LA FORTUNE DE SILA by Fabrice Humbert

After L’Origine de la violence, Fabrice Humbert gives us in La Fortune de Sila a captivating novel, a true modern panorama of our globalised society. Paris, June 1995. In a grand restaurant, a waiter is struck violently by a customer. Around him, no one intervenes. Not the Russian couple surveying the scene with mixed feelings, not the angry customer’s wife, not the two young men, two Frenchmen, there to celebrate a first job at the bank.

A simple story? Barely worth mentioning? In the course of lives, no event, however minor, is harmless. And the brutality of one, the indifference or cowardice of others will soon reveal their true significance, as the first sign of their decline. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Financial Crisis of 2008, in a world made of money, the interwoven destinies of the actors in this opening scene, from the Russian oligarch to the French banker and the property speculator, gradually spin a web. And at the centre of the web, Sila, the waiter on the ground, the motionless figure around whom everything moves . . .

- the director is Xavier Durringer (his latest film was a satire on Sarkozy). The script is written and filming should commence in early 2013.

- the title is winner of Grand Prix RTL-Lire