West Coast Premiere • War/Thriller/Fantasy • France, 2015

DCP • 1.85 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 100 min

Directed by: Clément Cogitore
Written by: Thomas Bidegain, Maxime Caperan, Julia Ducournau, Nadja Dumouchel, Fabien Gorgeart, Britta Krause, Franz Rodenkirchen, Clément Cogitore
Cinematography: Sylvain Verdet
Film Editing: Isabelle Manquillet
Original Score: Eric Bentz, François-Eudes Chanfrault
Produced by: Jean-Christophe Reymond, Amaury Ovise (Kazak Productions)
Cast: Jérémie Renier (Capitaine Antarès Bonassieu), Swann Arlaud (Jérémie Lernowski), Marc Robert (Jean-Baptiste Frering), Kévin Azaïs (William Denis), Finnegan Oldfield (Patrick Mercier)
International Sales: Indie Sales • indiesales.eu
U.S. Distributor: Film Movement • filmmovement.com
U.S. Release Date: 2016

War-torn Afghanistan becomes a metaphysical netherworld in this evocatively eerie genre bender. No-nonsense Captain Antarès Bonassieu and 12 French NATO soldiers patrol a badland of endless dust and rock in search of a Taliban warlord called “Sultan”. The unit is on high alert, relations with the villagers are fraught, and the Taliban are everywhere and nowhere. One night, while observing what appears to be some kind of ritual involving a tethered goat, two of his men disappear. Initially Bonassieu maintains a firm command on the situation. He believes he knows who took the men, and where they might be located. But as certainties begin to fall away, Bonassieu’s grunts – hardened fighters to a man – are consumed with primal fear. Whatever is happening out there is bigger than the war on terror, and far more mysterious.

The French Union of Critics voted Neither Heaven nor Earth 2015’s Best French Debut Feature, marking writer/director Clément Cogitore as a filmmaker to watch. Cogitore was able to attract a strong cast including Kévin Azaïs, who signed on to the project before Love at First Fight(COLCOA 2015) made him a rising star. Cogitore, an established contemporary artist with multimedia installations in exhibitions throughout the world, brought a bold visual approach to the film, even shooting extended sequences directly through the lens of night-vision goggles. He has made half a dozen shorts, including the docu-short, Bielutine – In The Garden Of Time, selected for Director’s Fortnight at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Cogitore’s principal collaborator on the screenplay, Thomas Bidegain, has won multiple awards for his collaborations on such notable screenplays as A Prophet (2009), Rust and Bone (2012), and Dheepan(2015).

QUOTES:

“…an incredibly ambitious and daring work…intellectually stimulating and indefinably weird.”
– James Travers, Films De France

“…haunting and original.”
– John Bleasdale, CineVue

“…an existential trip.”
– Kent Turner, Film Forward