Created in 2013 and steered by Damien Megherbi and Justin Pechberty, the Paris-based production company Les Valseurs is attending the 44th Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, where it’s pitching French director Yves Piat’s first fiction feature project Nefta within the Development Grant section of the Cinemed Meetings (read our news).

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Cineuropa: You produced Yves Piat’s short film Nefta Football Club (nominated for the Oscars in 2020 and for a César in 2019) and now you’re back with his first feature-length project, Nefta. Is the latter an extension of his short?
Damien Megherbi: The feature film is linked to the short, but it’s not the same story. Some sections of the plot are similar to those in the short film, but it’s a whole other plot with different characters, adult characters rather than the children we followed in the short film. It tells the tale of a customs officer who finds himself transferred to Nefta in southern Tunisia, on the border with Algeria, which is home to a lot of trafficking between the two countries, and corruption. He finds himself caught up in a holy mess when his daughter (just like in the short film) comes across a donkey carrying cocaine which has been trained to cross the border following a playlist, but which gets lost along the way because one of the traffickers has played the wrong music. It’s similar in tone to a Coen brothers movie.

We enjoyed a really exceptional adventure with Yves Piat when it came to his short film, right from the writing phase all the way through to the Oscars. But he’s primarily an author who’s teeming with ideas. The 90 pages of the feature film script are incredibly rich. Yves co-wrote it with Morocco’s Alaa Eddine Aljem, who directed The Unknown Saint [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (Cannes’ Critics’ Week 2019), which helped to add a few extra layers vis-a-vis the short film. We now have a reworked first version of the screenplay. We envisage shooting the film in winter 2023/2024 in southern Tunisia. We’d be very interested in a European co-production with Germany and/or Italy, and maybe Belgium too.

How does this project fit in with Les Valseurs’ usual editorial line?
We look for original worlds, proposed by French or foreign filmmakers whom we help to emerge and who bring us their visions of the wider world and that of film. So Nefta fits perfectly with our editorial line. We’re currently in Brazil shooting Sem Coração/Heartless by Nara Normande and Tião, which we’re co-producing. We’re at a very advanced stage of funding (notably alongside Arte France Cinéma) Le mystérieux regard du flamand rose by Chile’s Diego Céspedes, which we’re planning to film at the end of 2023. We’re also developing Bandeira by Brazil’s João Paulo Miranda Maria, who just won the Ikusmira Berriak residency in San Sebastián’s co-production market. Here in Montpellier - specifically within the Cinemed Meetings’ Development Grant section - we’ve also got Ciudad sin sueño by Spain’s Guillermo García López, which we’re co-producing with Les Films des Tournelles who pitched the project yesterday. Last but not least, we’ve just presented Antoine Delelis’ project Les Monstres in Marseille’s French-Language Co-Production Meetings, which we’d like to co-produce, most likely with Belgium.

Les Valseurs is active in production and distribution in France. What are your thoughts on the current market for the internationally open auteur films you work on?
The question of how audiences will get to see our films is becoming increasingly common and is being asked increasingly earlier on in the process. We need to think about projects organically, from an artistic development viewpoint, whilst also remembering that we’ll need to find a space for it in cinemas, a media space, and try to get it seen by the public. It also depends on the subjects which are chosen, and on the filmmakers, who might need to focus more on the world around them. And there are younger audiences too, so we need subjects which appeal to these viewers. I’m fairly optimistic, I think that strong offerings with sustained ambitions and funding, which remain within the field of auteur cinema, can still draw in audiences. Despite the current situation, which is still pretty disheartening, we’re starting to see films which are reawakening people’s appetite for films. Perhaps we need even stronger, more original and more audacious offerings.