Roxanne Sarkozi, head of production at Ghent-based outfit De Wereldvrede, is attending Flanders Film Days (FFD) with Nathalie Teirlinck’s drama Jonah Was Here, about a father trying to cope with the loss of his son by adopting his unfinished student life.
“Most of the time, films about people who have lost someone are very hard dramas, but Jonah Was Here has a lot of humour, some comedy elements,” says Sarkozi, explaining why this original approach to a story about grief and bereavement attracted her to the project. “That is also Nathalie as a person. She is very funny.”
Paradiso is handling the Benelux release of the feature, which is receiving its world premiere at Film Fest Ghen, which runs parallel to FFD. It is expected to spark plenty of interest in the Netherlands thanks to the casting of Dutch star, Monic Hendrickx.
Sarkozi joined De Wereldvrede as a junior producer in 2018, becoming head of production in 2023. The ambitious, auteur-driven company was set up by filmmakers Gilles De Schryver and Gilles Coulier and has a big slate of fiction and documentary features as well as series such as The War Of The Worlds, starring Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern.
The first project Sarkozi produced was Leonardo Van Dijl’s Julie Keeps Quiet, which screened in Critics’ Week in 2024, went on to represent Belgium at the Oscars, and was sold to some 25 territories by New Europe Film Sales.
She is now working on a big slate of projects “that need partners to be financed”, including Robotbrother, the next film by Teirlinck based on a Dutch book by Emiel de Wild.
When Sarkozi first came into the business, her ambition was to become a line producer. “I wanted to be on set all day long,” she says. “But a few years later, I found how much I enjoyed being creatively involved in screenplays, looking for money, talking to people, building bridges.”
She “lives from deadline to deadline,” and works as hard as she can to give all her directors the support they need at every stage of a project.
“It is time-consuming, also mentally, because you need to talk, talk, talk!” she says. ”But planning and structuring projects, that is stuff I love. I need to shift my brain between different stories, different people.”
On some projects, she will serve as executive producer while on others she will be the hands-on producer.
New films on the slate include Anke Blondé’s Belgium-Romania-Italy co-production Harvest, produced by Ada Solomon’s MicroFILM and Serena Alfieri and Stefano Centini from Volos Films. Sarkozi met Centini when both were selected as European Film Promotion’s ’Producers on the Move’ at Cannes earlier this year.
On the series side, Sarkozi is developing King Of Hearts, which Gilles Coulier is directing, which is based on the real story of the 19-year-old Prince Baudouin who becomes Belgian king against his will in the 1950s.
Sarkozi says she is very happy working with De Wereldvrede and has no plans to set up on her own. “There is still so much room for me as a person and a producer to develop my skills at De Wereldvrede,” she says.
No comments yet