European Films

French director Claire Denis (Beau travail) is working on not one but two new films. First up will be White Material, which will start principal photography in Cameroon this winter. The film, set on coffee plantations, will star Isabelle Huppert and Christophe Lambert in a story scripted by novelist Marie Ndiaye that is still under wraps. Mixing the bizarre and the real (along the lines of Kafka, Faulkner or Paul Bowles), the writer often places the family at the heart of her films as the focus of all tensions and as a means of destruction. The film marks a return to her roots for a director who spent her entire childhood in Cameroon and based her debut feature and 1998 Cannes Official Competition title Chocolat in the African country. 

 

Isabelle Huppert's presence seems to indicate the actress's willingness to explore the family as a setting for tension and descruction (her last role was as the mother of the dysfunctional family in Nue propriété/Private Property from Belgium's Joachim Lafosse); it will be the first time she shares the screen with Highlander's Christophe Lambert.

 

After White Material, Denis will make 35 Rhums, which received funding this week as part of a French/German co-production mini-agreement. Also funded by Eurimage, the co-production between France, Germany and Belgium has a €3.4 million budget and will mostly be shot in the Ile-de-France region, which co-finances part of the budget. Written by the director and her regular partner Jean Pol Fargeau, 35 Rhums analyses how a father (Alex Descas, the priest from Denis's L'intrus/The Intruder) who raises his daughter alone after his wife’s suicide and tries to teach her that she must live her own life, despite the quite strong relationship between them.

 
A busy slate is lined up for the director, who – well-liked by film-lovers and winner of the 1996 Locarno Golden Leopard for Nénette and Boni – took part in official competition at the 2004 Venice Film Festival with her latest feature, L'intrus (The Intruder), before making a detour into documentary making in 2005 with Vers Mathilde (Towards Mathilde).