How do you finance a Hollywood project without a script? How do you seduce potential financial backers for a film with no star power? And where do you meet wealthy cinephiles who are willing to take such a risk? At the Cannes Film Festival of course. That’s at least where friends and colleagues Alec Baldwin and James Toback thought to look in 2012 when they set out to find potential backers for their film project “The Last Tango in Tikrit,” a project inspired by Bernardo Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS. To achieve their goal Baldwin and Toback work their way through the festival and use their charm to pitch their story to producers, investors, and studio moguls in hotel rooms, luxury yachts, and in the cinema. Along they way they encounter industry big shots and actors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski or Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain, who all reveal their own stories about the difficulties of backing for their [in most cases earlier] films. Orson Welles once said: "I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live." The boundaries of documentary films become visibly blurred in SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. Throughout the film it's unclear whether Toback and Baldwin are really serious about this project. Like the cinema wonderland that is Cannes, the vanity fair for the wealthy, truth and fiction blend merge in impressive ways.

David Herger