Lionel Baier: Last News

Memories can’t be cancelled. The Boltanski family never celebrates significant dates, even their own birthdays; according to the narrator who leads us into this whimsical fantasy of post-war Jewish life, they live only for the present moment. In May 1968, the present moment consists of riots in the streets and demands for the government to step down, although it is the utopian dreams on the posters slapped up on walls that embody the movement’s true spirit: “Beauty is in the streets!” “Banning is banned!”. One of the Boltanski sons is out there at the Sorbonne with his wife, changing the world; the rest of the family are together in their house in Paris, where they like to huddle in one room, eating assortments of snacks on the bed while the revolution is televised.

Siddhant Adlakha Set during the May 1968 revolution in Paris, Lionel Baier’s “The Safe House” is a comic family portrait filled with ideas that never fully cohere. The film is based on Christophe Boltanski’s Prix Femina-winning biographical novel of the same name, a fact of which we’re reminded numerous times via authorial voiceover.

Callum McLennan Paris, May 1968, becomes more than a backdrop in “The Safe House” (“La cache”), Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier‘s latest. It’s an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s Prix Femina winning novel, “La cache,” produced by Bande à Part Films and co-produced with Red Lion, Les Films du Poisson, RTS Radio Télévision Suisse and SRG SSR, making it a French, Swiss and Luxembourgish co-production. The comedy-drama, which debuts in competition at Berlinale, sees Baier observe an eccentric family.

JD Linville Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier (“Stealth,” “Longwave”) has completed the third movement in his sweeping film tetralogy concerning Europe with “Continental Drift (South).” The film, which debuts at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, sees Baier shifting his focus southward to Sicily in 2020, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and deep within the European migrant crisis.Isabelle Carré (“Remembering Beautiful Things,” “Mademoiselle Else”) plays Nathalie Adler, who has been dispersed to a migrant camp in Catania, Sicily ahead of a visit from Macron and Merkel only to find her pugnacious son Albert, played by Canadian Théodore Pellerin (“Genesis,” “My Salinger Year”) working against her interests as an activist. The film, which is produced by Bandita Films with RTS and Les Films du Losange handling sales, strikes a balance between political satire and heartfelt drama, as Nathalie and Albert push and pull, magnetic at the edges of their estrangement.