ET@Cannes: 'The Tree', Julie Bertuccelli

It took a huge tree to do the closing honours at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival on Sunday night. French director Julie Bertuccelli's ' The Tree' rose to the occasion, bringing a whole cast of young children to transform the red carpet to a Cannes family stairs.

Adapted from Australian writer Judy Pascoe's debut novel ' Our Father Who Art in the Tree', the film is about mourning. When her husband suddenly dies, a mother has to care for her children, one of them thinks her father has gone to live in an enormous fig tree in their backyard.

Bertuccelli, who was inspired by the novel, chose Australia to shoot the film "because it's a country where the nature and its, at times amazing excesses are the centre of everything". The director saw a thousand trees in the Queensland region before she decided on one.

"The film uses the primitive force of nature to reflect on human feelings," said Bertuccelli, a well-known documentary film-maker whose first feature film 'Since Otar Left' was part of the parallel selection in Cannes 2003.

French actor Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes last year for her role, incidentally as a grieving mother, in Danish director Lars von Trier's ' Antichrist', plays a grieving wife this time. Gainsbourg walked the red carpet with her young actor-colleagues Morgana Davies, who plays the role of the eight-year-old daughter who believes her father lives in their tree after his death, and the other three young children in the movie. 'The Tree', which is made in English, was screened in the out of competition section.

For Bertuccelli, whose first film was set in Georgia, travelling to Australia to film her new movie, was a journey that identified with the film. "The task of mourning is like going into exile. It snatches the other person away from us, taking away a part of ourselves at the same time. It's a journey that we make until we get to the point where we let go of the other person while keeping them inside us, just like an exile tries to maintain a link to his roots within himself."A