Sarah Michelle Gellar

International Jury for Cinema composed by Dario Argento, director (Italy) – President, Paolo Briguglia, actor (Italy), Sabrina Impacciatore, actress (Italy), Jeff Lindsay, screenwriter, (USA), Michèle Maheux, managing director Toronto Int’l Film Festival (Canada), has awarded the following prizes:

SPECIAL JURY AWARD

THE AIR I BREATHE by Jieho Lee, USA

Prod. Nala Films, world sales Inferno, Italian distribution CDI

The Jury awards its special prize to this debut feature by Jieho Lee for his talent as a writer and a director of such a diverse cast which establishes him firmly as one to watch.

New directors for grand actors While they may just be beginning of their careers, Romuald Beugnon (Vous êtes de la police?) and Jieho Lee (The Air I Breathe) have already had the privilege of working with great actors. At Courmayeur to present their star-studded feature debuts, they spoke about their “noir” experience.

In his film, Romuald Beugnon directed (for the first time) two great actors: Jean Pierre Cassel and Jean-Claude Brialy. “I was very interested in capturing the ambience of a nursing home, not to present it as a depressing and surreal place but as a living space. For this it was fundamental to work with great actors who presented this idea, bringing them together with non-professional actors.”

Aiming to depict in the many aspects of the isolated lives of some elderly people, the film unites diverse genres, from comedy to noir to social drama. Beugnon adds: “I made a documentary set in a nursing home but I was somewhat disappointed by the end result because there was a lot of material that inspired a lot of other things. And I thought if I wanted audiences to enter this universe I needed to do it through fiction. I wanted to give the story as much depth as possible but with a comical tone.” The famous names of Vous etes de la police? figure behind the camera as well, in producers, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. “They boarded the project after reading the script,” says the director. “From the very beginning they were very respectful of my work, they didn’t want to interfere. Their observations regarded the coherency of the script and certain technical questions and directing choices. Obviously, I appreciated all of their advice. And I came to understand that what they truly brought is something more, something that arose from conversations about cinema, about films we liked, about life in general.”

Kevin Bacon, Forest Whitaker, Andy Garcia and Julie Delpy are among the leads in the feature debut The Air I Breathe by Jieho Lee, born in Korea and raised in the U.S., who spoke of the importance the actors had in the film. “For my part,” he explains, “I wanted to impose a directing style. I believe that once the cast has been selected the director’s role is to make the actors believe in what they’re doing. To make each one of them bring out the best in themselves and to together make the work consistent.”

There is a Korean proverb that divides life along four concepts – love, pleasure, happiness and pain – which Lee used as the film’s underlying idea. “Having grown up part of the Asian American community in the United States, this was a very personal film for me. In the United States people speak about individual rights all the time, about individual liberties, whereas in the Asian world the idea of the collective, of the community and the group, count much more. I wanted to depict the conflict caused when these different ways of seeing the world exist side by side,” he said.

Asked if he himself identifies with any of the characters, Lee said no but that, for example, “the role Andy Garcia plays is based on my father, a hard man who certainly never cut anyone’s finger off, but who has a very strange, almost unilateral way of loving. The four main characters are the characters of The Wizard of Oz – they try to act as a group but get lost in their individuality.”