Presented by Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC)
Jessica Forever
Directed by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
Official selection
Toronto International Film Festival 2018, Berlin International Film Festival 2019
Director
Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
Writer
Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
Cast
Aomi Muyock, Sebastian Urzendowsky
Producer
Emmanuel Chaumet
Cinematographer
Marine Atlan
Composer
Ulysse Klotz
Editor
Vincent Tricon
contact
Shudder
"A feminist subversion of typical saviour narratives"Sarah Ward, SCREEN DAILY
In a near future, in a common suburb of soul-less villas with beige, roughcast walls, a disturbing calm has been present for too long. The silence is suddenly broken. A bay window explodes into a million pieces. A boy has thrown himself in it, pursued by the threatening murmur of a thick cloud of killing drones. He is saved by a gang of armed young men, led by a woman, Jessica (Aomi Muyock, seen in Gaspar Noé’s LOVE). She has a soft voice, an unplaceable accent, and piercing blue eyes. She gathers the lost boys of a dystopian Neverland, where she prepares them for love and death.
AS LONG AS SHOTGUNS REMAIN (winner of a Golden Bear, 2014 Berlinale), and AFTER SCHOOL KNIFE FIGHT, one third of the phantasmagorical triptych ULTRA RÊVE (selected in Cannes’ Critic Week 2018) — the short films of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have brought them to great heights from the get-go. With JESSICA FOREVER, these promising paragons of alternative French cinema unleash their brutal and poised feature debut. Affirmed auteurs, their fetishes get refined here: youth, violence and the hyper-contemporary arranged around languorous dialogues and ghostly action sequences. A loud shootout gives way to a luminous tree ; the romantic cohabitation between the mundane stillness and transcendental wonders. Modern poets fed as much by Claire Denis’ BEAU TRAVAIL as video games (such as Metal Gear Solid) and B-grade action flicks, Poggi and Vinel break all the barriers before them, channeling the buried rage of a lost generation heavy with the burden of a man's body and a child’s bruised mind. – Celia Pouzet
Showings
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