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Exploring the female gaze in a unique and rather taboo fashion, Of Skin and Men (L’Amour des hommes) tells the story of a recent widow who begins taking eroticized photographs of the men around her Tunisian neighborhood.

Marked by an assured lead turn from The Secret of the Grain star Hafsia Herzi, this third feature by director Mehdi Ben Attia (I’m Not Dead) can be dramatically clunky in places and feels stretched a bit too thin. Yet it nonetheless offers an intriguing portrait of a young woman overcoming grief by exploring the flesh of the opposite sex, even if she...

Algerian filmmakers were the big winners when the awards were handed out today (Tues) at Locarno’s Open Doors co-production lab, this year dedicated to the Maghreb region.

The Open Doors Production Grant, worth $30,465 (Chf 30,000), was awarded to Narimane Mari’s Le Fort Des Fous, which is being produced by her Allers Retours Films with French co-producer Corinne Castel’s Centrale Electrique.

The Cnc’s $10,900 (€10,000) prize went to Karim Moussaoui’s debut feature En Attendant Les Hirondelles, which will be co-produced by France’s Philippe Martin and David Thion’s Les Films Pelléas.

A third prize for Algeria - the newly created Prix Mad Solutions including the financing of PR, mareting and press and publicity services - was presented to Yanis Koussim for his second feature Ruqya.

“Due to the number of strong projects in the Open Doors section, we decided to extend our Mad distribution award to two projects,” said Alaa Karkouti...

Tunisian filmmakers have withdrawn projects destined for Locarno’s Open Doors co-production lab in protest at the festival’s refusal to drop the Israeli focus in the Industry Days’ revamped First Look showcase.Click here for update (Aug 10)

Answering a call from the Tunisian branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (Bds) movement, Tunis-based Propaganda Productions decided to pull Nadia Rais’ debut, the animation feature Aller Simple, and Nejib Belkadhi’s third feature Retina, from the line-up of 12 projects from Open Doors’ focus on the Maghreb.

Subscriber CONTENTOpen Doors 2015: feature Open Doors 2015 project profiles Locarno: First Look at Israel

Producers Imed Marzouk and Badi Chouka and the two directors said in a statement that this decision had been taken as a reaction to Locarno’s partnership with the Israel Film Fund for the First Look showcase and “at the end of a week of fruitless negotiations with the festival’s management to revoke this partnership.”

According...

Mad Solutions among backers of Maghreb films in Co-pro Lab lineup.

Arab-focused promotion agency Mad Solutions will this year provide distribution and promotional support to one film of its choice in Locarno’s Open Doors section.

The strand will highlight directors from Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia with the section’s Co-production Lab pairing selected directors with other filmmakers and networking opportunities to bolster their films.

An award of $52,500 (50,000 Chf) is financed by the Open Doors initiative in collaboration with the town of Bellinzona and the Swiss production fund Visions Sud Est, also supported by the Dsc, while Icam (Investing in Culture & Art in the South Mediterranean), a new initiative funded by the European Union (Programme Med Culture), will offer, for the first time, a contribution of $21,900 (€20,000) for development or post-production.

The Cnc (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) will offer a prize worth $10,900 (€10,000) and Arte will finance a prize of $6,600 (€6,000).

The 12 films chosen...

Locarno Film Festival’s co-production lab, Open Doors, is dedicated this year to four countries from the Maghreb: Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia.

A total of 12 projects will be brought to Locarno by their directors and producers to present them to potential partners.

For the 13th edition,which runs August 8-11, the 12 selected projects are:

Aller simple by Nadia Raïs (Tunisia)Dieu reconnaîtra les siens by Hassan Legzouli (Morocco)En attendant les hirondelles by Karim Moussaoui (Algeria)Inhebek Hedi by Mohamed Ben Attia (Tunisia)L’Amour des hommes by Mehdi Ben Attia (Tunisia/France)Le Fort des fous by Narimane Mari (Algeria)Le Sacrifié by Amin Sidi-Boumédiène (Algeria)Pagan Magic by Fyzal Boulifa (Morocco/France)Retina by Nejib Belkadhi (Tunisia)Ruqya by Yanis Koussim (Algeria/France)Saint inconnu by Alaa Eddine Aljem (Morocco)The Colonel’s Stray Dogs by Khalid Shamis (Libya/South Africa)

Awards at the end of the four days include a prize worth $55,000 (50,000 Chf...

Exclusive: Paris-based producer Alexa Rivero will co-produce Amit Dutta’s The Invisible One through her newly-established production company Altamar Films.

Rivero worked as a line producer on Asghar Farhadi’s The Past and was also production manager on films such as Javier Fuentes-León’s Undertow (2009) and Mehdi Ben Attia’s The String (2009).

She will produce The Invisible One with Mumbai-based Anjali Panjabi, who executive produced Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s Good Morning Karachi and line produced Mira Nair’s segment in omnibus film Words With Gods.

The Invisible One received Hubert Bals funding for script and project development in 2012 and has been selected for this year’s Co-production Market at Film Bazaar. It tells the story of a young man who moves to the big city and is forced to rent a room built on top of a tree.

The opening credits to I'm Not Dead play over an intense string number that immediately calls to mind Hitchcock thrillers of yesteryear. While in many ways Mehdi Ben Attia's film is far more intimate and ambiguous (at least on the surface) than, say, Vertigo, the music choice is still fitting. Indeed, Attia has crafted an tense, thought-provoking examination of one of the suspense master's favorite themes: mistaken identity. Or in this case, a literally switched identity, which of course leads to mistakes. What differentiates Attia's version of this story from many others with similar content is the skillful way he develops both the characters and the situation and gently eases the audience into a "what-if" scenario that, when it reaches full speed, is absorbing and...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Unforgivable

Directed by André Téchiné

Written by André Téchiné and Mehdi Ben Attia

France, 2011

There have certainly been worse cases of writer’s block, but the main character in the new French film Unforgivable really lets his spin out of control. Unforgivable, from co-writer and director André Téchiné, tells an almost Hitchcockian story of how paranoia can drive people to ridiculous lengths. Téchiné’s unique decision to let the script itself not be so single-minded is both a breath of fresh air and a bit of a detriment to the film’s overall impact.

André Dussolier plays Francis, a bestselling crime novelist who just can’t find the inspiration to push him forward in the writing process. Unable to focus in his homeland of France, Francis decides to move to Venice to re-commit to his latest work of fiction. While finding a place to stay, he becomes enamored with his real estate agent,...

Title: Unforgivable (Impardonnables) Strand Releasing Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten Director: André Téchiné Writers: André Téchiné, Mehdi Ben Attia, from Philippe Djian’s novel Cast: André Dussolier, Carole Bouquet, Mauro Conte, Adriana Asti, Mélanie Thierry, Andrea Pergolesi Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 6/12/12 Opens: June 29, 2012 You don’t need a degree in psychology or history to realize that the past is always with us. You can’t escape its impact. Its memory will leave with feeling of guilt but also haunting regressions of past loves: familial, platonic and romantic. If you’re a filmmaker, whether in the seat of the director or the writer, you need the skill to bring an [ Read More ]...

Still from Gigola

Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival 2012 will screen ‘Country Focus – France’ package of two feature films and six short films portraying diverse queer expressions in contemporary French Cinema.

The festival will screen Gigola directed by Laure Charpentier and Le Fil (The String) directed by Mehdi Ben Attia.

Gigola is an exploration of the gay underbelly of Paris in the 1960s through the eyes of a suave lesbian hustler; and Le Fil is a bitter-sweet romance that’s plays on the class difference between a rich young man and a handsome young labourer.

Consul General of France in Mumbai Jean-Raphaël Peytregnet said, ‘It is a great honour that France is the country of honour at Kashish 2012. I wish this edition of Kashish festival great success and intend to be part of this prestigious festival for a long time.’

‘The films in this section are innovative in form, sensitive...

Impardonnables (English title: Unforgivable)

Directed by André Téchiné

Written by André Téchiné and Mehdi Ben Attia

France, 2011

French director and screenwriter André Téchiné has had a long and illustrious career, earning critical acclaim for a great variety of films. His works date as far back as 1969, the year he released his debut, Aline s’en va. Among the common threads which tie in his works are the complicated interactions and strained relationships between his characters, who are continuously confronted with emotional challenges they would much rather not deal with. The wealth they sometimes possess is belittled in the face of various interpersonal hardships. Another is that he adapts almost exclusively original scripts, oftentimes playing a major role in the writing process. For Impardonnables, his latest feature film, the inspiration differs, for it is based on a novel of the same name from Philippe Dijan. Dealing with a vastly different screenwriting process,...

Antonin Stahly and Salim Kechiouche

Remember last year's Meryl Streep movie It's Complicated? It had nothing on The String, the new foreign-language film by writer-director Mehdi Ben Attia, just out on video.

Malik, a closeted 30-year-old man, is the product of a French mother and an Arabic Tunisian father. When his father dies, he returns from France to Tunisia, to live with his wealthy mother, who is eager to marry him off to a woman. But Malik immediately has his eye on Bilal, the hunky handyman who works for his mother.

But the Tunisia of the film is a homophobic, classist, and racist place, rife with government corruption. Is it even possible for a rich, mixed-race aristocrat to love another man, especially one from a "lower" class — even if that lover turns out to be a secret, self-educated artist who, unlike Malik, has long accepted that he's gay?

As a drama,...