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" EXILEE
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Fast-Paced Thriller
LONG METRAGE - FILM 90 mn
SYNOPSIS
“The First Death Is Always The
Hardest” Val, a young French woman
living in Rio de Janeiro, is paying for her university course in
literature
by working as a top-flight fitness instructor in a high-class Rio gym.
Her employers take note of her natural, exquisite good looks and
fabulous physique and she becomes the living symbol of their health
club through an ad campaign that sees her photograph displayed in the
news papers, TV and on posters plastering what seems like every wall
in Rio.
However, her life is turned upside down by the murder of Julian,
her handsome, amoral ex-boyfriend who had shared Val’s fame by
being
her male counterpart in the gym’s ad campaign. Julian, a playboy,
almost too perfect-looking to be real, is found brutally stabbed to
death in his apartment without any clear motive in evidence.
The intensive police investigation reveals Julian as a complex
character
who was drifting deeper and deeper into the shady darkness of the
notorious Rio underworld; a secret life Val knew nothing about.
Confronted by the terrible facts of Julian’s horribly violent
death and
his double life, Val decides to collaborate with the Delegado
Van Duyl,
a policeman who‘s deep, enigmatic personality and Zen-like calm gives
him an almost mystical ability to find the hidden truths of this complex
and puzzling case.
Val, meanwhile, begins for the first time to truly understand
her
secretive ex-lover, and discovers the appalling reality hidden
beneath
his apparently carefree existence, when Guido, Julian’s friend is also
found stabbed to death in the same gruesome manner as Julian.
Her quest for the truth is now a race against time, driving our
young
‘exile’, Val, inside the infamous Favelas, where she meets Julian‘s
mother who turns out, to Val’s intense surprise, to be a Maé de Santo
– a high priestess of the Macumba, the ancient and secret religion
of the slaves.
Fascinated despite her fears, Val becomes immersed more and more
deeply in the investigation, and is drawn inexorably into the hypnotic
world of the prime suspect, sinister Dragan Kardic, the shadowy ruler
of Rio’s underworld; a deeply ambiguous figure, at once a
superbly
beautiful and convincing transsexual, and the controller
of a cruel and deviant male prostitution network, whose evil
tentacles
embrace the rich, the famous and the damned.
As an outsider, an exile from France living in the seething
cauldron
of fabulous, dangerous Rio, Val is free of the inherited guilt
and cultural
forces that bind Rio’s underworld to silence about the true horror
of Dragan’s power.
Val, after putting her own life on the line, is able to finally
unmask,
one by one, the terrifying truths that Julian sought so desperately
to conceal. But these are secrets so dangerous, so powerful and
so
widespread, that Val finds the roots of evil are much , much deeper
thanshe could ever have imagined . . .
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