We’re proud to announce that DELIGHT, the second film in Gareth Jones’s Desire Trilogy, has been selected to open the Main Competition programme of the 35th Moscow International Film Festival on June 21st.
Starring Jeanne Balibar (Va Savoir, The Duchess of Langeais, Ne Change Rien, At Ellen’s Age) in her first leading role in a British film, Tim Dutton (The Rendezvous, The Bourne Identity, Tom and Viv) and introducing Gavin Fowler (RSC/RADA), DELIGHT tells the story of a female war photographer who comes to terms with her buried trauma through a passionate affair with the son of a former lover and comrade-in-arms.
Building on the intimate, intense style established in his previous film DESIRE (2009), Jones now develops the D-Trilogy’s concerns with creativity and libido to look at the human cost of war reportage and the interplay between
landscape, memory and truth-telling.
Jones says: “DELIGHT is a war film without violence, about scars hardening on the inside. The journalist as hero – or antihero – is a trope of our times; I wanted to push that theme, to see how cinema could address the price of
bearing witness, particularly for an audience steeped in visual consumption, for whom suffering can easily become unconscious entertainment.”
Jones’s story was partly inspired by the experience of his war correspondent father Ivor Jones, who retired to the village where the production was based, but for whom inner peace was always elusive.
“DELIGHT probes the business of observing and recording, the creation of memory through photography and art, and the role of eros in healing the damaged psyche. Naturally we praise the journalists and photographers who bring us evidence of distant conflicts, but rarely do we ask what it costs them all their lives. Nor what they have shared in and may yet pay for. At what point does observing become collusion?”
Shot by DESIRE Director of Photography Alex Ryle on the Red Scarlet and designed by Rupert Allan at rural locations near to Jones’s own Welsh home, DELIGHT performed the logistical somersault of mounting a major international feature film in a remote and unspoilt corner of Wales with a majority local crew and cast. The third film DENIAL is scheduled for 2014.
Cast: Jeanne Balibar, Gavin Fowler, Tim Dutton, Eiry Thomas, Sue Jones-Davies, Naomi Everson, Iestyn Jones, Raphael Jones, Pandora Jones,
Rupert Allan.
Production Details:
Writer/director Gareth Jones
Producer Fiona Howe
Co-producers Echo Art Films, London; SaGa production, Sarajevo
Executive Producers Anna Holburn, Marie Howe, David John, Mamta Kaash, Sarah Rouche, Steve White
Associate Producers Rupert Allan, Alex Ryle
Director of Photography Alex Ryle
Production Designer Rupert Allan
Picture Editor George Pursall
Sound Recordist Charlie Weisfeld
Sound Design/Mixer Richard Chesebrough
Music Composer Fiona Howe
Music Editor/Whisper track mix James Bell
Online Editor Malcolm Ellison
Colourist Thor Janke
Costume Designer Andrea Wiltshire
Make-up Designer Victoria Poland
First AC/Focus Puller Jason Wingrove
DIT/Assembly Editor Siencyn Langham
Gaffer Dave Hutton
Year of Production 2012/13
Format DCP
Aspect Ratio 1:2.35
Sound Mix 5.1
Length 101 minutes
Language English/French/Welsh
Location Ceredigion, Wales
Press contact:
[email protected]
Fiona Howe, Scenario Films
+44 (0)20 8992 6332
+44 (0)20 8992 6332
+44 (0)7792 644325+44 (0)7792 644325 (m)
www.scenariofilms.com/films/delight
