Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2019: #33. Portrait of the Girl on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) – Céline Sciamma

Portrait of the Girl on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu)

French director Céline Sciamma ends her five year hiatus from directing with her fourth project, Portrait of the Girl on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), which will reunite her with Adele Haenel, who starred in Sciamma’s 2007 debut Water Lilies. The project will be Sciamma’s first period piece after delivering a trilogy of films which dealt primarily with explorations of how gender and sexuality defined parameters for adolescents. The project will also feature celebrated Italian actress Valeria Golino. Veronique Cayla (Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1; Camille Claudel, 1915) and Benedicte Couvreur (who produced her first three features) are producing while Arte France Cinema has pre-purchased the film and will co-produce. Sciamma’s Water Lilies debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2007 (earning a Cesar nod for Best First Feature), while her sophomore film Tomboy went to Berlin’s Panorama sidebar. In 2014, Sciamma opened Directors’ Fortnight with Girlhood, which scored her a Cesar nod for Best Director. Since then, she co-wrote Andre Techine’s Being 17 (2016) and Claude Barras’ animated film My Life as a Cucumber (2016), which received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film.

Gist: Sciamma’s original script is set in the 18th century on the isolated island of Brittany, where an artist is commissioned to a young woman’s wedding portrait.

Release Date/Prediction: Sciamma’s production on Portrait of the Girl on Fire is scheduled for October through December 2018. The logical platform would seem to be Cannes, where Sciamma could potentially compete for the first time. If the project hasn’t completed post-production by then, we’d assume Sciamma would bow out of Venice.