Edited by Sarah Cooper
sarah.cooper@
emap.com For more tales from the Croisette, see
ScreenDaily.com/home/blogs DIARY The Slut promises to be far
darker in tone. Like her earlier short, Pathways, it explores what she calls “the relationship between sex and violence”. The title of the movie is deliberately provocative. The writer-director initially
Hagar Ben Asher The Slut
Delicate and dirty The Outback insiders
BY GEOFFREY MACNAB Israeli actress Hagar Ben Asher’s feature directing debut The Slut (sold by Films Distribution) will be screening in Critics’ Week. In the film, Ben Asher plays a
sexually reckless woman with two young children. When she falls in love with a vet, she hopes to put
BYSARAH COOPER The Cannes experience can be crazy enough even for the most seasoned festival-goer, so for the cast of Toomelah, most of whom have never left the Outback, stepping on to the red carpet to- night is going to be one hell of an experience. Screening in Un Certain
Regard, the second feature from Australian director Ivan Sen is set in the remote aboriginal commu- nity of Toomelah and centres on a
Words of wisdom
Literary adaptations have never been hotter, with Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin in Competition (review, p20) and Danish director Lone Scherfig’s eagerly awaited One Day due to hit screens later in the year. If you’re looking for the next
big one, you might want to head over to the Best Seller To Box Office pavilion in the Pantiero International Village from 5pm to 7pm today, where you can mingle with publishers and agents while sipping glasses of Ricard and Chivas. And if you can’t make it, check
out the Best Seller To Box Office website,
www.bs2bo.com, which has a database of all the hottest new books on the market.
sought to cast someone else in the lead. “I did see many actresses — some better than I am.” How- ever, with time running out and aware “there was nobody who was really right”, she cast herself. “Films in Israel are considera-
an end to her promiscuous ways. Ben Asher is famous as an
actress in Israel for her appear- ance in TV series The Ran Quartet and for her performance in Yuval Granot’s movie, Julia Mia, in which she plays a charming kleptomaniac with an uncanny resemblance to Julia Roberts.
bly low budget. We shot for 21 days. That was very, very stressful. We had many technical struggles and also emotional struggles, dealing with two little girls who had to act in the film (it was the first time they had acted in any- thing), and the sex scenes are a delicate issue,” Ben Asher recalls.
Rebecca Daly
Making her feature debut in Directors’ Fortnight with spooky thriller The Other Side Of Sleep, about a young woman who becomes obsessed with a murder investigation, Rebecca Daly is the first Irish female film-maker to be eligible for the Camera d’Or award in Cannes. She developed the feature while taking part in the Cannes Cinéfondation programme in 2008.
10-year-old wannabe gangster, Daniel, played by non-actor Daniel Connors. “I was out there [in Toomelah] looking for older boys, and this little boy came up and started swearing at them, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is my charac- ter.’ He has so much presence,” says Sen, whose family originate from the community and who spent years researching the film in order to keep things as authentic as possible. “It was just me, my car and the actors,” he says.
Daniel Connors and Ivan Sen Sen describes his film as “like a
very intimate guided tour through an aboriginal community… Most Australians might drive past the sign for Toomelah but they never turn off to see it. This is the chance for people to see beyond the sign.”
Gifted celebrities
BYSARAH COOPER In the name of investiga- tive journalism, we felt it was Screen’s duty to head to the Carlton Hotel to check out the DPA gift suite (run by Nathalie Dubois), which offers a tantalis- ing array of freebies to stars at- tending the festival. While browsing the Fendi
sunglasses and dreamy designer dresses, Screen bumped into Ro- manian director Radu Mihail- eanu, whose Competition film, The Source, screens on May 18. He seemed as overwhelmed as we did by all the goodies, espe- cially the all-expenses-paid trip
Radu Mihaileanu with Screen’s Sarah Cooper
to the luxury St Regis resort in Bora Bora in the Pacific, where Couples Retreat was shot. The best freebies might be
reserved for the stars, but Screen did pick up a gift or two and, most importantly, the business card of the St Regis general manager. If only there were a film festival in Bora Bora…
AT THE BOOKIES Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life is the 11/4 favourite to win the Palme d’Or according to bookmakers Paddy Power. With four women directors in Competition, Paddy is also quoting odds of 9/2 for a female winner. Come on, girls!
The Other Side Of Sleep n 16 Screen International at the Cannes Film Festival May 13, 2011
Where did the idea for the film come from? It started with an article in the paper about a girl whose body was found in a car park, wrapped in a duvet. Originally, that girl was the main character, but as it developed we decided we wanted to tell the story through the eyes of someone who wasn’t connected directly. The central character is a sleepwalker. How did you research that? Someone suggested that I take medication where the side effect was that it made you sleepwalk, but I thought it would be better to get someone else to do it and watch! Of course, we didn’t do that. But we did speak to a lot of people who had sleepwalking experiences and my co- writer [Glenn Montgomery]’s brother used to sleepwalk a lot, so he knew what people were capable of doing. How does your first feature reflect you as a film-maker? I always think I’m setting out to make something that is really quite realistic. But actually all of my films, while they
do have realistic elements, are quite expressionistic and have a strong psychological or dream element, which is often a surprise. The film is set, and was shot, in the Irish region of Offaly. Was it important to you to make your first feature in your home country? Yes, definitely. The stories I am interested in telling are not necessary Irish-specific, but that’s the environment I know. I’m really interested in the little details of how people look and behave and speak. So it makes sense for me to work in Ireland, at least for my early features. Do you have any advice for other first-time film-makers? Always try and see the bigger picture. There’s a danger of getting bogged down in details. Detail is important and I love narratives which have that textual detail, but there are times when if I could have let that something go and seen the bigger picture I maybe would have stressed myself out less. What’s next? There are a couple of books that I’m interested in adapting and a couple of ideas from newspaper articles. Sometimes you find a little nugget and it develops from there. The challenge is finding something that I can stay with for three years and still be interested in it.
Sarah Cooper
The Other Side Of Sleep is screening in Directors’ Fortnight tonight
Meet the debutants REBECCADALY, THEOTHERSIDEOFSLEEP
Today
Cloudy high 20°
Tomorrow Sunny
intervals, high 20°
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