Olivier Assayas will open the #15FestivalSevilla with his latest film: starring Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet and Vincent Macaigne, ‘Non-Fiction’ is a comedy that follows a marriage that has settled into a routine: he is an editor who questions the technological advances applied to literature, she is an actress pigeon-holed by her work on television. The mid-age crisis and infidelity threaten their relationship. With ironic dialogue and an air of Woody Allen, ‘Non-Fiction’ is the funniest film in the career of Olivier Assayas who will return to Seville two years after presenting ‘Personal Shopper’.
Like Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi will also compete for the Gold Giraldillo with their latest works. The former, winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2016 with 'L’Avenir', will present 'Maya', a drama that follows a reporter, freed after being held captive for several months in Syria, who travels to India to find himself again and recover from the trauma. There he will meet an adolescent, Maya, with whom he will have an unexpected emotional connection. Bruni Tedeschi, meanwhile, aims for self-referential laughs in 'Les estivants'; she plays the protagonist, a woman who spends her holiday with her dysfunctional family, while she tries to write the script of her next film and also overcome the break-up of her relationship.
Another comedy, in this case very black, is 'Pity', by Babis Makridis, which follows the day to day life of a lawyer whose happiness, however odd it may seem, depends on the amount of misfortune he is suffering. It had the collaboration of Efthymis Filippou, the regular scriptwriter for Yorgos Lanthimos ('Canino', 'The Lobster', `The Sacrifice of a Sacred Deer’). The Festival’s Official Section in competition is completed with 'What You Gonna Do When the World is on Fire?', a look at Trump’s America that centres on the reigning social racism, through the prism of an Italian, the filmmaker Roberto Minervini. The film won an award at the last Venice Festival. At the same time we will also see the debuts in feature film of Elsa Amiel and of the British photographer Richard Billingham. The French filmmaker has made ‘Pearl’, a story of motherhood and female body building. The prestigious photographer has made his first film with irreverent memories of his childhood which allude in the title 'Ray & Liz' to his neglectful parents and which complement one of his best known photographic reports.
Out of Competition, the Official Section will also programme 'At War' and ‘Close Enemies’. The former reunites the director Stéphane Brizé and the actor Vincent Lindon. After films like 'La loi du marché' of 'Mademoiselle Chambon', in ‘At War’ they recount the odyssey of a group of workers and their struggle after the announcement that the factory where they work is closing. As for ‘Close Enemies’ the director David Oelhoffen uses the thriller to show how the relationship between two former childhood friends (Mathias Schoenaerts and Reda Kateb) is threatened by a crime now that they live on opposite sides of the law.