EXCLUSIVE: Pathe is heading to this month’s Cannes market with Emmanuelle Bercot’s coming-of-age drama The Enraged (L’Enragé) starring Marion Cotillard and Benoit Magimel, about a tormented teen who escapes from a youth detention centre off the coast of Brittany and is taken in by a compassionate couple.
Newcomer Aaron Debarre stars as the teenager, Jules, who manages to escape a juvenile detention centre run by brutal wardens with a group of fellow inmates. Most are captured and returned to the prison, but Jules manages to find sanctuary with a nurse (Cotillard) working within the juvenile system and starting to question it and her kind-hearted fisherman husband (Magimel).
The film is an adaptation of Sorj Chalandon’s 2023 novel, which was inspired by a real-life event in 1934 at a detention centre on Belle-Ile-en-Mer, an island off the southern coast of Brittany.
The Enraged is produced by Sylvie Pialat and Benoit Quainon for Les Films du Worso and Ardavan Safaee for Pathe Films, in association with France 2 Cinema and Belgium’s Umedia Production. Bercot penned the script with Armel Gourvennec.
The film shot on location in the Brittany region earlier this year. Pathe will release it in France and is launching international sales at Cannes.
It is the seventh feature from actress-filmmaker Bercot and reteams her for a third time with Magimel. Their previous collaboration, 2021’s Peaceful, earned him the best actor Cesar award.
Magimel will feature in Cannes this year in Lea Mysius’ Competition title The Birthday Party and Antonin Baudry’s geopolitical thriller De Gaulle: Resistance, while Cotillard has starring roles in Guillaume Canet’s out-of-Competition title Karma and Bertrand Mandico’s Roma Elastica, which plays as a Midnight Screening.
Bercot said of wanting to make The Enraged: “This story speaks directly to one of my deepest concerns: the protection of children. Through Jules, the film explores the idea of freedom, which is a fundamental right, but one that must be learned and transmitted. How do you teach life to a child who has known only violence?”
She added: “It was on this very island – where the real events took place, and which I have known since childhood – that I first heard this story about children who did not share my luck. That memory became a defining impulse in the making of this film.”
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