainer and the dog Bruno is hugely fat after years of no exercise and eating left overs - he also has a fixation with barking at trains after an incident while he was a puppy.
Whilst doing the Tour de France, the boy gets kidnapped by some mobsters from Belleville who want to include him in a bizarre cycle-off where the cyclists keep going until they exhaust themselves and get shot.
The grandmother and the dog go in pursuit of the mobsters and encounter triplets who used to be world famous performers in Belleville, but now eat frogs for dinner - which they catch by throwing grenades into lakes - followed by tadpoles for dessert.
Together they infiltrate the mob and try to release the young man. 'Les Triplettes de Belleville' has nearly no dialogue but has many musical moments to keep the narrative flowing.
The film will be released internationally later in the year.
FILM CLIP DETAILS
Citizen Verdict
Lucky 7 Productions
Osama
Swipe Films
44 (0) 7887 954 005
Les Triplettes De Belleville
Celluloid Dreams
33 (0) 1 49 70 03 70