USA
2011 / INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE
1H56 / IN ENGLISH
Synopsis
Curtis LaForche lives in a small Ohio town with his wife Samantha and six-year-old daughter Hannah, who is deaf. Curtis makes a modest living as a crew chief for a sand-mining company. Samantha is a stay-at-home mother and part-time seamstress who supplements their income by selling handmade wares at the flea market each weekend. Money is tight, and navigating Hannah’s healthcare and special needs education is a constant struggle. Despite that, Curtis and Samantha are very much in love and their family is a happy one.
Then Curtis begins having terrifying dreams about an encroaching, apocalyptic storm. He chooses to keep the disturbance to himself, channeling his anxiety into the obsessive building of a storm shelter in their backyard. His seemingly inexplicable behavior concerns and confounds Samantha, and provokes intolerance among co-workers, friends and neighbors. But the resulting strain on his marriage and tension within the community doesn’t compare to Curtis’ private fear of what his dreams may truly signify.
Faced with the proposition that his disturbing visions signal disaster of one kind or another, Curtis confides in Samantha, testing the power of their bond against the highest possible stakes.
director: Jeff Nichols
screenplay: Jeff Nichols
cinematography: Adam Stone
editing: Parke Gregg
sound: Ryan Putz
production design: Chad Keith
music: David Wingo
cast:
Michael Shannon
Jessica Chastain
Tova Stewart
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Biography
Jeff Nichols
American nationality. Born on December 7, 1978 in Little Rock (USA)
Filmography
2011 TAKE SHELTER
2007 SHOTGUN STORIES |
production
LOW SPARK FILMS
Tyler Davidson
Tel. +1 323 382 0000
tyler@lowsparkfilms.com
distribution
Ad Vitam
Tel. +33 1 46 34 75 74
contact@advitamdistribution.com
sales
FILMNATION ENTERTAINMENT
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press agent
Laurence Granec et Karine Ménard
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laurence.karine@granecmenard.com
Laurence Granec
Mob. + 33 6 07 49 16 49
Karine Ménard
Mob. + 33 6 85 56 22 99
Jeff Nichols, from Little Rock (Arkansas), stands out as one of the promising new deal in American cinema.
A complex hybridization between Malick and Spielberg (without ever limiting himself to these far-reaching elective filiations), he is right at the edge between American independent cinema and Hollywood industrial cinema. Shotgun was striking due to its humble mastery of direction, its capacity to revisit America’s myths grasping at the same time both the territory and the landscape. One could see a “folk cinema”, in the tradition of the great American names, from John Ford to Terrence Malick in Badlands. One could also discover a brilliant actor, Michael Shannon, whose marmoreal grace evoked a “redneck” version of Christopher Walken. The same qualities can be found (including Michael Shannon) in Take Shelter; but there, the art of Americana is somehow “disturbed” by the codes of the genre movie, to be more specific those of the supernatural disaster movie.
If couple throes after marriage and “parenthood” are the real topic, Nichols chooses to explore this intimist drama under the astounding excessiveness of the wrath of gods belching from the sky (a form of “spectacular intimacy” to be related to Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
There are at least four reasons to like Take Shelter: aesthetic (the instantaneous strength of faces and landscapes, the poetical use of special effects), dramatic (how can love stand the test of adversity – even “inner” one?), historical (the way Nichols inherits and distorts a tradition of American cinema in a single surge), economic (its position at the border of the Hollywood system).
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Fabien Gaffez |
The film opened in US theaters on September 30.
AWARDS
Grand Prize – 2011 Semaine de la Critique
SACD Prize – 2011 Semaine de la Critique
FIPRESCI Prize – 2011 Cannes Film Festival
Grand Prize – 2011 Deauville American Film Festival
Best Picture - 2011 Zurich Film Festival
FESTIVALS
2011 Sundance Film Festival
2011 Toronto International Film Festival
2011 Doha Tribeca Film Festival
Festival International du Film d’Arras - 2011
