Foundation (MMKA) and the Minister of Culture pledged to back the production if a guarantee could be made that the film would be finished safely. A compromise filming schedule was negotiated whereby a quarter of the shoot would take place in Eastern Europe rather than Corsica and fewer shooting days would be allotted. This allowed the original €5 million budget to be reduced by €700,000 to the amount available. With the funding promises secured and a revised shooting schedule, the film's producers forged a new co-production contract in July 2005. While the production's lawyers worked to clarify its legal standing in the Summer of 2005, it emerged that Humbert Balsan's deeply indebted production company Ognon Pictures had pledged all rights to the production to Coficiné in exchange for loans. With production in legal stasis and faced with a lengthy court battle to recover the rights, the producers agreed to a settlement with Ognon's bankruptcy officer. In the meantime, the French partners Mezzanine Film declared their discomfort with the scale of the production, and after mutual agreement with the producers, left the project on September 5, 2005. After meeting with the producers and their new French partner, Paul Saadoun of 13 Production, Coficiné consented to completing the film. On February 6, 2006, Tarr and producer Gábor Téni issued a press release which documented at length the developments with the troubled production to that date, and expressed their hope and intent to persevere in completing the film. Tarr duly restarted shooting in March 2006, after a year of inactivity. The filmmakers dedicated The Man from London to their late colleague Humbert Balsan. Release The Man from London premiered in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Tarr's first film to do so. Although its showing was highly anticipated, the slow pace and prolonged shots of the film "had the press fleeing like panicked slaughterhouse cattle" as The New York Times put it, and it won no prize. This failure was attributed by the film's French distributor Shellac to its late showing and the poor quality of the dubbing. A proposal for the film to open the Hungarian Film Week out of competition had previously been rejected by the festival's board. Following its Cannes appearance, the film was screened at the film festivals of Toronto, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Split, Vancouver and New York. It proved controversial in New York, where elements of the audience