Open The Door

STORY LINE

THIS SHORT FILM IS PART OF A LONG FEATURE FILM ENTITLED « CHILHOODS »

At the age of 12, Jacques is more than six feet tall while his friends are 12 to 15 inches shorter. This morning, the traditional class photo is being taken The photographer tries to create an harmonious and symmetrical frame, according to the rules of art.

But how can one integrate Jacques in the same frame than the others?

PRODUCTION

A FILM BY
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

SCRIPT BY
Yann Le Gal, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

PRODUCED BY
Laurence Darthos for Tara films

CAST & CREW

Maxime JURAVLIOV, Bernard LAPENE, Gilbert TRAINA

IMAGE	Benoit Chamaillard
EDITING	Tina Baz Le Gal
FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTORS	Benoît Parrot
SECOND ASSISTANT DIRECTORS	Nayla Baghadi
STILL PHOTO	Anne Harnie-Cousseau
SET DESIGN	Catherine MANANES
COSTUMES	Agnès NODEN
SOUND	Lionel GARBARINI
SOUND EDITING	Simon POUPARD
MIXING	Stéphane de ROCQUIGNY
TIME	12 minutes
FORMAT	35mm color – 2.35
SOUND	DTS stereo
YEAR	2006
ORIGINAL LANGUAGES	French and English (subtitles)

World premiere : Paris Cinéma 2007

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

When Yann Legal conceived the project « Childhoods », he suggested we should direct an episode related to the childhood of Jacques Tati. At the outset, a historical film, made in France, was not a natural part of our filmography. We had always worked in the arab world on very personal scripts, inspired by our daily surroundings and often filmed in our own house.

Being part of this project meant we had to face Tati, a history of cinema, discover whether we could work outside our natural context and extent our territory to another geography.

A child, taller than the others, not knowing what to do with his cumbersome body ; a disproportionate body, so abnormal that it turns an assumed handicap into an asset, into a type of resistance to the uniformity which tends to supersede our present world ; a body that seems off-beat in a modern world always seeking more speed, more achievements…

No one ever explored, as Tati did, the disfunction of bodies, the very moment when the well-oiled machine suddenly jams because of a troublemaker, of a foreign body.

Tati centered his cinema on that very body, a cinema often defined as a re-appropriation of the body. It is this re-appropriation we seek.

The emergence of the individual is central to our cinema. When and how does one detach himself from the group and dare to assert one’s difference ?

It is that transformation which interests us, the very instant when things evolve, the passage where Tati himself evolves from « he who is laughed at » to « he with whom we laugh ».

SCREENINGS

« Open the door, please » is part of a collective film entitled « Childhoods », made up of 6 short films. Each one of them relates an episode of the childhood of a great movie director, and has been directed by a young filmmaker.