French director Michel Hazanavicius, whose credits include the Oscar-winning The Artist, will head the jury of the European feature film competition at the Les Arcs Film Festival in the French Alps (December 11-18).
Unfolding in and around the ski resort of Les Arcs, the festival has carved out a role as a convivial and useful end-of-year meeting for the European film industry, thanks to its respected Work in Progress and Coproduction Village events.
It was forced to cancel its physical December 2020 edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic but ran an online industry programme online in January 2021. With French ski resorts reopening again after an 18-month hiatus, the aim this year is to hold everything physically in Les Arcs.
In 2019, the festival’s big prize, the Crystal Arrow (Flèche de Cristal) went to Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis, while Sarah Gavron’s Rocks won the grand jury prize.
Hazanavicius’s varied filmography spans spy spoof comedies 0SS 117: Lost in Rio and OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies, the black-and-white silent film The Artist, Jean Luc Godard tribute Redoubtable and, most recently, children’s film The Lost Prince.
“For us, he is one of the classiest men on the planet, with a distinctive way of playing with different genres and cinema codes,” said the festival in a statement, referencing the director’s 1993 TV film La Classe Americaine.
Additionally, Les Arcs will host a special focus on ‘Alpine Cinema’ in partnership with Switzerland’s Swiss Films, Cineforom, the Zurich-based film fund Zürcher Filmstiftung, Austrian Films, France’s Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region and Italy’s, Film Commission Torino Piemonte, Film Commission Vallée d’Aoste and IDM AltoAdige.
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