Welcome to New York | |
---|---|
Directed by | Abel Ferrara |
Written by | Abel Ferrara Christ Zois |
Produced by | Adam Folk |
Starring | Gérard Depardieu Jacqueline Bisset |
Cinematography | Ken Kelsch |
Edited by | Anthony Redman |
Production company | |
Distributed by | IFC Films |
Release date |
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Running time | 125 minutes [1] |
Countries | France United States |
Languages | English French |
Welcome to New York is a 2014 drama film co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara. Inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair when the prominent French politician was accused of sexual assaulting a hotel maid, the film was released on 17 May 2014 by VOD on the Internet as the film failed to secure a place on the Official Selection at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival (where it was given a special market screening), [2] nor was it picked up for theatrical distribution in France. [3]
According to Vincent Maraval, one of the producers, the film faced a boycott by the French media. [4] [5] [6]
The film tells the story of a powerful man, a possible candidate for the Presidency of France, who lives a life of debauchery and is arrested after being accused of raping a maid at his hotel.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on 56 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Led by a fearless performance from Gerard Depardieu, Welcome to New York is director Abel Ferrara at his most repulsive -- and most compulsively watchable." [7]
Following its release – to mixed reviews varying from high praise to outright disgust – Strauss-Kahn said he would sue for slander. His lawyer also complained that the film's portrayal of Strauss-Kahn's then-wife, Anne Sinclair, was anti-Semitic. The film suggests Mrs. Deveraux's family profited from World War II. In fact, Sinclair's real family were French Jews who fled the country and had their property confiscated when Germany invaded. Sinclair echoed the criticism, but declined to press charges. [8] [9]
Ferrara, in a series of interviews with Indiewire, The Hollywood Reporter and other publications between September 2014 and March 2015, claimed that his distributor, Vincent Maraval of Wild Bunch, sold an unauthorized R-rated version of the film to IFC Films, for distribution in the US; the R-rated cut had already been released on Blu-ray and VOD in various European countries. Maraval subsequently responded that Ferrara had agreed on the R-rated cut to receive more financing for the film and had also contractually consented to lose final cut of the R-rated version if he did not deliver one by a certain date. [10] [11] [12] Ferrara then stated his intent to send a cease-and-desist letter to Maraval and IFC, which issued its own statement also claiming that it had given Ferrara the chance to deliver his own R-rated cut for theatrical showings in the US, which he declined to do. [13] As of March 27, the R-rated cut has only been shown at one American theater – the Roxie in San Francisco – though it is available in the US on VOD, and IFC has stated it intends to show it at additional theaters. [14]
Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu is a French actor, known to be one of the most prolific in film history. He has completed over 250 films since 1967, almost exclusively as a lead. Depardieu has worked with over 150 film directors whose most notable collaborations include Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Ridley Scott, and Bernardo Bertolucci. He is the second highest-grossing actor in the history of French cinema behind Louis de Funès. As of January 2022, his body of work also includes countless television productions, 18 stage plays, 16 records and 9 books. He is known for having portrayed numerous leading historical and fictitious figures of the Western world including Georges Danton, Joseph Stalin, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Auguste Rodin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean Valjean, Edmond Dantès, Christopher Columbus, Obélix, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
1900 is a 1976 epic historical drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and featuring an international ensemble cast including Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti, Stefania Casini, Ellen Schwiers, Sterling Hayden, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Stefania Sandrelli, Donald Sutherland, and Burt Lancaster. Set in Bertolucci's ancestral region of Emilia, the film chronicles the lives and friendship of two men – the landowning Alfredo Berlinghieri and the peasant Olmo Dalcò (Depardieu) – as they witness and participate in the political conflicts between fascism and communism that took place in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. The film premiered out of competition at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.
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Abel Ferrara is an American filmmaker, known for the provocative and often controversial content in his movies and his use and redefinition of neo-noir imagery. A long-time independent filmmaker, some of his best known movies include the New York-set, gritty crime thrillers The Driller Killer (1979), Ms .45 (1981), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992) and The Funeral (1996), chronicling violent crime in urban settings with spiritual overtones.
Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, also known as DSK, is a French economist and politician who served as the tenth managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and was a member of the French Socialist Party. He attained notoriety due to his involvement in several sex scandals.
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Anne Sinclair is a French-American television and radio interviewer. She hosted one of the most popular political shows for more than thirteen years on TF1, the largest European private TV channel. She is heiress to much of the fortune of her maternal grandfather, art dealer Paul Rosenberg. She covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and the French TV channel Canal+. She married French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 1991 and divorced him in 2013 in the aftermath of the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. She was portrayed in the 2014 feature film Welcome to New York.
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The Red Turtle is a 2016 animated fantasy drama film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit who co-wrote the film with French screenwriter Pascale Ferran. The film is an international co-production between Japanese anime company Studio Ghibli and several French companies, including Wild Bunch and Belvision. The film, which has no dialogue, tells the story of a man who becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and meets a giant red female turtle.
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