Special to SanDiegoComicConNews.com) – SHE IS CONANN Synopsis: In a barbaric fantasy sci-fi trip through time, sword-and-sorcery mythology is bent, fractured, and gender-swapped by master visionary Bertrand Mandico in his third feature epic. Six lives, six eras, and six deaths mark Conann’s poetic journey through different incarnations and lesbian loves.
Guiding Conann through her many epic lives in SHE IS CONANN is Elina Löwensohn (Amateur, Let the Corpses Tan) as Rainer, a Cerberus of many otherworldly dimensions whose paparazzi camera sees all.
The perversity of The Wild Boys and the hero’s journey of After Blue (Dirty Paradise) come together in SHE IS CONANN. It’s an even greater handmade homage as Mandico ropes in influences as lush as Fellini Satyricon, The Night Porter, The Hunger, and Fassbinder’s entire oeuvre to craft a moving portrait of a warrior trying to find her place while outside of space, time, and meaning.
This official selection of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Fantastic Fest, and Sitges “thrives on its own bizarre extravagance as it pushes the limits of substance and style” (Collider).
A visceral and impulsive queer artist with a prolific body of work in singular and form-challenging cinema, SHE IS CONANN is Mandico’s third feature following THE WILD BOYS, which topped Cahiers du Cinéma’s 2018 list of Top 10 Films, and the multi-award-winning AFTER BLUE (DIRTY PARADISE) —both of which were released by Altered Innocence in North America.
His most ambitious work yet, SHE IS CONANN is a barbaric fantasy sci-fi trip that blurs realities and flips genders, loosely using the American cult classic Conan the Barbarian as groundwork for this intoxicatingly lush 35mm-shot epic.
SHE IS CONANN stars Claire Duburcq (1917, AFTER BLUE), Christa Théret (RENOIR), Sandra Parfait (Netflix’s Lupin), Agata Buzek (AFTER BLUE, HIGH LIFE), Nathalie Richard (AFTER LOVE, IRMA VEP), and Françoise Brion (L’IMMORTELLE) as the many faces of Conann — from young woman to warrior queen, each overcoming the last — in addition to Julia Riedler (LUZ) and Mandico-constant Elina Löwensohn (AMATEUR, NADJA), who has appeared in every one of his feature films, in the role of Rainer, the Cerberus guardian of the underworld.
SHE IS CONANN REVIEWS
“Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, French writer-director Bertrand Mandico’s She Is Conann is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem”
— Slant
“Mandico has proven his artistic devotion to three things: Poetic dialogue, iconoclastic gender-bending, and glitter. With She Is Conann, the writer-director reinforces this fantastical architecture with a clear, propulsive story arc, and the result is his best work to date”
—RogerEbert.com
“She Is Conann is no mere gender-swapped take on author Robert E. Howard’s famous warrior king. It is instead a mind-melting, time-traveling, corpse-eviscerating manifesto on the price of vengeance, a visually stunning film that doesn’t wallow in excess, because that implies sloth. No, She Is Conann slithers in excess with relentless intent”
— The Austin Chronicle