bears
TRANSCRIPT
BEARS (Working title)Short fiction project by Guillaume Protsenko
3 bis rue de Varize 28000 Chartres
France+79263701773
SYNOPSIS:
After a violent fight with her French husband, Olga decides to take distances with him, to leave France for a while and take her young daughter, Charlotte, with her to Russia. Without warning, they leave the house and move to a holiday rental apartment on the Normandie shore, waiting for their pass-ports to be ready. There, they spend some happy time, floundering on the end-less sand beaches at low tide. But they won’t be able to hide long, as the artificial bubble of happiness she built around her and her daughter, blows up. What was supposed to remain a couple crisis will turn into a kidnapping. This will be the beginning of a vicious circle of cynism and violence from which Charlotte will be the poor and innocent victim.
(The story is inspired from a true story of a French-Russian couple who several times kidnapped their own daughter from eachother)
- GENRE: Family drama.- LENGHT: 15-20 min- TARGET AUDIENCE: 12+- PRODUCTION FORMAT: 35mm- SHOOTING LOCATION: Basse Normandie, Cabourg (France)- SHOOTING LANGUAGE: French (main), Russian.- TACKLED ISSUES: Family, divorce, immigration, kidnapping.- PROVISIONAL BUDGET: 80k €
Script & Directing: Guillaume Protsenko, Image: Marton Vizkelety, Sound: Igor TarasovProduction: MVMT Films (France)
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
“If we could measure the distance that separates us from the ones we think are the closest, we would get scared.”
Jean Cocteau / Opium
Two years ago, a piece of news started a wave of debates concerning the custody rights of children of binational couples. The pretty sordid story couldn’t reach a moral conclusion, as both the parties involved seemed to have been guilty of misapprehention and had resorted to the use of pointless vio-lence. But one thing was sure: the poor young girl was suffering the most from the hate between her parents and from the lack of legislation; being turn and turn about violently kidnapped by both her Russian mother and her French father, and taken, from country to country, like a war trophy.
This story appealed to me as a particulary violent one. But the ridicu-lous escalation of violence (both parents resorted to mafia-like methods to get their child back) wasn’t as interesting to me as the mystery of the origin of such a blind violence within a couple.
How can such a wide gap open between people that loved each other? Did the cultural differences play a role in the process? How does the perspective of never see your child again emphasize the whole situ-ation? Which place is left for the child’s interests in such a conflictual context?
The movie won’t offer answers to those questions, but will instead ex-amine the psychological mechanisms and the chain of events that led this cou-ple to not even asking themselves those questions, anymore and hurt the ones they love. But may be, the proximity of a real exterior physical threat to their child could set their mind right before they reach a point of no return in their couple?
By introducing the obviously symbolical element of the escaped bear in the story, I wish to take distance with the widely spread realistic social es-thetics in which this kind of subject is usualy treated, therefore underlining the crosscultural essence of the couple and of the story itself. The movie could be the result of Arnaud Deplechin meeting Andeï Zviaguintsev: an unlikely esthetical mix that would play a game of bluring borders between symbolical realism and realistic symbolism . This is the challenge I put myself in front of: to manage a synthesis between my two countries and two schools of thoughts, French and Russian, in order to find a way out to this crual story...
The “child” of this two ideas of cinema, imbodied in Charlotte and her point of view on the world, throws an objective look to the story: she unconditionaly loves both of her parents. It’s up to her to build herself against all odds
PROVISIONAL PRODUCTION PLANNING:
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2011: PRE-PRODUCTION MARCH 2011: PRODUCTIONAPRIL-MAY 2011: POST-PRODUCTION RELEASAE DATE: JUNE 2011
3 bis rue de Varize 28000 Chartres
France+79263701773