1999 MADELEINE

Employed as a seamstress in a failing tailor's shop, thirtysomething Madeleine tries to cure her intense loneliness with a computer dating service. When that brings less than success, she fantasizes about the visiting door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman and even a young female customer from work. Paris may be called the City of Light, but you have never seen it illuminated with the starkness and soul-baring severity of Laurent Bouhnik's ?note pad? camera lens, unraveling the solitary heroine's hungry psyche, hidden yearnings, and desperate passions. But Madeleine is not quite alone. Weaving in and out of the fabric of her life are Gabriel ? the salesman ? and his wife Marie, Madeleine's mother Eve, a harried bus passenger named Mathieu, a would-be father named Thomas… Over the next decade the writer-director plans to follow their stories as well, embroidering, quilt-style, one fresh feature a year until concluding the interconnected saga in 2009. Not since Krzysztof Kieslowski's “Trois Couleurs” trilogy of “Red,” “White,” and “Blue” has there been an ambitious screen project conceived on the emotional and temporal scale as Bouhnik's “10 Films/10 Years.” The CIFF is proud to commence it with Madeleine's 1999 narrative, the first panel in Bouhnik's celluloid tapestry. A bientot! (In French with English subtitles.)