The Festival team wishes all those who were involved in the 19th French Film Festival a properous New Year: the 2011 programme attracted record audiences.

We look forward to seeing you all at our 20th Anniversary Edition in November 2012.

(Image Courtesy of Pathe International – Titeuf, le film 2011)

Photographer credit: Danielle Arbid photographed by Pascaline Hofmann

A Lebanese-born and Paris-based director, Danielle Arbid, has just been notified that her latest film Beirut Hotel cannot be shown in the country where it was filmed last year.
 
Its release in Beirut, orginally scheduled for 19 January 2012, has just been cancelled.
 
The censorship committee argued that : “The film’s depiction of the political situation would endanger Lebanon’s security.” The committee insisted that all the sequences mentioning the assasination of Rafic Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, who died in 2005, should be removed.

Danielle Arbid stresses that Beirut Hotel is a pure fiction, but based on real events. It’s inspired by stories which have appeared in the Press. “But there is nothing revelatory, nor does it support or attack any Lebanese political party,” she says.
 
The story revolves around a young Lebanese singer (Darine Hamze) trying to break free from her ex-husband’s influence. She meets Mathieu (Charles Berling), a French lawyer on business, who is tracked down and suspected of spying. Over ten days, they experience an affair made up of fear and desire, intrigue and violence. Beirut Hotel is described as “a romance on the edge, mirroring a country wavering between war and peace, where at any moment everything could be turned upside down…”
 
Danielle Arbid also ran into trouble with her first feature In the Battlefields (2004) censored for anyone under 18. And her second, A Lost Man (2007) for which the authorities demanded she excise 17 different parts of the film, officially remains unseen in Lebanon.
 
Arbid is adept at portraying the game of loyalties and betrayals that’s become a feature of the country’s political and social landscape.
 
Selected in the official competition of Locarno Film Festival this year and recently shown in Glasgow and Edinburgh as part of the official selection of the French Film Festival UK, Beirut Hotel is a TV-film produced for the French-German TV channel Arte. It will air in prime time on 20 January 2012, with an expected audience of some 1.5million viewers.
 
The film is a Pelleas and Maia Films French production. It is co-produced by the Lebanese Orjouane and the Swedish, Film I vast.

For further information / interviews contact: Richard Mowe 07710 762 149 or richardmowe@mac.com / or les Films Pelleas (David Thion) : 0033 1 42 74 31 00   

Photographer credit: Pascaline HoffmanFor images from the film: https://public.me.com/richardmowe

Radio Mentale DJs Jean-Yves Leloup and Eric Pajot added sound to the silence at the Hippodrome in Bo’ness. The 1913 episode of Juve against Fantomas was playing in the 100 year old restored cinema. Radio Mentale’s score – an interesting remix of cinema scores, followed the adventures of the master of evil and suspense Fantomas. It ended with the eerie cry of the 1964 Fantomas (with Louis de Funes) ready for new adventures.

Award-winning and previous FFF guest director Danielle Arbid presented her new film BEIRUT HOTEL at the GFT yesterday evening. She explained to a rapt audience the difficulties of making films in Lebanon. She is used to controversy: her previous film A Lost Man (FFF 2008) needed to be cut in order to screen in her native Lebanon so it was never shown. The film screens in Edinburgh today 29 November at 8.30pm.

(Danielle Arbid at her Q & A in Glasgow)

A chance encounter in a railway station, a Frenchman in Scotland and a Scot in Paris: this is how Vincent Vizioz and Scottish actor Jamie Sives met. They presented the award-winning short TREMBLAY-EN-FRANCE.

Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel arrived on Tuesday in Edinburgh airport hot foot from Stockholm. They are here to introduce their new film, award-winning THE FAIRY at Fimlhouse in Edinburgh the same day, then GFT on Wednesday and finally at Dundee’s DCA on Thursday 24 November. They enchanted their audience in Glasgow when Fiona Gorden, showed her ancestry, by downing a can of Irn Bru.

After London and Edinburgh the Christophe Honoré road show moved to Glasgow Film Theatre where the packed audience empathised with his treatment of (among others) a mother and daughter relationship over three generations from Sixties onwards with Ludivine Sagnier as the younger incarnation, Chiara Mastroianni as the daughter and the matriarch Catherine Deneuve. Honoré whose films feature strong scores in collaboration with Alex Beaupain, revealed that he had strong affinity with the Glasgow band Belle and Sebastian.
(Photo: from left Chloe Derache a fan from GFT audience, Christophe Honoré and James Steel (FFF Chairman).