Les Roseaux Sauvages is a French film directed by André Téchiné released in 1994.
It is the long version of the TV movie " Le Chêne et le Roseau " part of the collection commissioned by Arte " Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge ".
The film received four Césars in 1995, including those for best film and best director.
André Téchiné responded favourably to Arte's request, happy to be able to respond to a commission that corresponds to his desire, which he considers rare.
He chose to make a film about the 60s because they were his own adolescence and he had long wanted to make a film about the Algerian War.
The screenplay was written quickly, the director even considering at the time that it was the one he wrote the fastest.
It was first a 55-minute version written in 5 days, but André Téchiné and his screenwriters Gilles Taurand and OLivier Massard are dissatisfied with it because the characters are not developed enough.
In two additional weeks, the story is developed into a feature film, interweaving the political and sexual aspects of the previous version which didn't cross enough.
The screenwriters started with the characters and wondered what could happen to them.
The work is largely autobiographical, the story being inspired by an event in the director's youth "the intrusion of a black foot in a quiet corner of France in the 60s", the respect of an experience drawn from the guarantee of fiction.
Without having really lived the story of Serge's brother, the director doesn't find it totally foreign to the place: he is struck in this region of the South-West, by the frequency of cemeteries, of commemorative plaques of young soldiers who died during the Algerian war.
The casting
Élodie Bouchez: Maïté Alvarez
Gaël Morel: François Forestier
Stéphane Rideau: Serge Bartolo
Frédéric Gorny: Henri Mariani
Michèle Moretti: Ms. Alvarez
Jacques Nolot: Mr. Morelli
Charles Picot: the principal
Shooting locations
André Téchiné, the director immediately thinks of the sub-prefecture of Lot-et-Garonne, Villeneuve-sur-Lot.
It was in Villeneuve that he spent his last years in high school, at the Georges-Leygues high school, where he obtained his baccalaureate in 1962.
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