Bangkok--Dec 24--Bangkok International Film Festival
French director Olivier Assayas is to be honored at the 2005 Bangkok International Film Festival with a special retrospective of his past works as well as his latest, "Clean", starring Maggie Cheung. Cheung won the Best Actress Award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for her role in this film as Emily, a former drug addict who’s trying to get her life back together in order to be reunited with her young son.
Assayas and Cheung have collaborated before in his 1996 film, "Irma Vep", an existential comedy on French filmmaking scene and homage to Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent classic "Les Vampires". In the film, Cheung plays herself, an actress from Hong Kong who was cast in a new project by a veteran French director (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, best known for his role as Antoine Doinel in films by Francois Truffaut). The film will also be screened at the festival.
Two other films by Assayas set for the BKKIFF are: Les Destinees Sentimentales (2000), an epic tale set in early 20th Century rural France starring Emmanuelle Beart, Charles Berling and Isabelle Huppert, and Demonlover (2002), a sci-fi thriller starring Connie Nielson, Gina Gershon and Chloe Sevigny.
Born in 1955, Assayas is widely regarded as one of France’s most respected contemporary filmmakers. He started out his career as a critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. His breakthrough came in the mid 80’s when he collaborated with Andre Techine on the films "Rendez-vous" and "Scene of the Crime". He made his first feature, "Disorder", in 1986.
Assayas cited many Asian “new wave” filmmakers among his main influences, and also directed a documentary on the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien in 1997. His credits include the films "Paris s’eveille" (1991), "Cold Water" (1994) and "Late August, Early September" (1998), as well as the book "Conversations with Ingmar Bergman" (1991) with Stig Bjorkman.
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