"A towering, teetering and exquisitely-wrought puzzle box." The Cinema Guild has released an official US trailer for a French-German indie film titled Human Flowers of the Flesh, which originally premiered at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival last year. Opening at the Metrograph in NYC in April, with hopefully more cinemas to follow. In her spellbinding followup to the critically acclaimed Drift, Helena Wittmann invites us to relinquish control and join her on a Mediterranean voyage unlike any other. Ida lives on a sailing yacht with a crew of five men. While on shore leave in Marseilles, she becomes fascinated with the French Foreign Legion and decides to sail to Sidi Bel Abbès (see Google Maps), the Legion's former headquarters in Algeria. This stars Angeliki Papoulia as Ida, along with Steffen Danek, Gustavo Jahn, Ingo Martens, and Denis Lavant. The film looks extremely experimental and intensely meditative, definitely not for everyone,...
- 3/17/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Helena Wittmann on Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) in Human Flowers of Flesh: “She’s not looking for fulfilment of any sort, but only following her curiosity.”
Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.
Helena Wittmann with Anne-Katrin Titze on Denis Lavant as Galoup: “I mean, you met him, so you know. He’s really a rich personality.”
Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew from different countries cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in...
Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.
Helena Wittmann with Anne-Katrin Titze on Denis Lavant as Galoup: “I mean, you met him, so you know. He’s really a rich personality.”
Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew from different countries cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in...
- 9/28/2022
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew, from different countries, cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in Helena Wittmann’s quietly disturbing Human Flowers Of Flesh (a highlight in the Currents programme of the 60th New York Film Festival).
Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.
Lavant, wonderfully unpredictable and agile as ever sashays along the...
Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.
Lavant, wonderfully unpredictable and agile as ever sashays along the...
- 9/26/2022
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
One of the most entrancing films I’ve seen in the last few years has been Helena Wittmann’s debut feature Drift, screened at New Directors/New Films back in 2018, and beautifully reviewed by our own Leonardo Goi here. The German director is now prepping her follow-up feature and the cast has been announced, along with new details.
Variety reports that Denis Lavant and Angeliki Papoulia will lead the Mediterranean-set feature Human Flowers of Flesh. The 16mm-shot film, featured in Locarno’s The Films After Tomorrow spotlight, follows our heroine Ida, who navigates with an all-male crew along the route of the French Foreign Legion from Marseille to Sidi-Bel-Abbes via Calvi on a contemporary odyssey that is at once political and sensuous. Wittman, who serves as her own cinematographer, has said Claire Denis’ Beau Travail is an inspiration, as well as Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray.
“It is an...
Variety reports that Denis Lavant and Angeliki Papoulia will lead the Mediterranean-set feature Human Flowers of Flesh. The 16mm-shot film, featured in Locarno’s The Films After Tomorrow spotlight, follows our heroine Ida, who navigates with an all-male crew along the route of the French Foreign Legion from Marseille to Sidi-Bel-Abbes via Calvi on a contemporary odyssey that is at once political and sensuous. Wittman, who serves as her own cinematographer, has said Claire Denis’ Beau Travail is an inspiration, as well as Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray.
“It is an...
- 8/10/2020
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Sounding a note of hope for the 20 titles selected for Locarno Festival’s highest-profile competition, The Films After Tomorrow, Helena Wittmann’s entry, the sensuous sea odyssey “Human Flowers of Flesh,” is scheduled to go into production on Aug. 12, with “Dogtooth” actor Angeliki Papoulia and “Holy Motors’” Denis Lavant attached to star.
The news gains particular force coming on the eve of a reimagined Locarno Festival in Switzerland, Europe’s biggest mid-summer movie event, whose Films After Tomorrow strand aims to prize and promote movies — 10 Swiss, 10 international — whose production was foreclosed or halted by the Covid-19 pandemic, as was the case with Wittmann’s second feature.
The producers of “Human Flowers of Flesh,” Germany’s Fünfurfilm and France’s Tita Productions, had originally planned to location scout in Algeria’s Sidi-Bel-Abbes in March 2020 and then shoot a part of the movie in May, but all their plans were scuppered by the pandemic.
The news gains particular force coming on the eve of a reimagined Locarno Festival in Switzerland, Europe’s biggest mid-summer movie event, whose Films After Tomorrow strand aims to prize and promote movies — 10 Swiss, 10 international — whose production was foreclosed or halted by the Covid-19 pandemic, as was the case with Wittmann’s second feature.
The producers of “Human Flowers of Flesh,” Germany’s Fünfurfilm and France’s Tita Productions, had originally planned to location scout in Algeria’s Sidi-Bel-Abbes in March 2020 and then shoot a part of the movie in May, but all their plans were scuppered by the pandemic.
- 8/4/2020
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
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