TRAPPED / Piégé

West Coast Premiere • War, suspense • France, 2013

DCP • 2.35 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 78 min

 

Directed by: Yannick Saillet

Written by: Vincent Crouzet, Jeremie Galan, Patrick Gimenez, Yannick Saillet

Cinematography: Raymond Dumas

Film Editing: Éric Jacquemin

Original Score: Thierry Blanchard, Robert Goldman

Produced by: Fabio Conversi (Babe Film), Patrick Gimenez

Cast: Pascal Elbé (Denis Guillard), Laurent Lucas (Murat), Arnaud Henriet (Pastre), Caroline Bal (Caroline)

International Sales: Other Angle Pictures

 

Sergeant Denis Quillard is a man who prefers to keep his feet on the ground. Literally. After a lightning ambush leaves his entire patrol gunned down, he is left alone in the middle of the desert with a truckload of Afghan heroin. Oh, and one other thing: he is also standing on an old Russian era double-trigger landmine. As in, one move and you are dead. With no means to diffuse the situation, the heroic, stoic Quillard, played with sympathy by actor/writer/director Pascal Elbé (Turk’s Head – COLCOA 2010), can do little but hope that some passerby will come to his aid before the Taliban soldiers arrive. The intensity of Buried meets the suspense of the classic Clouzot film The Wages of Fear in this edge-of-your-seat tale of survival and human resilience in a war zone.

 

For his first feature, director/co-writer Yannick Saillet wanted a shooting style that would bring a first-person immediacy to match his suspenseful story. Saillet’s experience shooting hundreds of music videos over his career proved invaluable. Eschewing the big budget studio approach, Saillet instead found inspiration in the YouTube battle clips American soldiers take with cameras sewn into their uniforms.  Much of the film is staged from the Sergeant Quillard’s POV, lending the film a raw and realistic feel. Prior to Trapped, Saillet made five dramatic shorts, including his first short Mon premier acte (1988), shot at the age of seventeen, which he financed by selling his parent’s car without asking while they were away.

 

 “A tightly wound wartime thriller that’s high on concept, twists and turns.”

- Jordan Mintzer HOLLYWOOD REPORTER