Official Competition 2018

The Wild Boys / Les Garçons sauvages

Bertrand Mandico I 2017 I 110'

SYNOPSIS

At the beginning of the 20th century, five teenagers of good families enamoured with the occult, commit a savage crime. A Dutch Captain takes them in charge for a repressive cruise. Exhausted by the Captain’s methods, the five boys prepare to mutiny but their scale in a supernatural island will cause a metamorphosis in them

BIOGRAPHY

Bertrand Mandico

BERTRAND MANDICO (France, 1971) has a long career as a short filmmaker, with more than 40 audiovisual creations. His work is recognisable by its unique aesthetics and combination of black humour and macabre elements. In addition, he has enriched his film studies with various publications in still format, photography, collage and drawings. The Wild Boys was his first feature film.

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Critical text

Bertrand Mandico ́s universe is inspired by Walerian Borowczyk ́s surrealistics, boundless and lush poetics, as well as by other heterodox filmmakers as Nikos Nikolaidis, Ken Russell or the last of Fassbinder, but also by the glorious vein of exploitation represented by the giallo or erotic and horror European films shot in the seventies. In this, his first full-length film, Mandico adds new ingredients to the formula: the adventure tales for children, from Two Years’ Vacation of Verne, passing through Captains Courageous of Kipling, and to Lord of the Flies of Golding, which here will conveniently end perverted. The Wild Boys renews the frenzy, impact and inventive cinema, in which the distortion of myths and the gender and generic transgression reach the climax. Mandico treats us to a feast with humour, fantasy and provocation where shadow lines are definitely dissolved. GABRIEL DOMÉNECH

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