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PRODUCTION / FUNDING France

The CNC grants an advance on receipts to Céline Devaux’s Everybody Loves Jeanne

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- The French film centre will also be backing the feature debuts by Tamara Erde and Zaven Najjar; three projects have been selected, representing fiction, documentary and animation, respectively

The CNC grants an advance on receipts to Céline Devaux’s Everybody Loves Jeanne
Director Céline Devaux

Three feature-debut projects have been selected during the fifth and final 2020 session of the CNC’s second pre-production advance on receipts committee. Standing out among them is Everybody Loves Jeanne [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
by Céline Devaux, a director who has been festooned with awards with her animated short films Gros chagrin (Golden Lion at Venice in 2017), Sunday Lunch (César Award for Best Animated Short and International Press Award at the MyFrenchFilmFestival in 2016) and Vie et mort de l’illustre Grigori Efimovitch Raspoutine (Best Animated French-language Film Award at Clermont-Ferrand in 2013). This time, the filmmaker will not only be making the leap to feature-length territory, but also to live action, even though her project will also include animation. The director herself also wrote the screenplay, which revolves around a 35-year-old woman who has been yearning to change the world. After entering the world of politics, she is forced to quit her job in the wake of a scandal, and so she heads off to Portugal. Sylvie Pialat is in charge of production duties at outfit Les Films du Worso, while Portugal’s O Som e a Furia is also on board as a co-producer.

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Another advance on receipts has gone to the feature-length documentary project After the Evil by Tamara Erde, who made a splash with the audiovisual work This Is My Land [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
(screened at Toronto in 2014 and at Rotterdam in 2015). This time around, the French-Israeli director (who studied at Le Fresnoy film school) will take a look at Austrian-British journalist and researcher Gitta Sereny, who dedicated her life to studying cases of people who committed crimes against humanity or who perpetrated acts of extreme violence. To tell the story of this quest, the film will set up a “laboratory of evil” and use it as a cinematic space. The project, which received writing support from the Ile-de-France region, is being staged by Laurent Lavolé for Gloria Films Production, with Germany’s Katuh Studio serving as a co-producer.

Lastly, the CNC is throwing its weight behind the animated project Allah Is Not Obliged (see the article) by Zaven Najjar (who turned heads in 2016 with the short film Un obus partout), an adaptation of the novel by Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma, produced by Sébastien Onomo for French outfit Special Touch Studios in league with Luxembourg (Paul Thiltges Distributions) and Belgium (Lunanime and Need Production).

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(Translated from French)

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