As part of the 22nd Raindance Film Festival, Jean Luc Herbulot’s first feature film DEALER will receive in London its UK Premiere on Friday 26 September at 8.20pm at the Vue Piccadilly Cinema. The screening will be attended by the director, the lead actor/producer Dan Bronchinson and main cast members Bruno Henry, Salem Kali and Elsa Madeleine.

DEALER tells the dark tale of Dan, a small-time drug dealer, dreaming to take his daughter and move to Australia to become a pastry chef. When he is offered the chance from his best client for a one-time only, big cocaine deal, he goes against his better judgment and accepts the offer. What starts as a simple score becomes a struggle to keep Dan and his daughter alive.

Raindance Film Festival describes the film as “clever enough to make you root for the bad guy, with a gritty and frenetic visual style, a smart script and superb performances from its central cast. Highly tense, frequently brutal and always engaging, DEALER is slick, smart and stylish breathing new life into a familiar genre.” French-Congolese Director Jean Luc Herbulot comments: “I’m thrilled that DEALER will be playing at Raindance. I really hope Britons will develop a special relationship with the film as many Brit flicks were a great source of influence.”

Due to its unusual subject matter in France, DEALER was produced as a true indie film by Dan’s company (Multipass Prod) and Jean Mach (Mad Films Mi) with no public funds, financing from TVs, no French distributors attached or major film producers involved. “I knew we had to do the film that way. It was its language. Dan’s life was like that: a sequence of shit hitting the fan,” says Jean Luc Herbulot. “Each film has its own configuration, and it was the right one for us. We would have had 300,000 Euros more, it may have ruined the spirit of the film.” The film was completed for a very low budget of £130,000.

Loosely inspired by the life of Dan Bronchinson (“The darkest scenes being the most faithful to reality.”, says Dan), DEALER is already a landmark in France as it is the first local film depicting the life of a drug dealer. Cowritten by Jean Luc Herbulot and Samy Baroon, the film features a new generation of French talent: Elsa Madeleine (Chris), Salem Kali (Salem), Bruno Henry (Delo) and Dimitri Storoge (Soupape).

“I wanted to explore the energy of despair. When the odds are against you and there is no way out – but you still have to fight”, explains director/writer/editor Jean Luc Herbulot. “I also wanted to show how one’s life can change in the blink of an eye with one action. The dreams you thought were within your reach become unreachable and your allies become your worst enemies”.

Fueled by a fast-paced style of editing and directing, DEALER is a gritty depiction of the drug-trafficking lifestyle without unnecessary glamorization. “We wanted to show that drugs are far from the best path to a dream journey,” explains Dan Bronchinson. “There are no praises, no bling bling. It’s really a descent into hell, and the dark truth of a life in drugs”. A dark truth that still leaves space for humor and irony as the film toys with the the tragicomic ambiguity of its main character: Dan’s desire to succeed and his inevitable misfortunes.

DEALER was well received this summer in festivals such as Fantasia Montreal where the local press described it as “an absolute rocket ship of a feature film” (CriterionCast) and “an invisible jagged cliff that leaves us all hanging while gritting our teeth” (Arts & Opinion). The film recently premiered in Paris at the opening night of L’Etrange Festival, with the newspaper Le Figaro later calling the film “an original piece of cinema full of energy and dark humor”. Paris-based sales company WTFilms has currently sold the film to German distributor Alamode and Praesens for Switzerland. Talks are ongoing for the US, UK and Japan – while the film should officially have a French distributor in the coming weeks.

Images courtesy of Alexis Perrin