12/02/2008

The legendary French screen diva, Jeanne Moreau, will be the subject of a special retrospective during this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Unveiling her plans last night at the Berlin International Film Festival - at an EIFF party, at the Filmhaus, in the heart of Potsdamer Platz - artistic director, Hannah McGill, said that Moreau represented “exactly the sort of trailblazing spirit, boldness and intelligence that we celebrate yearly at the festival”.

This year, the festival is taking place, for this first, in June - from the 18th to the 29th.

Moreau’s achievements will be celebrated alongside the late New York filmmaker and actress, Shirley Clarke, whose career, McGill said, was similarly courageous and pioneering.

The French actress - who was last in Scotland for the European Film Awards when Glasgow was European City of Culture in 1990 - has worked with such renowned directors as the late François Truffaut, in Jules et Jim, Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold and Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid.

Moreau is in Berlin for the premiere of her latest film, Later, You Will Understand (Plus tard, tu comprendras), by Israeli director, Amos Gitai. She plays an elderly Jewish woman suddenly finding memories of the Holocaust come flooding to the surface.

McGill confirmed that the Berlin event has become crucially important in the selection process for Edinburgh with its change of dates meaning that the Cannes Film Festival in May falls too late to make a major impact on the programme.


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