Film premiered in Cannes this year.
Streaming service and theatrical distributor Mubi has taken UK and Ireland rights to Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello’s Haiti-set horror that premiered in Cannes this year.
Starring Louise Labèque, Wislanda Louimat, and Katiana Milfort, the film explores the legacy of French colonialism in the Caribbean country Haiti.
The film recently had its North American premiere at Toronto and will have its UK debut at the upcoming BFI London Film Festival.
Mubi picked up the film from sales agent Playtime. The company said its release plans have not yet been worked out but it will be this year.
Streaming service and theatrical distributor Mubi has taken UK and Ireland rights to Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello’s Haiti-set horror that premiered in Cannes this year.
Starring Louise Labèque, Wislanda Louimat, and Katiana Milfort, the film explores the legacy of French colonialism in the Caribbean country Haiti.
The film recently had its North American premiere at Toronto and will have its UK debut at the upcoming BFI London Film Festival.
Mubi picked up the film from sales agent Playtime. The company said its release plans have not yet been worked out but it will be this year.
- 9/12/2019
- by Tom Grater
- ScreenDaily
Never one to shy away from audacious conceits, from a Moody Blues needle-drop in a late-19th century Parisian brothel in “House of Pleasures” to the sympathetic treatment of terrorist radicals in “Nocturama,” French director Bertrand Bonello returns with a brow-raising one in “Zombi Child,” a political horror film that bundles the sins of colonialism with those of mischievous boarding-school girls. Alternating between a fact-based case of zombieism in 1962 Haiti and a clique of privileged students in contemporary France, the film brings the legacy of Haitian suffering and hardship to the doorstep of a Legion of Honor school with ties to the Napoleonic age. Though Bonello eventually reveals a more concrete bridge between eras,
Though the story of Clairvius Narcisse is largely considered more legend than fact, he was a real Haitian man who supposedly turned into a zombie in 1962 and rematerialized in 1980 in perfectly normal health. The likely catalyst of his transformation was tetrodotoxin,...
Though the story of Clairvius Narcisse is largely considered more legend than fact, he was a real Haitian man who supposedly turned into a zombie in 1962 and rematerialized in 1980 in perfectly normal health. The likely catalyst of his transformation was tetrodotoxin,...
- 9/7/2019
- by Scott Tobias
- Variety Film + TV
"Can voodoo help me live?" Get a look at an official trailer for Zombi Child, the latest by French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello. It first premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival, and will play at the New York Film Festival. Bonello moves fluidly between 1962 Haiti, where a young man named Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), made into a zombie by his brother, ends up working as a slave in the sugar cane fields, and a girls' boarding school in Paris, where a white teen girl (Louise Labèque) befriends Clairvius' descendant (Wislanda Louimat), who was orphaned in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. These two disparate strands ultimately come together in a film that "evokes Jacques Tourneur more than George Romero, and feverishly dissolves boundaries of time and space as it questions colonialist mythmaking." Also with Katiana Milfort & Adilé David. See below. Here's the official festival trailer (+ poster) for Bertrand Bonello's...
- 9/6/2019
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Bertrand Bonello’s last film, the terrorism-themed thriller Nocturama, hit headlines as it was released in the wake of Islamic State terror attacks in France. Supposedly it was the reason the film didn’t debut in competition at Cannes that year and with the compelling Directors’ Fortnight premiere Zombi Child, the director has again swerved away from official selection. Where Nocturama pointed to a seething social tension that Bonello believed present in the undercurrent of contemporary France, this is a genre-blending horror satire on the country’s racial divisions that delves into the country’s post-colonial heritage and the myth of Haitian zombie legend.
We open in Haiti in 1962, at the death of Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), a man who comes back to life as a “zombi” (spelled without the ‘e’ to foreground the Haitian etymology), used as slave labor in the hell of the Caribbean nation’s sugar fields.
We open in Haiti in 1962, at the death of Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), a man who comes back to life as a “zombi” (spelled without the ‘e’ to foreground the Haitian etymology), used as slave labor in the hell of the Caribbean nation’s sugar fields.
- 6/10/2019
- by Ed Frankl
- The Film Stage
Premiering at the Directors' Fortnight, Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child is a film that jolts our expectations. A bit of a zombi film, a bit of an all-girls boarding school reverie, the film radically combines both through audacious cross-cutting and maintaining a silkily mysterious atmosphere of uncertain direction.Opening in 1962 Haiti, Clairvius (Mackenson Bijou) is cursed and partially killed through voodoo, buried not-quite-dead, and resurrected to toil as a mindless zombi in a sugar plantation. Regaining some sense of his life, Clairvius's shrouded vision catching flashes of color and images of his wife, and he escapes the plantation through the countryside. The story behind this saga is revealed much later, and in the meantime Bonello basks in sepulchral day-for-night shadows and the sorrow of human exploitation that extends beyond the grave. Cut into this is a story set in today’s France, with a white teen beauty, Fanny (Louise Labèque...
- 5/30/2019
- MUBI
The Notebook is covering Cannes with an on-going correspondence between critic Leonardo Goi and editor Daniel Kasman.Zombi ChildDear Leo,Your last dispatch pinpointed works of social realist cinema here in Cannes, alongside a quintessential art-house picture. I have no bias for or against any of these idioms, each and all can be used to make a great film, but often at festivals I long for the smarts for entertainment that genre cinema can promise. Genre movies exemplify in the most vivid sense a truism of the art of the cinema, that it relies on the building blocks of cliches, the language and toolkit of conventions and archetypes. Because of this, to expect most movies to do something new or fresh in some ways feels antithetical to the art, founded as it is on iteration and variation on shared popular ideas. To surprise an audience within the confines of expectations...
- 5/21/2019
- MUBI
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