Flowers of Evil

Trailer Link: http://www.facebook.com/FLeursDuM4L?ref=ts&sk=app_57675755167

France, 2010
Director: David Dusa
Screenwriters: David Dusa, Raphaëlle Maes, Louise Molière, Mike Sens
Cinematographer: Armin Franzen
Editors: Yannick Coutheron, Nicolas Houver
Cast: Rachid Youcef, Alice Belaïdi
Running Time: 100 minutes

Exhilarating and emotional, Flowers of Evil is the story of a young Iranian woman, Anahita, forced to leave Iran by her parents in order to keep safe from the violence following Iran’s bitterly contested election in 2009. Now in Paris, she meets a young French-Algerian man, Gecko, who works as a bellhop in a Paris hotel.

In David Dusa’s feature-length directorial debut, technology, in the forms of Twitter and YouTube, plays a starring role, at once connecting and dividing the two lovers. Anahita’s exile in Paris juxtaposed with her desire to monitor and understand the conflict back in Iran provides the main tension in the film. She is caught between her old life and a new freedom she feels with Gecko, a young man with apparently no familial or political ties. Gecko’s spirit is exemplified by his breathtaking “parkour” dancing, which is irrepressible and stunningly performed by actor Rachid Youcef.

Roya Rastegar for the Tribeca Film Festival remarked, “David Dusa powerfully and viscerally binds a fictional romance with real footage collected from YouTube, Google Video, and Twitter, personalizing anonymous images of violence and testifying to the revolutionary potential of the Internet.” This is a decidedly 21st-century love story, which Variety rightly calls “innovative and powerfully visceral.”

Actress Alice Belaïdi, whose own background is Romanian Gypsy and not Iranian, is one of French theater’s rising talents and recently received recognition as Best Female Newcomer at the Molière Awards.