The Ukrinform news agency hosted a press conference dedicated to Myroslav Slaboshpytsky’s film Luxembourg entering production.
This is definitely a long-awaited event, and not only for our cinema community, but for the whole Ukrainian cinematography as well, because Slaboshpytsky, to recall it once again, directed The Tribe, the most successful Ukrainian film since independence.
The project will bring together Ukraine, France, Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands. Luxembourg is the first co-production with this broad involvement in the history of these countries. The leading co-producers are Valentyn Vasianovych (Ukraine) and Anna Katchko (Germany).
Luxembourg, which will be Slaboshpytsky’s second feature-length work, was defined by the director himself as “a neo-noir story told against the background of contemporary Chornobyl area.” Let us recall that the neo-noir is the modern modification of the film noir, a unique genre of criminal psychological drama, which had its heyday in the US in the 1940s and the 1950s and significantly influenced both Hollywood and the art cinema. As for Luxembourg itself, the creators still keep the plot secret, but we know that the film’s heroes are people who work in the Chornobyl exclusion zone, and a very risky, even fatal plot will be played out amid this apocalyptic and yet extremely expressive landscape.
Slaboshpytsky knows his chosen theme well, since he often visited the exclusion zone while working as a reporter in the 1990s. Later on, his script The Chornobyl Robinson won a diploma at the 1st All-Ukrainian Scenario Competition The Coronation of the Word in 2001, and short film Nuclear Waste enjoyed a great success at international festivals (including a Silver Leopard award at the Leopards of Tomorrow program in Locarno in 2012).
The work on the script for Luxembourg took over a year. During this time, the project was selected to participate in Europe’s largest co-production markets – the Berlinale Co-Production Market and CineMart of the Rotterdam Festival – and even won prizes: the Global Filmmaking Award at the Sundance Independent Film Festival (US) and CineMart Prize of influential pan-European TV channel ARTE.
At this year’s Cannes Festival film market, distribution rights for the film which has not been produced yet were sold for the territory of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, and Greece. The negotiations are ongoing on the sale of distribution rights for the US and France.
In case of the project’s successful realization, Luxembourg is highly likely to be selected for the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival, where, given the good reputation of the director at this film forum, it will have a good chance to win an award.
