Les Arcs selects eight emerging directors for 2025 Talent Village

The industry programme of France’s Les Arcs Film Festival has selected eight emerging international directors for its Talent Village initiative running December 12-16, and has named Spanish director Oliver Laxe as its 2025 ambassador.

The directors, who have all made short films that have played at leading festivals, are Irish filmmaker Ruairí Bradley, the UK’s Chloe Culpin, Lithuania’s Dovydas Drakšas, Spanish directing duo Fran Moreno Blanco and Santi Pujol Amat, Romania’s Xandra Popescu, France’s Helio Pu and Xin Wang, and Austria’s Reza Rasouli.

The Talent Village comprises five days of workshops, one-on-one meetings and mentorship sessions, designed to help the filmmakers move from short to feature-length projects and engage with industry professionals before joining the Coproduction Village market.

It has become a key incubator for emerging European filmmakers making the leap to feature films in recent years.

Alumni with films at 2025 festivals include Dorian Jespers’s Loynes at Directors’ Fortnight, Lauri-Matti Parppei with A Light That Never Goes Out at Cannes’ ACID , Kukla with Fantasy in Locarno, and Bernhard Wenger whose Peacock is Austria’s submission to the Oscars.

“We are confident that this year’s selection is very much aligned with this new generation of bold voices in European cinema and will inspire our participants,” said Lison Herve, head of the industry village and Jeremy Zelnik, festival co-founder and head of professional events.

Prizes

One of the eight selected talents will go home with a Talent Village prize worth €5,000 and awarded by CICLIC Centre-Val de Loire agency. Workshops will be led by executives including Lemming Film producer Erik Glijnis, Lucky Number co-founder and sales agent Olivier Barbier, Cannes Critics’ Week’s Thomas Rosso, and music supervisor Laura Bell.

The filmmakers will also have the opportunity to work with four emerging film music composers chosen for the parallel Music Village in partnership with Sacem to encourage the creation of film scores for their features in the works. The 2025 composers selected are Greece’s Gregorios Eleftheriou and France’s Lolita Del Pino, Minh Lê Boutin and Emil Sana.

Olivier Laxe

Laxe, best known for You Are All Captains, Mimosas, and Fire Will Come, will be on hand as a mentor for the rising talents to share his experience and vision. The filmmaker’s Sirat premiered at Cannes Film Festival where it earned the jury prize and has been an arthouse success in France with nearly 700,000 admissions since its September release. He will discuss that film’s original score during a conversation at the festival’s Industry Village.

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