Cannes, France - Veteran US director Clint Eastwood unveiled Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival his latest movie with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie playing a mother whose young son, Walter, suddenly vanishes.
US actor and director Clint Eastwood (R) and US actress Angelina Jolie (L) arrive for the gala screening of US director Clint Eastwood's film 'The Exchange' running in competition at the 61st edition of the Cannes Film Festival, 20 May 2008, in Cannes, France. EPA/CHRISTOPHE KARABA
Set in Los Angeles in 1928, Jolie's character Christine Collins is suddenly confronted, months after the disappearance with a nine-year old boy claiming to be her missing son, and the LA police turning what they claim to be the boy's successful return into a publicity stunt.
But Christine is convinced that the boy is not her son. Walter had, in fact, met a terrible fate.
The Exchange is based on one of the most notorious crimes in LA history which concerned a child serial killer and sex offender Gordon Northcott played by Jason Butler Harner.
'To lose a child - I can't imagine anything worse. Especially not knowing the fate of the child,' Jolie said a press conference in Cannes ahead of the movie's premiere.
'Certainly so much of it is being a mother and imagining this happening to me: this pain and frustration,' she said, adding that Christine Collins is very much like her own mother who died shortly before the movie went into production.
Despite turning 78 this month, Eastwood's The Exchange also shows that the actor turned director-screenwriter-composer-producer still has a lot to say about movie making.
This is especially the case as the storyline in The Exchange marks another twist in the recent run of movies that he has made which have included bleak war dramas and Million Dollar Baby about the ambitions of a young woman boxer.
'Crimes against children are the most heinous crime there are,' said Eastwood.
But apart from also shedding light on the role of women in 1920s Los Angeles, The Exchange also exposes the risks that individuals take when they challenge the system with Christine finding herself locked in a tough and at times harrowing battle with the authorities.
Eastwood's film also touches on the position of single working mother during prohibition-era California.
'They (the police) were dismissive of her original complaint,' he said. 'She was a single mother, maybe that was not looked on so well in those days.'
But the film also presents a chilling picture of the lengths to which the LA authorities went to silence their critics, especially those that were relatively easy to intimidate such as women.
'Every two or three decades the (LA) police department has gone through some sort of revolution where they have been caught in some sort of corrupt activity,' said Eastwood.
'History often repeats itself,' he said. 'Since then many changes have been made to the police structure, sometimes good and bad.' The police department in 1928 'was particularly corrupt.'
However Jolie believes that there are parallels with what happens in other parts of the world.
'Obviously it deals with LA, we can look at this globally and see people fighting against their governments and corrupt police,' she said.
The Exchange also stars John Malkovich, as Reverend Gustav Briegleb who is one of the LA police's major critics and who becomes Christine's champion in her struggle to locate her missing son and her fight with the police.
'Once the city of angels, our protectors have become our brutualizers,' Briegleb says in one of his sermons.
Once an icon of macho movie stars, Eastwood gained acclaim for his role in the 1970s in the Dirty Harry movie series playing a tough San Francisco cop. Eastwood is to host a special Dirty Harry screening at the festival.
The Exchange also marked Jolie's return to the Cannes festival.
The 32-year-old Hollywood star and her partner Brad Pitt were in Cannes last week for the premiere of the animated Kung Fu Panda in which she lends her voice to the character of a tigress in the movie about an unlikely hero in the shape of a chubby panda.
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