FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000

Erick Zonca's La Vie Rêvée Des Anges (The Dream Life Of Angels) was the feature film debut of a 44-year-old writer-director who had spent two years just crafting the scenario and searching for the right faces to fit the visual images in the landscape of his mind. I

It paired two young talents, the already accomplished Elodie Bouchez and the bright newcomer Natacha Régnier, as "angels" who don't quite live in the same world as the rest of us, and it went on to earn a shared Best Actress Award at the 1998 Cannes festival.

A key artistic and screenplay collaborator on The Dream Life Of Angels was Virginie Wagon, who is now in the sweepstakes for Camera d'Or honours with her own debut feature, Le Secret (The Secret).

Born in 1965, Virginie Wagon contributed reports and documentation for various press agencies before meeting Zonca. She collaborated with him on all three of his short films that were preludes to The Dream Life Of Angels  Rives (Dreams) (1992), Eternelles (Eternal) (1994), and Seule (Alone) (1996) in addition to Zonca's recent Le Petit Voleur (The Little Thief). Along the way, she made a short film of her own, Grandir (1995).

After playing several film festivals, Grandir set the stage for The Secret. Marie (Anne Coesens) is a 35-year-old woman who has been married for the last 12 years to François, the man she still loves and the father of her two-year-old son, Paul. François wants to have anoth

er child, but Marie is not at all sure. She earns money on the side by selling encyclopedias door to door, and one day, she arives at a villa where she meets Bill (Tony Todd), a 50-year-old black American who never goes out and can hardly speak a word of French.

Their first clumsy, hesitant meeting leads to another, and soon they are beginning to enjoy their conversations. In fact, Marie likes to prolong them, for now she can open up, talk about herself, and reveal a long suppressed secret...

Ron Holloway