Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2012: #45. Raymond Depardon’s Journal de France

#45. Journal De France

Director: Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret
Producers: Claudine Nougaret
Distributor: Rights Available (Wild Bunch)

The Gist: Traveling alone, internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing his home country with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile ground for the creation – with his long-time partner and collaborator Claudine Nougaret – of an extraordinary travel journal. The journey returned Depardon to important places from his past as a reporter – Chad, Venice, Cannes – and to a wealth of previously unseen footage from his archive – an interview with Jean-Bedel Bokassa, film of Jean-Luc Godard, extraordinary glimpses of private and public life. Intimate, compelling, revelatory, “Journal de France” offers a unique portrait of a country and its landscapes, an overview of a truly remarkable career and a fascinating resume of the development of the photographic art over the past half century…(more)

List Worthy Reasons…: So if Raymond Depardon filmed the French countryside with such care and attentiveness in 2008’s La Vie Moderne, I imagine we’ll be getting some of the same and then more — apart from the road docu movie, Depardon will be including a treasure trove of items from a career spanning almost half a century.

Release Date/Status?: Logically this would have a rendez-vous date in Cannes in 2012. Un Certain Regard selection appears more than likely.