After more than three decades in the business, France’s Les Films Pelléas has backed two of the last three Palme d’Or winners and has four films in this year’s official selection.
Paris-based production company Les Film Pelléas appears to have been thrust into the spotlight, with Palme d’Or wins in 2023 for Justine Triet’s Anatomy Of A Fall and last year for Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident. But these recent headline-grabbing achievements are the result of more than three decades of quiet backing for auteur filmmakers from Philippe Martin, who founded the company in 1990, and David Thion, who joined in 1999. Les Films Pelléas has more than 100 features under its belt, and is an established producer of prestige arthouse cinema with commercial appeal.
“Our overnight success has taken 36 years to build,” says Martin. “If we have had a few exceptional years recently, it is because for years and years before that we were fostering relationships.”
The company’s four titles in Cannes this year are illustrative of this strategy. Pierre Salvadori may have landed the festival’s opening night slot with The Electric Kiss, but, says Martin, “we produced all of his films before that”. During
Covid-plagued 2020, Les Films Pelléas took a gamble producing a young French female director’s debut feature, Anaïs In Love; now, Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet has landed in this year’s Competition with her second film A Woman’s Life. The company has produced eight of Christophe Honoré’s 16 features, including Orange-Flavoured Wedding, which screens in the Premiere strand, and it is a co-producer on Emmanuel Marre’s Competition entry A Man Of His Time, lead produced by Kidam.
Auteur credentials
Backing filmmakers for the long-term means being there “even when it doesn’t work. We are there through the ups and downs,” says Martin. He cites Honoré’s biggest box-office success to date, 2016’s Sophie’s Misfortunes, which he made after Metamorphoses had failed to perform at the French box office in 2014. The company also produced Triet’s 2019 comic psychodrama Sibyl, which received mixed reviews and was less successful at the local box office than her previous film In Bed With Victoria — but was then followed by Anatomy Of A Fall.
Martin and Thion like to work across different budgets and genres as their Cannes selections demonstrate, ranging from the $4.1m (€3.5m) modern-day A Woman’s Life to the $15.3m (€13m) 1920s-set period drama The Electric Kiss. “It may be a cliché for a French indie producer, but everything we do is truly auteur-driven,” says Martin. “We make sure we are committing to a great filmmaker, and the rest happens organically from there.”
Les Films Pelléas produces an average of four features a year, with 10 employees and a central Paris base in which Martin and Thion’s offices are connected by an adjoining door. The pair cite their “shared tastes” but each leads his own projects — Thion on Anatomy Of A Fall and A Woman’s Life, for example, and Martin for It Was Just An Accident and Orange-Flavoured Wedding. “It’s easier for filmmakers and production partners to have just one point person on a given project,” says Thion.
Continuing with its longlasting alliances, Les Films Pelléas has a slate of projects from its filmmaker family in various stages of production. Among its English-language projects is Mia Hansen-Love’s If Love Should Die, about visionary English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, which Les Films Pelléas is on board having produced most of the director’s films since 2007 debut feature All Is Forgiven. “[The project’s] UK producers need financing so we have come on in a co-production capacity and to help structure European financing,” says Thion.
Thion is also reteaming with producer Marie-Ange Luciani’s Les Films de Pierre for Triet’s English-language psychological thriller Fonda, which has a buzzy UK/Irish and US cast including Odessa A’zion, Mia Goth, Andrew Scott and Frank Dillane, and kicked off production in southwest France last month.
Other upcoming projects include the debut feature of Palestinian actor/filmmaker Tawfeek Barhom, whose I’m Glad You’re Dead Now won the short film Palme d’Or last year and who starred in Tarik Saleh’s 2022 drama Cairo Conspiracy (aka Boy From Heaven). The $4.7m (€4m) English-language The Trap is set to shoot next spring with the plot under wraps. Martin is producing alongside Kidam’s Alexandre Perrier, and Losange Films handles global sales.
Even as they venture further into the international production scene, Martin and Thion insist their raison d’être remains the same: “Find good filmmakers and make good movies. It’s as simple as that.”
No comments yet