Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #171. Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle

La bête dans la jungle

Austrian Patric Chiha reunited with Béatrice Dalle and returned to fiction form almost a decade later back in November of ’21. After a year in post … The Beast in the Jungle will be surely hitting a fest soon enough. Chiha shares co-writing creds with Axelle Ropert and Jihane Chouaib for the adaptation Henry James’ 1903 eponymous short story. Shot in Brussels, Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel were originally attached to the project, but this sees Anaïs Demoustier and Tom Mercier topline instead. Aurora Films’ Charlotte Vincent and Katia Khazak produce. Chiha was last in Berlin with the Teddy Award winning docu Si c’était de l’amour (2020).

Gist: For 25 years, in an enormous nightclub, a man and a woman watch and wait for an unknown event. From 1979 to 2004, we follow the evolution of disco to techno music, the story of a love, the story of an obsession. Eventually, this “thing” manifests itself, but it takes a far more tragic form than expected…

Release Date/Prediction: The team will try to temp Cannes programmers if they didn’t try in the previous year, but this will likely compete for the Golden Bear in Berlin.