Late last week we learned that Arte France Cinéma are getting behind four projects – all noteworthy in our books. Patricia Mazuy will direct Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi in Portraits trompeurs. Emmanuel Finkiel will direct Mélanie Thierry La chambre de Mariana. Walter Salles will adapt Je suis encore là. Payal Kapadia will move into fiction with All We Imagine as Light. Here is a more complete project by project breakdown below:
Portraits trompeurs
Director: Patricia Mazuy
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hafsia Herzi.
Production co.: ARP and Picseyes Films
Production Start Date: January 2023
Location(s): Metz, Strasbourg and Ile-de-France
Gist: This tells of an unlikely friendship between two women whose husbands are in prison. A meeting between a courageous young mother and a refined bourgeois woman. What brings them together? The hardships? Loneliness? One will help the other. Or maybe it’s the other way around…
La chambre de Mariana
Director: Emmanuel Finkiel
Cast: Mélanie Thierry.
Production co.: Cinéfrance Studios, Curiosa Films, Metro Communications, Sunshine Films, Tarantula, Proton.
Production Start Date: Early 2023.
Location(s): Hungary.
Gist: Based on Aaron Appelfeld’s novel of the same name. In 1943, on the borders of Ukraine and Poland, Yulia, who is fleeing the ghetto and deportation, entrusts her son Hugo, 11, to a childhood friend, Mariana, 35, who is a prostitute in a brothel. Hidden in a windowless room adjoining the young woman’s bedroom, Hugo’s existence is suspended by the noises and scenes he guesses through the partition: with imagination as his only resource, Hugo becomes aware of both the massacres being perpetrated and the mysteries of sexuality…
Je suis encore là
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: TBA.
Production co.: MACT Productions, Videofilmes, RT Features.
Production Start Date: 1st quarter 2023
Location(s): Brazil.
Gist: An adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s book of the same name, this is about a mother fighting the military dictatorship in the 1970s.
All We Imagine as Light
Director: Payal Kapadia
Cast: TBA.
Production co.: Petit Chaos, Chalk & Cheese, Another Birth, Baldr.
Production Start Date: 1st quarter 2023
Location(s): TBD.
Gist: Praba, a nurse, receives an unexpected gift from her long estranged husband that throws her life into disarray. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a private spot in the big city to be alone with her boyfriend. One day the two nurses go on a road trip to a beach town where the mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest.
Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).
