Binoche ‘Sponsoring’ Szumowska’s Paris-Set Drama

Juliette Binoche perhaps became an icon of Polish cinema when Krzysztof Kieslowski featured her in Three Colors, so I imagine she’ll get to practice some of the Polish she might have forgotten by joining helmer Malgorzata Szumowska’s next feature. Entitled Sponsoring, Cineuropa reports that Szumowska’s fourth film, which begins filming next month, is also set to star alongside Anaïs Demoustier, Joanna Kulig (she just signed up The Woman In the Fifth) and Louis-Do de Lencquesaing (he played the father who gives up in The Father of My Children). The detailed narrative and the film’s title suggests the businessman and young students arrangement that the Elliot Spitzer types might have employed.

Co-written by the director and Dane Tine Byrckel, the film centres on Parisian journalist Anne, who is investigating student prostitution. She meets Alicja and Charlotte, but where she expects to find poverty and distress, she discovers a silent determination to escape their condition. The two girls’ clients enable them to continue their studies, juggle exams, academic competitions, bills, difficulty in finding accommodation and social demand for a standard of living similar to that of better-off friends. Their daily life is punctuated with paid sexual acts, which are often less grim and bring more pleasure than they imagined, but which mark the end of all innocence. Anne is sensitive to the social reality of these students, but the stories of their experiences gradually start to affect her much more deeply.

To be produced by Slot Machine’s Marianne Slot, the project was selected at last year’s Cannes Festival Cinéfondation Workshop, will be co-produced by Zentropa International Poland and Zentropa International Köln. Shooting will take place from late May-late July with five weeks in Paris and two in Germany. France’s Haut et Court will distribute.