Screened as part of NZIFF 2012

Sleepless Night 2011

Nuit blanche

Directed by Frédéric Jardin

Quick-witted undercover cop thriller set in a vast Paris nightclub. “With this tightly paced nail-biter, director Frédéric Jardin has made a film that’s surpassed its US counterparts by a country kilometer.” — Time Out NY

France In French with English subtitles
98 minutes

Producers

Marco Cherqui
,
Lauranne Bourrachot

Screenplay

Frédéric Jardin
,
Nicolas Saada
,
Olivier Douyère

Photography

Tom Stern

Editor

Christophe Pinel

Production designer

Hubert Pouille

Costume designer

Uli Simon

Sound

Christian Monheim

Music

Nicolas Errera

With

Tomer Sisley (Vincent)
,
Julien Boisselier (Lacombe)
,
Joey Starr (Feydek)
,
Serge Riaboukine (Marciano)
,
Laurent Stocker (Manuel)
,
Lizzie Brocheré (Vignali)
,
Samy Seghir (Thomas)
,
Birol Ünel (Yilmaz)
,
Dominique Bettenfeld (Alex)
,
Adel Bencherif (Abel)

Festivals

Toronto 2011
,
Tribeca 2012

The latest French thriller to be handed the dubious compliment of a US remake, Sleepless Night makes deft play with an intricate set of double crosses and unleashes a torrent of action through the restaurants, kitchens, bathrooms, passageways and dance floors of a vast Parisian nightclub. To begin to describe the plot is to begin to throw out spoilers. Let’s just say a bent cop finds himself on the wrong side of a Corsican drug lord; a blameless teenager is held to ransom; and things become fatally complicated when the undercover squad moves in. — BG

“This French police thriller abounds in post-Woo/Tarantino action tropes… But Frédéric Jardin also brings a restless intelligence and disciplined glee to Sleepless Night that far surpasses its cinematic influences… Its bruising slapstick… multiple mistaken identities (and ethnicities), and well-developed characters accumulate into something uncommonly human for a shoot-‘em-up.” — Mark Holcomb, Village Voice