05 · 24 · 15

Congratulations to Michel Franco for winning at Cannes!

Mexican director Michel Franco won the prize for Best Screenplay at the 68th Cannes Film Festival for his latest film Chronic. We congratulate him for this extraordinary accolade!

In the festival’s official prize ceremony Michel Franco said: “the idea for this film emerged in Cannes three years ago, when I received a prize from Tim Roth. We talked about making a film together, and the result is Chronic."

Chronic is Franco’s first film made outside of Mexico. It tells the story of David, a nurse who works with the terminally ill, played by Tim Roth. Efficient and dedicated to his job, David develops close relationships with the people he looks after. But outside of work, he is shy and reserved. It’s clear that he need his patients just as much as they need him.

In an exclusive interview with FICM from the Cannes Film Festival, Michel Franco talked about the development of his award-winning script.

“I worked very closely with Tim. Since I was writing the script for him, I very nervously sent him the first treatment, since after a year of working on it I was uncertain about how he would react to it. At that stage we still weren’t close friends. Now we trust each other, but at that stage I still wasn’t sure how to work with a Hollywood actor – you work for a whole year and if he doesn’t like the script then it’s a wasted year; but that’s the risk I took. I was expecting to have to wait a few weeks for Tim’s response – that’s how long an actor normally takes to read a script – but he called me within two hours to tell me that he loved it. It was a really close collaboration, I changed a lot of things, not because he asked me to, but because he seemed to understand the script better than I did, he had a clearer idea of the film I wanted to make, so he contributed a lot. I wrote the script in Spanish, then Gabriel Ripstein, who is the producer, translated and adapted it, and we discussed ideas together – that also enriched the script a great deal.”

Franco has had a long career history at FICM: his short film El soldado (2001) was part of the Jornadas de Cortometraje Mexicano at the Cineteca Nacional (created by Daniela Michel, Director of FICM, and Enrique Ortega); his seventh short film, Entre dos (2003) competed at the first edition of FICM; his first feature film Daniel y Ana / Daniel and Ana, was presented as a Special Screening at the 7th edition of FICM; in 2012 he won the Premio Tradicional at the 10th FICM; and a year later he competed in the Official Selection at the 11th FICM with A los ojos, co-directed with his sister Victoria Franco. We are delighted by the success of this talented filmmaker, who shares such a close relationship with FICM.