New Movie Release “France” by Bruno Dumont
France
Official Selection of the Cannes, Toronto, and New York Film Festivals
From award-winning director Bruno Dumont
In select theaters starting Friday, December 10
“A star vehicle for Léa Seydoux, whose acting is these days hitting a new level of richness.”
– Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
“Dazzling. A fantastically pleasurable cinematic delight… bolstered by one helluva committed Lea Seydoux performance.” – Nicholas Bell, Ion Cinema
“Dumont delivers wild twists at a hectic pace, creating a kaleidoscopic frenzy of unreality and turning the daily life of a celebrity into a hallucinatory, media-saturated distortion.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Watch the trailer here.
For more info and tickets, visit: bit.ly/francedumont
Léa Seydoux brilliantly holds the center of Bruno Dumont’s unexpected new film, which starts out as a satire of contemporary news media before steadily spiraling out into something richer and darker. Set in contemporary Paris, France stars Seydoux as France de Meurs, a seemingly unflappable superstar TV journalist juggling her studio show, reporting on a distant war, and the rush of family life. Her high-profile world is turned upside down after she injures a delivery man in a traffic accident, triggering a series of self-reckonings and a strange romance that proves impossible to shake. Never one to shy away from provoking his viewers, Dumont’s latest is tragicomic and deliciously ambivalent – a very 21st-century treatment of the difficulty of maintaining identity in a corrosive culture.
A Kino Lorber release.
ABOUT WRITER-DIRECTOR BRUNO DUMONT
Bruno Dumont is one of the most singular and admired French writer-directors of the last two and a half decades. He directed The Life of Jesus, his first feature film in 1997 at the age of thirty-eight, shot in the town of Bailleul, his birthplace, in the north of France. The film brought him immediate recognition: selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight, it was awarded the Special Mention for the Caméra d’Or. Pursuing a demanding and raw vein of filmmaking, Dumont returned to Cannes in 1999 with Humanity in Official Competition. The film was recognized with the Grand Prix and a double acting award for its two non-professional actors. Dumont left the North of France to shoot Twentynine Palms in the California desert, a road movie selected for the 2003 Venice Film Festival. He won his second Cannes Grand Prix for Flanders, a harsh film on the ravages of war. Dumont then directed two films about religion, mysticism, and their excesses: Hadewijch and Outside Satan. After a biopic in which he directed Juliette Binoche (Camille Claudel 1915), Bruno Dumont broadened his audience with the resounding success of his mini-series Li’l Quinquin, a far more comedic project than his previous work. He continued in the same slapstick direction with Slack Bay (with Juliette Binoche), which was presented in Official Competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and was named by Cahiers du Cinéma “one of the best 10 films of 2016”. Dumont then turned his interest to the tragic fate of Joan of Arc and directed the musical Jeanette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, a selection of Cannes’ Directors Fortnight in 2017, then Joan of Arc, which was at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2019 and received a Special Mention from the Jury.
