Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 28, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The Berlin production company RAZOR FILM, run by Gerhard Meixner and Roman Paul, is represented at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with two projects: the first feature-length animated documentary, WALTZ WITH BASHIR (Written & Directed by Ari Folman), has been invited to the competition, and WOMB (Written & Directed by Benedek Fliegauf ) to the Atelier of the Cinéfondation.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR is the first feature-length animated documentary and takes the viewer on a visually powerful journey into the pop culture of the 1980s and West Beirut during the first Lebanon War. Twenty years after his deployment, director Ari Folman notices that he himself has no memory whatsoever of his time as a soldier – that period is simply missing. To fill this gap, he interviews former comrades.
The more he engages with the stories of others, the more dangerously close he comes to his own experiences. In enigmatic and psychedelic images, his own story finally breaks through into his consciousness. With an aesthetic inspired by 1980s video clips, Ari Folman’s self-experiment comes very close to the viewer emotionally and sensorially.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR was produced by Razor Film, Bridgit Folman Film Gang (Tel Aviv) and Les Films d`Ici (Paris) in coproduction with Arte France and ITVS. In Germany, WALTZ WITH BASHIR received funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.
The second project, WOMB, with which RAZOR FILM will be represented on the Croisette, comes from Hungarian writer and director Benedek Fliegauf, who won the Golden Leopard in Locarno in 2007 with his film MILKY WAY. WOMB is a participant in the Atelier of the Cinéfondation, where projects selected worldwide for the coming year are presented to industry professionals.
WOMB will be Fliegauf’s fourth feature film and tells a futuristic story about love, fate and humanity’s great dream of overcoming death.
The project was developed under the leadership of RAZOR FILM and Film4 (Peter Carlton) and is scheduled to be shot in English on Germany’s North Sea coast and in Berlin in autumn 2008, together with Inforg Studios, Budapest, and A.S.A.P. Films, Paris (“No Man’s Land” and “Before the Rain”). The production has so far received funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary, the European Union’s Media Programme, the Hungarian Film Fund and Script East.