DCFF 2018 Winner: Best Int’l Feature/Director/Actor/Actress.
Playing at 12:00pm Oct. 28th 2018 at Landmark Cinemas New West.
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Manuel Sanchez : DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, CO-WRITER
Lead actor Dominique Pinon notes:
“This film is at once pathetic and, paradoxically, funny.”
Filmed in the stunningly beautiful French Ardennes it features the river Meuse. Director Manuel Sanchez feels a deep attachment to this land that mixes industrial and rural landscapes and chose the title of the film with intentional homage to poet Arthur Rimbaud who is revered in the Ardennes, his birthplace. His poem “Le dormeur du Val,” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”) resonates throughout the film.
‘The Ardennes is a country of rain that holds the sky to the shoes and eyes of poets. The top and bottom, the sky and the earth are one. It is the country of Rimbaud and Verlaine that unites landscape and men,” says Sanchez.
La dorMeuse Duval was filmed primarily in Nouzonville, a small working-class town in the Meuse Valley. It is an environment to which Sanchez feels deeply attached.
‘All my life I have been a member of the working class and these days I consider myself a film worker, ‘a horrible worker,” to use the expression of Arthur Rimbaud.”
“This is a film you will want to watch again to try and answer the questions it leaves you pondering the first time through,” writes one reviewer. “It is quirky,” writes another, “a touchingly heartbreaking dramedy.”
La dorMeuse Duval is story of many layers — like the landscape where it was born.