French cinema sets out to conquer Southeast Asia

by Fabien Lemercier

01/12/2011 - Unifrance, the agency that promotes French cinema internationally, will for the first time hold an event in Southeast Asia, from December 7-13, as part of the Singapore French Film Festival.

Sixteen films will be presented, including seven that have already been bought by local distributors: Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist [trailer, film focus], Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank [trailer], Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Sarah’s Key [trailer] (pictured), Rémi Bezançon’s A Happy Event [trailer], Daniel Auteuil’s The Well Digger’s Daughter [trailer], Stéphane Rybojad’s Special Forces [trailer] and Dominik Moll’s The Monk [trailer]. Among the unreleased titles are Pierre Schoeller’s The Minister [trailer, film focus] and Christophe Honoré’s Beloved [trailer, film focus].

The event will also include a film market with about ten French international sales companies and distributors from Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Conquering new markets doesn’t prevent Unifrance from continuing to consolidate its position on territories where French cinema is already well established. Russia is therefore on the agenda with the French Cinema Today Festival, which will run from December 7-9 in Moscow, then from December 10-12 in Kazan. There are six films in the line-up, including A Gang Story [trailer] by Olivier Marchal (who will be there in attendance), My Little Princess [trailer] by Eva Ionesco and Declaration of War [trailer] by Valérie Donzelli.

Finally, yesterday marked the close of the 14th French Film Festival in the Czech Republic, which screened nine films in avant-premiere, including Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance [trailer] and Christophe Honoré’s Beloved, with the two directors in attendance. Nine other titles were shown in a competition that included Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy [trailer, film focus], Bouli Lanners’s The Giants [trailer, film focus] and Xavier Durringer’s The Conquest [trailer], while Mia Hansen-Love’s three feature films (including her latest, Goodbye First Love [trailer, film focus]) had special screenings, as did Declaration of War. The festival ran for one week in 14 cinemas in eight Czech cities (Prague, Brno, Ceske Budejovice, Hradec Kralove, Olomouc, Ostrava, Pardubice and Pizen).

(Translated from French)