News

Paris-based Playtime has unveiled a strong Cannes film market sales slate, which includes competition titles “About Dry Grasses” and “Homecoming.”

“About Dry Grasses” is by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palme d’Or in 2014 for “Winter Sleep.” The film follows Samet, a young art teacher, who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in, and hopes that his encounter with fellow teacher Nuray will help him overcome his angst. Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar and Musab Ekici are among the cast.

“Homecoming,” by French director Catherine Corsini who won the 2021 Queer Palm for “The Divide,” follows Khédidja, who minds a wealthy Parisian family’s children for a summer in Corsica. She brings along her own two...

Casting is complete and cameras are currently rolling on Catherine Corsini‘s Le retour. We recently reported that Aïssatou Diallo Sagna was the first to join the project, and now we learned that Esther Gohourou (breakout in Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties) and Suzy Bemba will also topline the film and they’ll be supported by Lomane de Dietrich, Cédric Appietto, Marie-Ange Géronimi, Harold Orsoni, Jean Michelangeli, Virginie Ledoyen and Denis Podalydès. Cineuropa reports that Chaz Productions’ Élisabeth Perez will produce. Corsini reteams with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie (who has Robin Campillo’s Vazaha to be released next year). Production will last close to two months and a Cannes premiere is entirely possible.…...

The past is a home country in Corsica-born French director Thierry de Peretti’s second feature, A Violent Life. A crime saga chronicling Corsica’s gruesome 1990s nationalist feuds via the rise and fall of the lost generation who took part in them, it captures a topic seldom shown on the big screen, but a few scattered hints of old and recent mafia classics aside (from Coppola’s Godfather trilogy to Francesco Munzi’s 2014 Black Souls), the end result never quite feels like the gripping thriller it could have been.

The entry point in the island’s troubled decade is Stéphane (played here by newcomer Jean Michelangeli, in an assured debut). A bespectacled and tame-looking Paris-based Corsican, his cushy life in the capital takes a U-turn after an old time friend is murdered in the island by local thugs. Shaken but seemingly not surprised by the assassination, he ignores his...