European Films

After their successful debut feature Tapas, which won them the Best New Director Goya and which was released across the continent, the Spanish directing duo José Corbacho and Juan Cruz have started working on their second feature Cobardes (lit. The Gutless). Principal photography on the film is scheduled to start on Thursday in Hospitalet de Llobregat in the Barcelona region. The film will reteam the directors with Elvira Mínguez, who won a Best Supporting Actress Goya for her role in Tapas. The story centres on harassment in school and follows the young boy Guille, who seems a good kid with decent grades, a love of sports and a loving family. Things start to change when he discovers that pummelling his classmates earns him a certain respect and he decides to pick on one red-haired boy especially.

 

After portraying a modern-day rebel in Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) and the titular Nazi-era hero in Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days), more rebellion is on the way for German actress Julia Jentsch, who will next star as the iconic Effi Briest. The film will be directed by Hermine Huntgeburth, whose Die weisse Massai (The White Masai) was a phenomenal success in Germany and was also widely screened outside of the country. Effi Briest is  a creation of novelist Theodor Fontane and is one of the most famous women in German literature; she is often seen as the German equivalent of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and like them she is stuck in a suffocating 19th century marriage and sees adultery as the only way out. 

French cult writer and polemicist Michel Houellebecq is currently shooting his first film as a director, based on one of his own controversial novels. La possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island) is the story of a man called Daniel25 who lives in the fourth millenium and who is a clone of man who was part of a sect that created clones more attuned to outliving religious and nuclear wars, famines and the devastating results of climate changes. The socio-political science-fiction story stars French actor Benoît Magimel (La demoisselle d'honneur/The Bridesmaid) as Daniel and is currently in production in Spain, where shooting started on April 30 and is scheduled to continue through June. Locations include Lanzarote, Huelva, Jaén, Almería, Benidorm and the Ciudad de la Luz studios in Alicante.