Samsa Film keeps busy with Lafosse, Fonteyne

by Boyd van Hoeij

01/06/2011 - Fresh off their success on the Croisette, where their co-production The Giants [trailer, film focus] by Bouli Lanners won two awards in the Directors’ Fortnight, Luxembourg production outfit Samsa Film started filming on not one but two new Belgium-Luxembourg co-productions: Nos enfants and Quartier Liber.

Both started filming on May 23, the day following the end of the Cannes Film Festival.

Joachim Lafosse, whose previous film Private Lessons [trailer, film focus] was selected for the Fortnight in 2008, has finally started filming on Nos enfants (“Our Children”), a drama inspired by a quintuple infanticide in Belgium. The film reunites the co-stars of Audiard’s A Prophet [trailer, film focus], Tahar Rahim and Niel Arestrup (photo), in two very different roles.

Arestrup plays a benign older doctor who looks after the young Maghrebi man (Rahim) who tries to set up a family with his young wife (Emilie Dequenne) in Belgium.

The screenplay was written by Lafosse, Matthieu Reynaert and the co-screenwriter of A Prophet, Thomas Bidegain.

The film is produced by Lafosse’s regular producers at Versus Production in Liège, in co-production with Samsa in Luxembourg, MK2 in France, Box Productions in Switzerland and Prime Time in Flanders.

Fellow Belgian director Frédéric Fonteyne has started filming on Quartier Libre (“Off Duty”), his long-awaited follow up to An Affair of Love and Gilles’ Wife [trailer]. The film is an Artémis production and is co-produced by the Flemish outfit Minds Meet as well as Samsa Film and its French sister company Liaison Cinématographique.

Fonteyne’s latest was penned by actress Anne Paulicevich, who also stars, in collaboration with the director’s regular screenwriter, Philippe Blasband.

The film follows a woman whose husband and lover are in prison, and who falls for the prison guard. Jan Hammenecker, François Damiens and An Affair of Love star Sergi López are also part of the cast.