Valeria Bruni Tedeschi on Mixing Personal Memory And Fiction in ‘Forever Young’

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentParis-based sales company Charades has closed a raft of deals on “Forever Young,” Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s film which competed at Cannes and earned a warm critical welcome. “Forever Young” opens at the end of the 1980s in Paris and follows a young troupe of comedians who have just have been admitted to Les Amandiers, the prestigious theater school headed by Patrice Chéreau. Bruni Tedeschi wrote the script alongside Agnès De Sacy and regular collaborator Noémie Lvovsky.

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EXCLUSIVE: Coda producer Pathé has concluded a raft of sales on its Cannes slate including for starry French drama Masquerade, Directors’ Fortnight entry Paris Memories and Penelope Cruz title L’Immensita.

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Refresh for latest…: The 75th Cannes Film Festival draws to a close tonight as the main awards, including the Palme d’Or, are soon to be handed out in the Palais. Scroll down for the list of winners which is being updated as prizes are announced.

This year has produced several films if terrorist attacks in France. One Year and One Night by Isaki Lacuesta (which premiered in Berlin this year) and November by Cedric Jimenez which is being shown out of competition at Cannes, and Alice Winocour’s deeply personal Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) which was inspired by Winocour’s own brother who was in the midst of the November 2015 attacks at Bataclan. The film follows a woman’s journey to recovery after surviving a mass shooting. 

Based on her own time spent in the acting school Les Amandiers, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” aims to recreate a very specific time and place both in her life and in France, more than it cares to inform her audience about what, exactly, was so special about this school. Funded in the 1980s by Patrice Chéreau, a successful and daring director of theatre, opera and film, Les Amandiers did not last very long but for a few years it was considered to be one of the most exciting places in France and even Europe for young actors to develop their crafts, and for directors to find new talent.

CANNES – To be frank, it’s hard to explain Olivier Assayas‘ impressive new limited series “Irma Vep” with a simple logline. It’s primarily about a modern-day movie star, Mira (Alicia Vikander), who is starring in a new limited series inspired by the classic French silent film “Les Vampires” which also inspired a 1997 film, “Irma Vep.” In the HBO series, the director (Vincent Lacoste), is remaking his own movie of “Irma Vep” into a limited series, just like Assayas is in real life.

Jessica Kiang There are no more potential-killing words of creative advice than “write what you know.” Certainly it’s a shame that when donning her screenwriter chapeau, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi — a fine actress and a director with a deft, light touch, especially with breezy character comedy — seems to have taken them so to heart. Once again she goes back to the autobiographical well for her latest directorial trifle, “Forever Young,” which she co-writes alongside Agnès De Sacy and regular collaborator Noémie Lvovsky.Once again the result is set in a rarefied world of which Bruni Tedeschi has intimate knowledge: this time the 1980s acting school run by the late French theater, opera and film director Patrice Chéreau.

Guy Lodge Film CriticIt’s over six years since the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that ruptured the country’s national consciousness and political agenda, but the events are only gaining currency for European filmmakers. This year’s Berlin festival brought us Isaki Lacesta’s “One Year, One Night,” an impressionistic reflection on survivor’s guilt in the long-term wake of the Bataclan nightclub massacre; at Cannes this year, Cedric Jimenez’s thriller “November” takes a more procedural approach to the aftermath.

French writer/director Alice Winocour was interested in the connection between the body and the mind before it was cool. Her feature debut “Augustine” (2012) told the story of a supposedly “hysterical” woman and her doctor in 19th century France, while “Disorder” (2015) centered on a soldier-turned bodyguard suffering from PTSD.

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