Marcia Romano: Last News

Audrey Diwan is attached to direct “The Marriage Portrait,” based on the novel by award-winning Northern Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell, best known for “Hamnet.” Variety hears that the project will see the fast-rising French auteur team with two of Europe’s leading arthouse producers in Ireland’s Element Pictures (which has three films in Cannes’ official selection this year) and Italy’s Wildside. Film4 helped develop the feature.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box is unveiling the trailer for “Revoir Paris,” a French drama boasting a Cesar-winning performance by Virginie Efira. The movie, which bowed at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and played at Toronto, will have its New York premiere on June 23 at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Film Center. A meditation on healing, the film tells the story of Mia (Efira), a married translator who survived a mass shooting in a Paris restaurant, and feels haunted by the trauma, yet unable to recollect memories of the tragic attack. Determined to reconstruct the sequence of events and reestablish a sense of normalcy, Mia finds herself repeatedly returning to the bistro where the shooting happened. In the process she forms bonds with fellow survivors, including banker Thomas (Benoît Magimel) and teenager Félicia (Nastya Golubeva). Efira, who just won a Cesar Award for her role in the film, stars opposite Magimel, the Cesar-winning actor of “Pacifiction,” as well as Grégoire Colin (“Both Sides of the Blade”) and Golubeva (“Annette”).

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box Filmshas acquired U.S. distribution rights to Alice Winocour’s heartfelt drama “Paris Memories” which world premiered at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight and had a gala screening at Toronto. It’s one of the five finalists for France’s official submission to the 95th Academy Awards. The critically acclaimed film stars Virginie Efira as Mia, a survivor of the terrorist attack that hit Paris venues, including the Bataclan concert hall and several bistros, in November 2015. Three months after the tragedy, Mia still feels unable to pick her life back up so she sets off to investigate her memories to find a way back to happiness.

Audrey Diwan’s Happening launched New Directors/New Films in April, mesmerizing viewers with the story of a brilliant literature student from a working-class background seeking an abortion to keep her life from derailing. In 1963 France the procedure was illegal. The suspense builds with each week a new chapter title as she seeks help from doctors, friends, the boy she slept with, and her body continue to change. Everyone backs away, judgmental, terrified of being thrown in prison for helping, or both.