The contemporary suspense tale centers on the unexpected relationship between a fictitious war criminal in hiding, and his only human contact – his maid.

Silberling produces the film through his Reveal Entertainment banner, in a co-production with Disruptive Media and producers Chris Miller, James Burke and Michael Richter. David Lonner executive produces the film that is targeted to start principal photography this fall on location in Belgrade, Serbia.

Radiant Films International helmed by President and CEO Mimi Steinbauer will handle international rights to the film and will introduce the project to buyers at the upcoming Cannes Film Market.

On the announcement of the film Silberling said, “There’s no greater pleasure than crafting a tale for brilliant actors to sink their teeth into, and with Brandon and Abbie, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot. Watching them go toe to toe in this suspenseful tightrope walk of veiled intentions, cat and mouse psychology, and desperate gambling for human contact – it will be a filmmaker’s dream to capture. Having Mimi and her Radiant team squarely behind the film gives me a tremendous sense of security for the picture as it makes its way out into the world.”

“Disruptive is honored to be working with such incredibly talented artists as Brad, Brendan and Abbie, and are so excited to help bring this uniquely provocative story to audiences around the world,” continued Miller.

“Brad has written one of the smartest scripts I have read in awhile. It’s an intelligent, complex story and a great character study of people in conflict. Brendan and Abbie are perfectly cast and in Brad’s hands we expect great things from this thrilling film,” commented Steinbauer.

Source: Coming Soon

While Cornish’s Spanish is perhaps a little too clean and unaccented to be that of a working-class Texan girl, her performance is riveting, channeling an air of Jodie Foster in her English-language scenes. She plays Ashley’s slow transition – from helplessness and selfish expediency to devastated culpability and hard-won self-knowledge – with a conviction that is no less stirring for being so understated.

From Next Movie:

Some stick more than others. Some, you just finish the film and let them go. Films like the ones I just mentioned, those four films won’t ever leave me — the characters or the experiences. Like I still recite the poem “Bright Star” in my head at least a couple times a week. Sometimes more, even. I don’t know why that’s so deeply ingrained within me. I think when you invest that much into something, artistically or creatively, there’s this connection to it that never goes away.

From The Playlist:

I think we had discussions about it. To not judge Ashley, to let her be. It’s not about popularity with her, it wasn’t about how we show this woman in a way that’s likeable. Not just that she’s cranky, she messes up, and she’s just not a very good person. That’s who she is. It doesn’t mean she’s a bad person at the core of herself, she’s just not connected to that core. There’s so many levels of this film that are political and spiritual, but for me the beauty of the film in regards to Ashley’s character was the journey into her life. The letting go. You see that moment you talked about, that moment that’s hope, that’s light.

Writer/director David Riker shoots impressively, making the best of the striking border locations, and with Abbie Cornish he has an actress whose quiet resolve fits her character perfectly. Solid, proud and gently determined, her anger at everyone around her – as she apparently seeks to blame everyone but herself for her predicament – gradually fades as she finds a certain grace in her mission of motherhood.

Cornish continues the dark-and-difficult pattern with The Girl, a bilingual immigrant drama that had its world premiere this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. David Riker’s moody indie has the Australian actress playing Ashley, an impoverished Texas woman whose child is taken away from her due to her drinking and generally bad parenting. Desperate for cash, Ashley tries to smuggle a group of Mexicans across the border into the United States, an operation that goes horribly wrong and winds up with Ashley responsible for a cute but petulant young Mexican girl (Maritza Santiago Hernandez).

Cornish’s character then spends much of the downbeat movie on-screen by herself, or with the girl in gritty Mexican neighborhoods trying to figure a way out of her mess, as the walls close in and the dialogue gets even less frequent.

At least this one is set in the present day.

Cornish acknowledged the challenges in making the movie, saying at a post-screening question-and-answer session that the Spanish, among other things, proved tricky.

She said she was helped by Santiago Hernandez, a non-pro whom Riker discovered at an open-casting session. “She knew every single word in the entire script. It was intimidating,” Cornish said, adding, to some laughs from the audience: “It’s so nice to work with another actor who’s so prepared.”

In a departure from the tweeness of her other recent lead parts, Cornish plays a hardscrabble, hard-luck woman of the American underclass, switching between Spanish and a twangy Texas drawl. You can see why she’d take the role, which, at least on the page, has prestige and Oscar bait written all over it.

Whether it was the right choice for her, or she the right choice for it, can be debated. Less ambiguous are the movie’s commercial challenges. Immigration and border dramas are a tough sell in any event, and they’re probably even tougher now that we’ve seen a bunch of them, including Frozen River in 2008 (with which The Girl has some similarities) and La Misma Luna and Sugar before that. The Girl, which does not have U.S. distribution, was being developed for about a decade, and it’s hard not to feel like it might have enjoyed a different fate had it been completed ahead of those films.

Riker (La Ciudad) said at the Q+A that he wanted to reverse the traditional immigrant story in which the outsider ends up in the United States. “Would there be a way of turning the border upside down?” Riker said he asked himself, a way “to take an American … and bring her south?”

So, yes, at least give some credit to the director for putting a new spin on a perpetually challenging issue. And perhaps to Cornish for attempting a new spin on a challenge-ridden resume.

Source: LA Times

From The Playlist:

Well-told, well-shot and featuring a strong, but restrained and internalized performance from actress Abbie Cornish, director David Riker’s The Girl is a mannered and in-the-pocket indie drama that might be a total subdued winner if it weren’t for its dubious political ideologies, an irony considering the film’s DNA is clearly built on humanist tendencies. While the Australian Cornish does have mild issues with sticking the landing on her Texas accent, it’s her meatiest role since the deeply underrated Bright Star and lesser-seen, but no less valuable indies like Somersault and Candy (the latter featuring her going toe-to-toe with Heath Ledger and giving as good as she got) and she makes the most of it.

Did you manage to catch a screening of the film at the festival? Please do not hesitate to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Cornish is understated but wrenching in her portrayal of a woman who sees no way out of debilitating poverty, and no way to regain custody of her young son.

She says half of her lines in a Southern drawl and the other half in Spanish, a language she didn’t speak before landing the movie – and when the Australian-born actress got up onstage at the end of the film to answer questions, her natural Aussie accent just emphasized how out of her element Cornish must have been.

“This was the most intense, beautiful and collaborative filmmaking experience I’ve ever had,” said Cornish after the screening. ” … [The film] has a heartbeat, it has a soul.”

As impressive as Cornish is in The Girl, though, most of the talk at the post-screening Q&A turned to a much younger actress: nine-year-old Maritza Santiago Hernandez, who the filmmakers found in a small village in the state of Oaxaca, in southwestern Mexico.

“There’s no film industry to bring the girls to you – you have to go find them,” said producer Paul Mezey of the casting search, which he said included looking at 3,000 girls in 60 villages.

“She knew every single word in the entire script,” said Cornish of her young co-star, who had never acted before and has no ambitions to continue. “It was intimidating.”

Hernandez did not make the trip to New York for the movie’s premiere, but she still dominated the conversation – meaning that on a day when the women of Tribeca took center stage, a little girl stole the show.

Source: The Wrap (click for full story)

“The Girl totally rebirthed me as an actor,” Abbie recently told press. “It felt like it was the first time again. In making the film, I felt like it was the best I had ever been as an actor in all regards – as an actor, as a collaborator, as a human being.”

GALLERY LINKS:
- Public Events: 2012 Tribeca Film Festival – The Girl Premiere

GALLERY LINKS:
- The Girl: Clip Screencaptures

But Tribeca isn’t likely the first place producers of narrative films go when looking for a high-profile awards launchpad. That hasn’t stopped Goldcrest Films and producer Paul Mezey who will debut their new indie drama, The Girl which stars Abbie Cornish, on Friday night. With Strategy PR firm (led by Oscar maven Cynthia Swartz) behind them, they are hoping to make a big impact with a small film, secure a good distributor and set up a late Fall release that would also include an Oscar campaign for Cornish who delivers her most challenging performance to date and is the real selling point of the film written and directed by David Riker (La Ciudad). The story revolves around the plight of a South Texas single mother who has lost her son to Social Services and winds up trying to make some easy money smuggling Mexican immigrants across the border. The plan goes awry and she finds herself stuck with a young girl separated from her mother in the disastrous crossing.

Producer Mezey’s Beasts Of The Southern Wild, opening in June from Fox Searchlight, won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance. He has also produced other small films that resulted in key lead acting Oscar nominations including Half-Nelson for Ryan Gosling and Maria Full Of Grace for Catalina Sandino Moreno. Mezey has high hopes for The Girl  based on Cornish’s performance. He is hoping audiences at Tribeca give the film the boost it needs in order to secure distribution and acclaim that will translate into success during an awards season release. “With a film like this you need a lot of lead time to organically try to connect with audiences and build strong word of mouth and have a jump start on that before things get insane in the Fall. We don’t have a distributor yet so hopefully this screening will be something that can parlay into distributors seeing this film has a certain viability and word of mouth also is critical. Having that momentum in place can build into awards season. I don’t think we are necessarily counting on that per se. But when you have a film that is pretty much riding on the shoulders of one key performance I think discussion of that, and certainly recognition of what Abbie has accomplished here is going to help bring audiences to the film which at the end of the day is the most important thing,”  he said noting that the film has the vibe of a small movie like The Visitorwhich also went on to get a lead Oscar nod for its star Richard Jenkins.

Mezey emphasizes the challenge the role entailed for the Australian-born Cornish who is playing a bi-lingual role but knew no Spanish at all before taking it on. She also not only had to play an American, but one with a specific regional South Texas accent and then speak Spanish using it. She worked on prepping for the film six months before cameras rolled and told me it’s the toughest role she’s tackled yet. “There was so much work to do in prepping this film in terms of research and spending time in Mexico. Bit by bit  this character found itself and I found her. It was an amazing process, ” she said, and looks forward to seeing it with an audience Friday for the first time since the film was just finished under the wire to meet its Tribeca date (I saw it in a rough-cut form).

“To me  this is more of a personal piece than any other film. I can’t be objective about this film. I just can’t disconnect from it. I don’t think I’ve done a film that is this intimate,”  she said.

Mezey says the reason they chose to debut it now in Tribeca is basically because of former Sundancer Geoff Gilmore, the Chief Creative Office of Tribeca Enterprises. Gilmore tells Deadline: “The Girl appears to be exploring familiar territory, but its storytelling and ultimately its direction are fresh and unanticipated. Abbie Cornish’s portrait of a struggling mother is the core of David Riker’s very impressive tale of relationships and borders.”

Mezey thinks things have shifted for Tribeca with Gilmore being there, even though he isn’t solely programming like he did at Sundance. He thinks it’s important that there are fewer films at this fest than say the marquis Fall launching pad of Toronto or the mothership of all fests, Cannes in May which he says is a crapshoot. “I think for us the most essential thing is building our audience here in the U.S. and landing a distributor. If those are our ultimate goals then I think Tribeca makes a lot of sense for us. Because it has gotten so difficult for films like this, the second you present your film for the public the clock starts ticking. You are starting the conversation. You have to manage the time frame as well. Tribeca is well-positioned for us in that way. We have a good eight months afterwards, particularly if we get a good distributor and open in the late Fall,”  he said.

Source: Deadline

Such leading roles don’t frequently come around for women, but this year’s Tribeca boasts a boatload of them. In David Riker’s The Girl, which will make its world premiere in competition at the festival, Cornish’s fraught, sweaty performance of a mother on the brink bears two more pervasive themes at the 2012 Tribeca: financial straits and overlapping worlds.

“It totally rebirthed me as an actor,” says Cornish, the Aussie actress of Bright Star and Limitless. ‘’It felt like it was the first time again. In making the film, I felt like it was the best I had ever been as an actor in all regards — as an actor, as a collaborator, as a human being.”

Source: Washington Post (click for full story)

GALLERY LINKS:
- Public Events: Marquee at the Star Opening

Speaking of the film, the gallery has been updated with a couple of behind the scenes images, which feature Abbie and her co-stars.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Seven Psychopaths: On the Set

GALLERY LINKS:
- Public Events: Restoration Hardware Spring 2012 Launch

Abbie’s film The Girl will premiere at the festival on April 20, 2012. Further details about the screening and information on how to book tickets are available on the Tribeca website. “So excited to share this film. Can’t wait,” Abbie tweeted earlier today. We cannot wait either! The Girl is certainly looking like a very interesting project and a truly challenging role for Abbie.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Public Events: 2012 American Express Tribeca Film Festival LA Reception

GALLERY LINKS:
- Photoshoots: Last Uploads

My friend Maria will be helping out in keeping Abbie-Cornish.com updated with red carpet photos. She started by uploading the missing images from the past year, namely The Weinstein Company Celebrates The 2012 Academy Awards and Paris Fashion Week Haute Couture – Versace events. Many thanks for the great help, Maria!

GALLERY LINKS:
- Public Events: 2012 Vanity Fair Oscar Party
- Public Events: The Weinstein Company Celebrates The 2012 Academy Awardsy
- Public Events: Paris Fashion Week Haute Couture – Versace

The exciting news is that The Girl will premiere in the narrative competition. Written and directed by David Riker, it stars Abbie Cornish as a single mother who loses her job. Desperate for income to keep custody of her son, she helps smuggle illegal immigrants over the US-Mexico border.

The 11th annual Tribeca Film Festival will be held April 18-29.

Source: Associated Press