The Cognac Thriller Festival
17th Edition
March 24 to March 28, 1999
The main novelties of the 1999 edition
The 1999 Edition is:
Novelties
· The Festival starts one day earlier
· · The New Blood section is now in competition NEW BLOOD
· The creation of a Grand Prix of Thriller Novel
· A tribute to Alfred Hitchcock
Great classics perennially fashionable
· With the competition of feature movies, short films and TV Pulps
· An exceptional jury for each of these competing sections
COGNAC NEW LOOK
For its 17th edition, the Cognac Film Festival, thanks to extraordinary liveliness of the thriller kind literature, wants to strengthen the links between literature and cinema. This 1999 edition looks like a promising vintage with 3 main novelties to back up the saying "more talent, more pleasure, more cinema in Cognac".
+ CINEMA
-The Festival starts one day earlier which allows us to show more films in each competing category: Movies New Blood, short films, TV thrillers and pulps.
+ PLEASURE
- The creation of the Grand Prix of Thriller Novel, which will see the best novel awarded each year, French or Foreign.
+ TALENT
-The New Blood section created last year, is now in competition. This category aims at creating favorable conditions to bring out the work of film makers who could otherwise appear as out of touch with the detective novel literary genre. The jury of this competition will exclusively consist of writers and journalists
Today Alfred Hitchcock would be 100 years old. As François Truffaut said, although the man is dead, the film maker, with his 53 movies broadcast around the world confirms what Cocteau was saying about Proust: "his work continues to live just like the watches around the wrists of dead soldiers keep on ticking." We invite you all to come to Cognac during the Festival to share with us all the emotions on the screen and on the scene… if it only were to listen to Ed McBain (scriptwriter of "Birds") and Anthony Shaffer (scriptwriter of "Frenzy") pay a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock.
New Blood
In order to give a chance to new authors and show the liveliness of the genre, a new category has been created this year An international selection of 1st and 2nd movies will be competing. These movies promise to be ambitious and intelligent ." off " Festival, the big Deal
As for each year, the Festival will also take place in the streets with the cooperation of the police.. It will start with the arrival of the Festival's guests aboard a special train departing from Paris Montparnasse at the Cognac train station. They will be welcomed be the Cognac Big Band around 3:15 PM on Wednesday, March 24. The guests will attend a luncheon on the train, music will be played and Cognac will be served. A good start!
The official opening of the Festival will take place an hour later at the Complexe Pathé, decorated by the very talented Gérard Gasquet.
And then the night will come...
The movie theater will empty, the bars and night clubs of the town will attract the crowd in great spirits.THE FESTIVE FESTIVAL
It' s party time: as we all know, from March 24 to 28, 1999, in Cognac will take place the Thriller Festival. But the real party is in the streets and the bars of Cognac. Indeed, a real effort has been made this year to allow everyone to be part of the Festival: to liven up all the bars and restaurants of the Place François 1er is what the Cognac Houses have succeeded in doing for the past 3 years. The bartenders have received adequate glasses to serve Cognac as a long-drink. This year, the Festival organizers have put a special emphasis on a younger crowd. Three weeks before the opening of the Festival, young wine growers will go to Poitiers, Bordeaux, Angoulême and La Rochelle to invite all students from these cities to come and enjoy the Festival. By presenting their student's card they will be granted discounts on movie tickets, in restaurants,… All the ingredients have been put together to show the rest of the world that in Cognac you will be welcome and have fun.François 1er Square on the 26,
All the Festival participants will walk through Cognac, leaving from the movie theater. They will go to the Place François 1er to leave their fingerprint in clay. Those will be added to the collection which belongs to the Cognac Festival Association. Then, the Festival participants will be invited by the shopkeepers of the Cognac Market to discover regional products at the famous "Cocktail du Marché".