Scampia is a suburb to the north of Naples, and a crossroads for global drug trafficking. Gomorra follows the lives of a dozen characters involved in the activities of the Camorra at different levels, all bound by the economic system of the most important criminal organisation in Europe.

With their disappointed and broken hopes and destinies, the characters in Gomorra are subject to a law that, although it is not overt, governs the lives of the people who live in the suburbs of Naples. The Camorra takes charge of its members from an early age, after a rite of passage that is as brutal as it is symbolic, and accompanies them after retirement with a pension scheme. Trafficking in drugs of all kinds, control of the rag trade, both legal and otherwise, the “management” of waste – we are spared nothing of the organisation’s activities, and the film, adapted from the bestseller by Roberto Saviano describing the organisation’s activities in Naples which earned its author a death sentence from the underworld, relies on its documentary skill. The director’s desire to address the subject comprehensively is palpable, as he uses the experiences of the individual characters to relate the tangible reality of everyday life in this suburb to the north of Naples. What interests the director is the everyday lives of ordinary people and the direct effects of the Camorra’s activities on the population of Scampia. But –and this is really one of the strong points of this remarkable film– the functioning of the Camorra in Naples never takes precedence over the dramaturgical aspect or the awesomely effective directing.
Gomorra is not only a brilliant documentary study – it is also a truly great genre film. Indeed by concentrating too much on the informative aspect of the film there is a risk of overlooking what makes it a great film. The filming and the photography are brilliant, staying close to the characters, sometimes seeing the world through their eyes, sometimes merely following them, but always there, with dynamic, inspired directing. Breathing palpable life into the characters, the director avoids the pitfall of turning them into major representative stereotyped figures and, beyond the documentary aspect, he makes us experience and feel with them the pregnant presence of the Camorra and the influence it exerts on everyone’s lives, whether they like it or not. At no time does the director use the mythology and iconography typical of the Mafia film. There is no indulgence in describing the underworld, or in the way of handling the other aspect of this ordinary war –violence– which is dry and cold, harsh and summary. In a word – ordinary.

One of the films in the official selection at the last Cannes Festival, where it received the Grand Prix, Gomorra is an exciting lesson in the cinema and proof of the rediscovered vitality of European cinema which, in Italy, Spain and Germany, is once more producing films for the general public that are both intelligent and technically brilliant.

Olivier Gonord

The Big Lebowski (1998) by Joel and Ethan Coen
“I’ve seen this film more than six times. And each time it makes me laugh like the very first time. The plot is crazy and delirious as often with the Coen brothers. What’s particulary outstanding in this movie though is the characters. “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges), Walter (John Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi) embody three attaching and realistic characters while being incredibly dumb! The absolute loser, the nevrotic and the punching bag -three characters we all met in a school yard! Basing their storyline on this trio, the Coen brothers created a unique mix they’re the only ones to know about: realism, surrealism and absurd. Dialogues are fabulous, the dream sequences taken from the musicals of the 70s are perfect ; the direction is simple, consistent and always under control. It’s a very American movie but also very universal, sexy, made up like a good song with a very strong visual aspect. Also, the directors dare everything, like that amazing end when the wind blows Donny’s ashes on the Dude’s face. The punching-bag takes a revenge on Walter, his torturer, but the three still stick together! This is also eventually a film about friendship.”

Synopsis: Jeff Lebowski, a.k.a. “The Dude”, is a lazy man, who spends most of his time drinking shots and playing bowling with his buddy Walter. One day, two burglars hit him down. It seems like someone called Jackie Treehorn wants to recover a pile of money to a guy named Lebowski. But the burglars made a mix-up: the Lebowski they were looking for is a millionaire from Pasadena. The Dude decides to meet this wealthy man to obtain a refund for his damaged carpet…

About director Hany Tamba: Hany Tamba was awarded a Cesar (French Academy Award) in 2006 for his short film named After Shave. On August 13, his first feature film is released in France: Melodrama Habibi. The movie relates the story of Bruno Patrice (Patrick Chesnais), a star singer of the 70s, invited in Lebanon for the birthday of the wife of a rich billionaire, who didn’t forget about his past hit… In a gentle, funny and nostalgic way, the director keeps on with his exploration of the Lebanese society, its wounds, vitality and memory blanks…

After Battle Cries, Made in the USA and Stormy Weather, in which you worked on more “serious” subjects (even if it didn’t exclude a light tone), nobody expected you back on the side of the screwball comedy. How was born the idea of Back Soon?
Jean-Luc Gaget, my co-writer, and I had spent two years working on a script that never became a film -Patrick Sobelman, my producer, was the one who introduced me to him. Jean-Luc had just finished the writing of a TV movie produced by Patrick’s company and directed by Lucas Belvaux. Working with Jean-Luc is like playing ping pong: his thoughts help me progress and vice versa. So, we thought: let’s do something totally crazy where we’ll have fun. I actually wanted to let myself go in an extravagant script, have no limits and rush totallt fearless, write for people I love. I imagined roles for people I had met, especially some musicians from the Icelandic scene I met in Reykjavik. I took pictures, talked with many performers, actors, musicians, writers… and little by little, each one of them brought something to the script of the movie. Also, I wanted to make people laugh. In my previous features, people were often moved and they would come after the screening to talk to me about their emotions. Here, I wanted to hear their reactions, to hear their laughs. It’s the first time I work with this genre even though I shot many “comic” documentaries: Barbara tu n’es pas coupable (Barbara You’re Not Guilty), Nobody Move! etc… I think I want to keep on telling funny stories that are also sad in a way because it’s what life’s made of in the end.

The movie is an ode to Didda Jónsdóttir, whom you directed in Stormy Weather and even portrayed for the series Faces from Europe. Did you write the movie for her? Is Anna actually Didda?
Didda isn’t Anna but what they have in common is an energy, a strength and an enthusiasm that move people who surround them in a way only Icelandic winds can do. I met Didda five years ago, in a bar in Reykjavik. She ended up playing Loa, co-starring with Elodie Bouchez in my previous feature: Stormy Weather. She had never acted before, yet she won the Icelandic Academy Award for Best Actress for this role.

The characters of Back Soon look a bit like Northern “cousins” of the women burglars from Nobody Move! -some kind of “nice outlaws”. You seem to share a genuine tenderness for people living outside the social system.
Since always… Seeking inside a person, who seems far from us, what is, deeper inside, the same reason they are close to us. To connect. Maybe it’s because my origins are so “fragmented”, plural.

The movie seems to be very spontaneous, were the actors able to improvise or was everything already written?
There was an original structure as far as the script, the plot and the dialogues were concerned. And then I allowed myself some time at the end of the sequences to let improvisation jump on stage. For example by not cutting right away or by saying “I have what I need but let’s make one more shot, in which you guys can let yourselves go”. Even if these “free” shots are not always shown, this method provided a real drive during the shooting, a joy of being there.

How was born the idea of the musical theme?
It was one of the very first ideas, which was developed with Martin Wheeler, who composed the score of almost all my features.
Whether with my documentaries or my fictions, Martin follows the films as from the writing stage to work on the soundtrack. Not to emphasize the image but to move along with it, to trouble it, to disturb it, to make it vibrate.
The original idea of the soundtrack of Back soon was to weave different sound elements that will little by little assemble to create the final song of the film, an Icelandic/Jamaican song, a piece of Scandinavian reggae music, written and performed by Sigurdur Gudmundsson and his band Hjalmar…
Those different elements (voice, drums, bass line, etc.) spread out into the film space. The very notion of space is important because the movie is partly a road-movie, and the characters are displayed in large landscapes, where the road and the cloudy rainy skies contribute to the rhythm of the story.
The goal of this work is to create a very specific atmosphere around the main character, Anna, according to the principle and the rhythm of a pregnancy. So, that music we hear all through the movie will give birth to the Icelandic reggae song of the end.
I think that that desire to “gather”, for each film, musicians, whose roads wouldn’t have crossed otherwise is linked to my “fragmented” origins (Iceland, USA, Central Europe). The fact that those meetings and understandings are made concrete in a song played live in the kitchen where the different characters of the movie get together embodies that desire.

Olivier Gonord

SYNOPSIS
Anna Hallgrimsdottir a poetess, dish washer and marijuana dealer in her late thirties lives in Reykjavik with her two sons, Krummi and Ulfur. Anna is tired of her lifestyle and the coldness of Iceland and wishes to show her sons more of the world.
Finally she decides to do something about it, move on, and somewhat change her lifestyle. The first step in her revival is to sell her business which consists of her mobile telephone which includes her big list of clients.
The sale is an unusual one and the potential buyer promises her the asking price within 48 hours.
During those 48 hours Anna gets into all kinds of “Icelandic familial adventures” as her kitchen fills up with customers/friends, partying, while waiting for her to come Back Soon.

More details about Back Soon: http://www.zikzak.is/back-soon

ABOUT SOLVEIG ANSPACH
Sólveig Anspach was born in Vestmannaeyjar (Iceland) from an American father and an Icelandic mother.
She graduated from French film school FEMIS in 1989.
She directed many documentaries, among which Nobody Move!, Made in the USA, Faux tableaux dans vrais paysages islandais (Fake Paintings in Real Icelandic Landscapes). But it’s Battle Cries starring Karin Viard and Laurent Lucas that contributed to her international notoriety in 1999. In 2003, she directed Stormy Weather starring Elodie Bouchez and Didda Jonsdottir, which was selected at Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard section.
Sólveig Anspach is currently shooting Louise Michel, a TV movie for France 2 starring Sylvie Testud, and also writing Soon Coming, the sequel of Back Soon.

Richard Avedon
Photographs 1946 - 2004
From 07 01 2008 until 09 28 2008

Organised by the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, this exhibition surveys the whole of Richard Avedon’s career, starting with his first steps as a fashion photographer at the end of the Second World War.

Avedon continued to photograph the creations of the big Parisian couture houses up until 1984, working first for Harper’s Bazaar and then for Vogue. Finding fashion photography too static and stuffy, he transformed it by introducing movement and photographing his models in public spaces.
He also made many portraits of celebrities from the worlds of literature, art and show business, always taking care to shatter the icon in order to reveal the true personality behind the public image.

In the 1960s, Avedon also ventured into photojournalism, covering such hot subjects as Civil Rights campaigners in the American South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, patients in a mental hospital and the Vietnam war — both in the country itself, where he photographed military officers and napalm victims, and back home, where, a pacifist himself, he covered the hippie protests against the war.

In 1974 Avedon exhibited a series of his father, then dying of cancer, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this decade he continued his fashion photography and reportage, and also produced a series of 73 portraits of America’s political elite for Rolling Stone.

The early 1980s saw Avedon produce a long series of 700 portraits of middle class and poor Americans from the 17 western states. As if to refute the myth of the American West, these portraits, all taken outdoors against a white ground, show closed, tense and introverted faces with an intense but subjacent emotional power. At the end of the decade, a commission from the French magazine Égoïste gave Avedon the chance to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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