Luxembourg
We’ve been tracking Luxembourg going on three years now and news has been scarce on its status for the past year. Ukrainian director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky‘s debut The Tribe, (read ★★★★ review), was one of the best titles out of Cannes 2014 (where it swept up a trio of awards at Critics’ Week), documenting the struggles of a new student at a deaf boarding school as he’s inducted into the troubling social customs among the students (and told without any subtitles). Slaboshpitsky’s since made more headlined with the Ukraine’s most ambitious co-production ever, his sophomore film Luxembourg, which focuses on ‘a group of people living in a permanent nuclear winter in a primitive post-apocalyptic society in the ruins of the old civilization destroyed by atomic war.’ The director will be filming in the Chernobyl Nuclear Exclusion Zone, which is where he also shot his 2012 short film (watch here) “Nuclear Waste.” After various funding initiatives since 2015, the project was announced as fully funded in March of 2016.
Release Date/Prediction: Luxembourg was part of the Venice Production Bridge in September 2016, designed to help microbudget features complete international financing. However, it’s unclear where Slaboshpitsky is on the project. If Slaboshpitsky has completed production, we can look forward to seeing Luxembourg as a prominent fixture on the 2018 festival circuit. Based on the attention he received for The Tribe, Slaboshpitsky could easily secure a slot in Berlin’s or Venice’s competition, while a return to Cannes could also be likely. After Sergei Loznitsa, could we see back to back years for Ukrainian cinema in the Main Comp?
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