28434: Minsky:(announce) new narrative film--Heading South--set in Haiti will open in July

[corbetre@webster.edu]

From: Tequila Minsky <tminsky@ix.netcom.com>

I saw this film at a screening last nite, takes place in the 70's, the 
touristic  period of time many of us heard about, the dialogue rings 
very true.
Its based on 3 short stories by Dany Laferriere.  They had to delay 
shooting for a year based on the situation. The street and market 
scenes were shot in Haiti.

Director Laurent Cantet follows up his critically acclaimed "Time Out", 
set during an austere wintertime in France and Switzerland, with 
Heading South, set in Haiti during the late 1970s. Based on stories by 
Dany Laferriere, the heat comes not only from the summertime tropical 
setting. Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, and Louise Portal head a 
group of single middle-aged women who have come for sun, fun, and 
romance. They desire the solicitous attention of attractive young 
Haitian men, and teenaged Legba (Menothy Cesar, winner of the Marcello 
Mastroianni Award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival) is an especially 
prized companion for whom the women vie. The women tourists' Queen Bee, 
Rampling, "is the ideal actress to convey" her Wellesley professor's 
"liberated carnality, Bostonian snobbery and racism, plus a deep 
vulnerability" (Jay Weissberg, Variety). Heading South received the 
Cinema for Peace Award at Venice, and has been called "(a) 
gem...shattering" (Stephen Holden, New York Times.)

Director Laurent Cantet:

I discovered Haiti by chance in January 2002. I went there to meet 
someone for vacation,  never dreaming that I would make a film. I 
stayed one week and left with the certainty that  I would be back. It 
was a very short stay, just enough time to set off a multitude of 
powerful  emotions, ranging from fascination to revolt, from this sort 
of peaceful bliss to extreme  dejection faced with the misery seen 
there. All the paradoxes that rapidly make your status as  a foreigner 
embarrassing. On the return flight I read Dany LaferrieÌ?reʼs book, La 
Chair du MaiÌ?tre. The short stories take  place in the 70s, but I was 
able to relate very well, the proximity of such absolute beauty  and 
the unacceptable, of nonchalance and tragedy. The fact that the book 
often raises the  issue of foreigners who discover this country for the 
first time certainly made these tales more  accessible to me. I donʼt 
really like generalities. I did not want to create an imaginary 
country, an entity that  would be the South, and another one, women 
from the North. It is important to name a  country, define a framework 
and a period in time. I didnʼt want this to be a contemporary  fable. 
Which is why we did everything in our power to shoot part of the film 
in Haiti, even  though this meant postponing the film for one year 
because of the events that took place  there during the winter of 2004 
(the fall of Aristide), which made the presence of a film crew  
impossible.

 From novel to screenplay  It was the structure of the novel that 
initially caught my attention. It is made up of individual  narratives 
by different characters. Tales told in the first person, more like 
confessions than  dramatic monologues. This design is not very 
cinematographic, it is true, but it left me enough  room to construct a 
scenario. The film could be born without being the copy of the novel. I 
also  drew inspiration from two other short stories in the same 
collection, La MaiÌ?tresse du Colonel  and LʼApreÌ?s-Midi dʼun Faune. The 
idea of maintaining the monologues was clear from the start. It gives 
each woman the  opportunity to talk about her relation to men in very 
direct terms, and in her own words. When  Brenda tells us about her 
first intimate encounter with Legba, we sense how hard it is for her to 
  do this, to find and pronounce certain words. But we also hear the 
pleasure she experiences  when she succeeds. A pleasure that sends her 
back in time (and us as well) to the pleasure she  felt on this 
afternoon that was so important for her. It is more unsettling to hear 
her talk about  it than it is to watch the images of it.     The 
literary aspect of these confessions interested me as well. It goes 
ʻʻagainst the grainʼʼ of  the rest of the film, which I wanted very 
raw, stripped of all the prettiness that the paradisiacal  setting, the 
torrid atmosphere, and even the cast could easily generate. Language is 
an  important element in the film. The different levels of language, 
the blend of languages, are  indications of this ʻʻothernessʼʼ that the 
film observes, clues to deciphering the power wielded  by some over 
others. The outline of the dialogues and the type of language used are 
often  more significant than the dialogues themselves.