Franz Rogowski continues to prove a master of unpredictable performance in this trippy and kinetic debut from Giacomo Abbruzzese. He plays Belarussian Aleksei, who is hit by tragedy when he loses his best friend (Michal Baliki) as they make the dangerous and illegal crossing from Poland to France. Once there, he signs up to the Foreign Legion, which gives recruits access to a new identity and - after five years - French citizenship. When asked about his attitude to risk, Aleksei says: “Those who are afraid, they stay at home.”
What he doesn’t realise, perhaps, is that it's not just his body that he’s putting on the line but his mental state and, as his life collides with those of guerrilla fighter Jomo (Morr Ndiaye putting in a memorably muscular performance) and his sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky), while he is on a hostage-rescue mission to the Niger Delta.
What he doesn’t realise, perhaps, is that it's not just his body that he’s putting on the line but his mental state and, as his life collides with those of guerrilla fighter Jomo (Morr Ndiaye putting in a memorably muscular performance) and his sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky), while he is on a hostage-rescue mission to the Niger Delta.
- 3/29/2024
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Disco Boy, directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese, is about the search for independence and its subsequent consequences. Aleksei/Alex (Franz Rogowski) is an illegal Belarusian immigrant in Paris, who enlists in the French Foreign Legion to legalize his stay. This trade has him cross paths with Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) in Nigeria, a man defending his delta from exploitation. The last main character who yearns for freedom is his sister, Udoka (Laetitia Ky), who wants to leave the village for city life. It's a bit of a ghost story, too. Alex takes center stage, is plagued by his actions, his decisions, his debts. Alex is the first one we meet as the audience, watching him cross a river into France. Disco Boy could absolutely not work with a French citizen...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 2/6/2024
- Screen Anarchy
"Are you willing to take risks?" Big World Pictures has revealed an official US trailer for an indie thriller titled Disco Boy, marking the narrative feature debut of an Italian filmmaker named Giacomo Abbruzzese. This premiered at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival earlier this year to mostly positive reviews, and layer played at the New Directors/New Films Festival in NYC. The film stars acclaimed German actor Franz Rogowski as a Belarusian immigrant haunted by his actions as a mercenary in the French Foreign Legion. After fleeing Belarus, he joins the French Foreign Legion and goes through hell at boot camp to make it out as a soldier & gain his French citizenship. It also stars Morr Ndiaye, Laetitia Ky, Leon Lucev, Robert Wieckiewicz, and Matteo Olivetti. Disco Boy will open at The Quad in New York City on February 2nd, and at Laemmle Theaters in LA on February 9th. The "ambitious film is a jarring,...
- 12/13/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
German actor Franz Rogowski is on the rise after winning Best Actor from the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle for his performance as a toxic bisexual in Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” The “Happy End” breakout actor’s turn also featured in IndieWire’s Critics Poll of the best films and performances of 2023.
That means you shouldn’t ignore his performance in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature “Disco Boy,” winner of the 2023 Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. In this vividly dreamlike postwar drama, Rogowski plays a Belarusian immigrant haunted by his actions as a mercenary in the French Foreign Legion. Comparisons to Claire Denis’ similarly themed “Beau Travail,” as Ben Croll pointed out in his Berlinale review for IndieWire, are inevitable and apt. After all, there’s a movie that made another unusual European actor — French actor Denis Lavant — an everlasting arthouse favorite.
In “Disco Boy,” following a difficult journey across Europe,...
That means you shouldn’t ignore his performance in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature “Disco Boy,” winner of the 2023 Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution. In this vividly dreamlike postwar drama, Rogowski plays a Belarusian immigrant haunted by his actions as a mercenary in the French Foreign Legion. Comparisons to Claire Denis’ similarly themed “Beau Travail,” as Ben Croll pointed out in his Berlinale review for IndieWire, are inevitable and apt. After all, there’s a movie that made another unusual European actor — French actor Denis Lavant — an everlasting arthouse favorite.
In “Disco Boy,” following a difficult journey across Europe,...
- 12/12/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to “Beau Travail,” Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own. Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, “Disco Boy” doesn’t want for boldness or surprise — Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.
One feature of “Disco Boy,” at least, plays as expected: the reliably fragile,...
One feature of “Disco Boy,” at least, plays as expected: the reliably fragile,...
- 8/17/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
18 films across three Kinoscope sections.
Sarajevo Film Festival has selected 18 features for its Kinoscope strand, composed of festival hits from the past year.
Titles include Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy starring Franz Rogowski and Morr Ndiaye, which had its world premiere in competition at this year’s Berlinale; as did Lila Aviles’ Totem, about a seven-year-old girl who comes to understand her changing world.
Dani Rosenberg’s The Vanishing Soldier arrives at Sarajevo following a world premiere last weekend at Locarno Film Festival. The thriller centres on an 18-year-old Israeli soldier who flees back to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv...
Sarajevo Film Festival has selected 18 features for its Kinoscope strand, composed of festival hits from the past year.
Titles include Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy starring Franz Rogowski and Morr Ndiaye, which had its world premiere in competition at this year’s Berlinale; as did Lila Aviles’ Totem, about a seven-year-old girl who comes to understand her changing world.
Dani Rosenberg’s The Vanishing Soldier arrives at Sarajevo following a world premiere last weekend at Locarno Film Festival. The thriller centres on an 18-year-old Israeli soldier who flees back to his girlfriend in Tel Aviv...
- 8/9/2023
- by Ben Dalton
- ScreenDaily
To be blunt about it, we’re reaching the sad, maybe inevitable stage where Beau Travail and its famous closing sequence are becoming subject to the dreaded “Seinfeld Effect,” coined to note where the original value of something is diminished by successive imitations. It’s not that Denis’ film and Denis Levant’s death dance would ever lose their impact for those new or returning to it, but that a prospective viewer could see a weaker future rendering or a jaded, comic social-media reference to the scene first, and then afterward eventually seek out Beau Travail, greeting it with a bit of a “huh, that’s where that’s from” or underwhelmed reaction.
To Disco Boy’s credit, while its core themes and imagery are second-hand, it does attempt to build, expand on, perhaps modernize Beau Travail, not unlike Helena Wittmann’s recent Human Flowers of Flesh, which premiered last...
To Disco Boy’s credit, while its core themes and imagery are second-hand, it does attempt to build, expand on, perhaps modernize Beau Travail, not unlike Helena Wittmann’s recent Human Flowers of Flesh, which premiered last...
- 2/22/2023
- by David Katz
- The Film Stage
What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.
The opening, which serves as a kind of mood-setting overture, presents a vision of sleeping Black men in a primitive natural environment. We then...
The opening, which serves as a kind of mood-setting overture, presents a vision of sleeping Black men in a primitive natural environment. We then...
- 2/21/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Giacomo Abbruzzese’s drama follows Belarusian Aleksei on his journey into the French Foreign Legion and a very strange epiphany in the Niger Delta
Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self. This is bold film-making: a movie that wants to dazzle you with its standalone setpieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.
Franz Rogowski, a German actor who always brings a compelling sort of chemical instability to his films (like a piece of smoking sodium exposed to the air), here plays Aleksei, a guy from Belarus who has arrived in Poland with his buddy Mikhail (Michal Balicki) and a bunch of other Belarus nationals on a short tourist visa, supposedly to see a football match.
Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self. This is bold film-making: a movie that wants to dazzle you with its standalone setpieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.
Franz Rogowski, a German actor who always brings a compelling sort of chemical instability to his films (like a piece of smoking sodium exposed to the air), here plays Aleksei, a guy from Belarus who has arrived in Poland with his buddy Mikhail (Michal Balicki) and a bunch of other Belarus nationals on a short tourist visa, supposedly to see a football match.
- 2/20/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Big World Pictures releases the film in select theaters on Friday, February 2 with expansion to follow.
It might be reductive to call “Disco Boy” a kind of club kid cousin to “Beau Travail,” but the comparisons aren’t entirely off. Like Claire Denis’ Sight and Sound chart-topper, here is a tour with the French Foreign Legion, another dissection of colonial roleplaying spent among a taciturn lot who find best expression in the rhythms of the night. So let’s dispense those comparisons up front, and with a degree of military efficiency befitting both films: While director Giacomo Abbruzzese does indeed pay homage to a direct artistic forbearer, his debut film stands (and writhes and shimmies) all on its own.
Pushed and pulled by another intensely physical Franz Rogowski turn, “Disco Boy” follows a man ever on the move,...
It might be reductive to call “Disco Boy” a kind of club kid cousin to “Beau Travail,” but the comparisons aren’t entirely off. Like Claire Denis’ Sight and Sound chart-topper, here is a tour with the French Foreign Legion, another dissection of colonial roleplaying spent among a taciturn lot who find best expression in the rhythms of the night. So let’s dispense those comparisons up front, and with a degree of military efficiency befitting both films: While director Giacomo Abbruzzese does indeed pay homage to a direct artistic forbearer, his debut film stands (and writhes and shimmies) all on its own.
Pushed and pulled by another intensely physical Franz Rogowski turn, “Disco Boy” follows a man ever on the move,...
- 2/19/2023
- by Ben Croll
- Indiewire
A young Belorussian attempts to make the dangerous trip across the EU to sign up for the French Foreign Legion while a young rebel leader in Niger and his sister attempt to help their people survive the ravages of post-colonialism in wildly uneven Berlinale competitor Disco Boy.
A committed, intensely physical lead performance by German actor Franz Rogowski (recently seen in Ira Sachs’ Passages), luminous cinematography courtesy of ace Dp Helene Louvart, and stirring electronic music by composer Vitalic all come together to make this a sensuous, striking film experience. But, yeesh, that script by director-screenwriter Giacomo Abbruzzese is a mess — a lumpy mix of silly supernatural elements and indigestible arthouse pretension, all garnished with an outright steal from Claire Denis’ infinitely superior 1999 French Foreign Legion-feature Beau Travail. But by all means, you might as well steal from the best.
Rogowski’s Aleksei is first met traveling to Poland from...
A committed, intensely physical lead performance by German actor Franz Rogowski (recently seen in Ira Sachs’ Passages), luminous cinematography courtesy of ace Dp Helene Louvart, and stirring electronic music by composer Vitalic all come together to make this a sensuous, striking film experience. But, yeesh, that script by director-screenwriter Giacomo Abbruzzese is a mess — a lumpy mix of silly supernatural elements and indigestible arthouse pretension, all garnished with an outright steal from Claire Denis’ infinitely superior 1999 French Foreign Legion-feature Beau Travail. But by all means, you might as well steal from the best.
Rogowski’s Aleksei is first met traveling to Poland from...
- 2/19/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Danger Zone
Director: Vita Maria Drygas
Producer: Vita Żelakeviciute
Production companies: Drygas Film Production
Sales: Dogwoof
Documentary is a journey to places devastated by military conflicts, seen through the eyes of thrill-seeking tourists.
Delegation
(Generation 14plus)
Director: Asaf Saban
Cast: Yoav Bavly, Neomi Harari, Leib Lev Levin, Ezra Dagan, Alma Dishy
Producers: Agnieszka Dziedzic, Yoav Roeh, Aurit Zamir, Roshanak Behesht Nedjad
Production companies: Koi Studio, Gum Films, In Good Co.
Sales: New Europe Film Sales
Three Israeli friends visit Holocaust sites in Poland before their stints in the army, and deal with love, friendship and politics.
Disco Boy
(Competition)
Director: Giacomo Abbruzzese
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Laëtitia Ky, Leon Lučev
Producers: Lionel Massol, Pauline Seigland
Production companies: Films Grand Huit, Dugong Films, Panache Productions, La Compagnie Cinématographique, Donten & Lacroix, Division
Sales: Charades
Aleksei reaches Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, which allows any foreigner, even undocumented, to be granted a French passport.
Director: Vita Maria Drygas
Producer: Vita Żelakeviciute
Production companies: Drygas Film Production
Sales: Dogwoof
Documentary is a journey to places devastated by military conflicts, seen through the eyes of thrill-seeking tourists.
Delegation
(Generation 14plus)
Director: Asaf Saban
Cast: Yoav Bavly, Neomi Harari, Leib Lev Levin, Ezra Dagan, Alma Dishy
Producers: Agnieszka Dziedzic, Yoav Roeh, Aurit Zamir, Roshanak Behesht Nedjad
Production companies: Koi Studio, Gum Films, In Good Co.
Sales: New Europe Film Sales
Three Israeli friends visit Holocaust sites in Poland before their stints in the army, and deal with love, friendship and politics.
Disco Boy
(Competition)
Director: Giacomo Abbruzzese
Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Laëtitia Ky, Leon Lučev
Producers: Lionel Massol, Pauline Seigland
Production companies: Films Grand Huit, Dugong Films, Panache Productions, La Compagnie Cinématographique, Donten & Lacroix, Division
Sales: Charades
Aleksei reaches Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, which allows any foreigner, even undocumented, to be granted a French passport.
- 2/19/2023
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski, is “certainly a dream come true.”
But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.
A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.
“I realized that beyond their apparent contradiction, these two worlds had a lot in common, especially when it comes to classical ballet,” the director said, citing “the extreme physical exertion and discipline that they both involve.”
That chance meeting was just a starting point for the film’s complex narrative, which Abbruzese developed at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefondation and during a Clermont-Ferrand Festival residency.
But then the film took 10 years to make.
But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.
A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.
“I realized that beyond their apparent contradiction, these two worlds had a lot in common, especially when it comes to classical ballet,” the director said, citing “the extreme physical exertion and discipline that they both involve.”
That chance meeting was just a starting point for the film’s complex narrative, which Abbruzese developed at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefondation and during a Clermont-Ferrand Festival residency.
But then the film took 10 years to make.
- 2/19/2023
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
Charades has dropped the trailer for “Disco Boy,” the anticipated feature debut of Giacomo Abbruzzese, starring Franz Rogowski (“Passages”) which is competing at the Berlin Film Festival.
The movie is produced by the rising French production company Films Grand Huit. Shot across two continents by Hélène Louvart, the movie boasts a diverse international cast and a soundtrack by electronic music artist Vitalic.
“Disco Boy stars Rogowski as Aleksei, who embarks on a difficult journey across Europe and reaches Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, a highly selective military corp that allows any foreigner, even undocumented, to be granted a French passport. In the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) fights against oil companies that threaten the survival of his village. His sister Udoka (Laëtitia Ky), meanwhile, dreams of escaping, knowing that all is already lost here. Beyond borders, life and death, their destinies will intertwine.
The film marks the feature debut of Abbruzzese,...
The movie is produced by the rising French production company Films Grand Huit. Shot across two continents by Hélène Louvart, the movie boasts a diverse international cast and a soundtrack by electronic music artist Vitalic.
“Disco Boy stars Rogowski as Aleksei, who embarks on a difficult journey across Europe and reaches Paris to enlist in the French Foreign Legion, a highly selective military corp that allows any foreigner, even undocumented, to be granted a French passport. In the Niger Delta, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye) fights against oil companies that threaten the survival of his village. His sister Udoka (Laëtitia Ky), meanwhile, dreams of escaping, knowing that all is already lost here. Beyond borders, life and death, their destinies will intertwine.
The film marks the feature debut of Abbruzzese,...
- 2/15/2023
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
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