Erick Zonca

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The IMDb gets ragged on a lot but occasionally you stumble on something like this and your faith in humanity is temporarily restored. This is the first thing Google turned up:

Co-scripted by Zonca and Aude Py, with the collaboration of Irish writer Michael Collins (whose novel The Resurrectionists attracted interest from Anthony Minghella), the original story follows the life of Julia, a 40 year-old seductress, who finds it increasingly difficult to hide her alcoholism and ends up out of her depth.

At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she encounters a young Mexican woman who can no longer see her son so Julia accepts to kidnap the eight year-old boy. Despite the sudden disappearance of the young woman, Julia succeeds in the kidnapping but gets caught up in an infernal spiral and frantically escapes to Mexico, with the child's grandfather hot on their heels.

It's an old-ish article but it looks like it managed to slip by, since I couldn't turn up anything about it with a forum search. I wonder if this is the "story of an abduction in Eastern Europe" mentioned in the long-dormant Zonca thread, retooled and relocated to North America.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

This sounds great! Swinton is a good match for Zonca I think. I never knew that Zonca knew English. Do you know who the distributor will be?

[colinr0380]

A positive review from Filmbrain!

[miless]

wow, Tilda loves those Eastern Europeans (this is her second in one year, right?)

[Barmy]

"Julia" has some awesome bits and some bad bits, but overall it's a must-see.

[montgomery]

I agree with Barmy. Actually, it wouldn't have been as great as it was without the bad bits, which only made the film more schizophrenic and hard to pin down. The less you know about the film going in, the better, I think.

[Barmy]

Yeah I knew ABSOLUTELY nothing, and was expecting some arty French drama, except in English. So it was a big surprise for me.