SELFMADEHERO
MIKEL GN
Mikel lives with his wife and two children in Costur, an idyllic Spanish town surrounded by hills. He has a job selling candy, but Mikel is a dreamer, not a businessman, and money is tight. What's more, the ordinariness of smalltown life is preventing him from fulfilling a life-long dream: to become a writer. Mikel takes a job as a bodyguard. His family is soon uprooted to the Basque Country, where Mikel is charged with protecting politicians from the armed separatist group ETA. It is a job that provides drama worthy of the page, but only at the cost of fear, uncertainty, and family breakdown.
MOZART IN PARIS GN
(W) Frantz Duchazeau (A) Frantz Duchazeau
In 1778, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) leaves Salzburg for Paris. The French capital promises to liberate the 22-year-old from the suffocating grip of his father and from a city that is unable to accommodate his genius. But there is no grand entrance for the former child prodigy. When Mozart arrives in Paris, he is cash-strapped, unknown, and his French is limited. His mentor, the critic Baron von Grimm, introduces him to a number of Parisian nobles. With these contacts, recognition is still hard-won; the French court appears indifferent to Mozart's talents and disapproving of his spontaneity at times. Tracing the composer's six-month stay in the city of lights, Mozart in Paris dramatizes the confrontation between a bright-eyed genius and everyday reality.