The IFI has announced that Robin Campillo, winner of the Grand Prix at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, will visit this year’s IFI French Film Festival for a very special screening of 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) on Monday, November 20th at 19.30, followed by a post-screening Q&A, moderated by Brian Finnegan of GCN.
Campillo’s third feature film is set in the 1990s at the height of France’s AIDS epidemic. Against the backdrop of the Act Up campaign, the HIV-positive Sean, one of the group’s founders, begins a tentative romance with gentle newcomer Nathan, who has tested negative for the virus. 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) is by turns a beautifully observed love story and a fiercely engaged political work that simmers with a quiet anger.
Tickets for 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) and all of the French Film Festival films are now on sale from www.ifi.ie and the IFI Box Office – 01-6793477.
Robin Campillo was born in Morocco in 1962. In 1983, he went to study at the IDHEC (the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies), where he met Laurent Cantet, with whom he has collaborated since the late 1990s as editor and co-screenwriter for the films Time Out, The Class, Foxfire Confessions of a Girl Gang, and most recently The Workshop, which was officially selected for the Un Certain Regard strand at the 70th Cannes Films Festival.
In 2004, he directed his first feature film, The Returned. Eastern Boys, his second feature film, received the Orizzonti Prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated at the 2015 César Awards in the Best Film and Best Director categories.