A New Life (2002)
"La vie nouvelle" (original title)

Director:

Philippe Grandrieux

Writers:

Philippe Grandrieux, Eric Vuillard

Stars:

Zachary Knighton, Anna Mouglalis, Marc Barbé

1 nomination.

Cast

Credited cast:
Zachary Knighton	...	Seymour
Anna Mouglalis	...	Melania
Marc Barbé	...	Roscoe
Zsolt Nagy	...	Boyan
Raoul Dantec	...	The french man
Vladimir Zintov	...	Hired man
Georgi Kadurin	...	The sad man
Simona Huelsemann	...	Prostitute 1
Salvador Gueorguiev	...	Boyan's man 1
Ivan Velichkov	...	Boyan's man 2
Peter Petrov	...	Boyan's man 3
Diana Gerova	...	Prostitute 2
Bojka Velkova	...	Boyan's wife
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Josh Pearson

Storyline

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Plot Keywords:

female nudity | male frontal nudity | techno music | french shock cinema | experimental film | 

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Genres:

Drama

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Details

Country:

France

Language:

French English

Release Date:

27 November 2002 (France)

Also Known As:

A New Life

Filming Locations:

Sofia, Bulgaria

Company Credits

Production Co:

Blue Light, Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

102 min

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

User Reviews

Film is a must-see

Film is a must-see for every art-movie and experimental film cinematography fan; 'moralistic' approach in trying to understand the concepts behind the film with rigorous logic and one-dimensional thinking will at the end fail unmistakeably; it's a direct experience of the subconsciouss or better unconsciouss material, surging up, as a sort of psychological 'nightmare', unfolding the raw material of vital impulses mixed with vague and seemingly blinded forces of almost formless reality which takes shape slowly into the visual and dark 'narrative' of threshold consciousness, pulling your senses in and out and bringing you face to face with your suppressed hidden reality, opening the dimension of the "concept of evil" in a strange way, somehow mirroring itself through the metonymical unfoldment of self-persistent desire to appropriate, to devour, to feed on the Other with the central point of the spectator and his gaze...to quote the excerpt from the "Evil and the Senses / Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre and La Vie nouvelle" by Martine Beugnet: Engaging with the legacy of the French surrealist and impressionist avant-gardes, Grandrieux thus equates a return to cinema's first vocation - the evocation of that which lies at the margins of human consciousness - with the rediscovery of the cinematic image as visual and sound textures - a form of sculpting in movement. Accordingly, although a battery of techniques rendered possible by twenty-first-century technology is deployed, the manipulations are not put at the service of transparent or illusionist effects. On the contrary, realistic aesthetics, psychological elaboration, and narrative logic are abandoned in favour of a celebration of cinema as a visceral, synaesthetic experience, where movement, images and sounds operate as affects that precede the emergence of rational discourse.