17/02/2020 - The French sales agent has 3 aces up its sleeve, with Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue and Golda Maria on the Berlinale Special line-up, and Little Girl in Panorama

With three features on show in the various different sections of the 70^th Berlinale (20 February-1 March), the international sales team of French group mk2 Films, headed up by Juliette Schrameck (aided by Fionnuala Jamison), will certainly not be lacking in ammo at the European Film Market. What’s more, the company is demonstrating the sheer eclecticism of its editorial policy by this time shining the spotlight on documentary films.

On the Berlinale Special programme, mk2 will be pinning its hopes on two titles: Golda Maria [+see also:
film review
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interview: Patrick Sobelman and Hugo S…
film profile] by France’s Patrick and Hugo Sobelman (a Gogogo Films and Agat Films production) and Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue by Jia Zhang-ke. A regular in the big competitions with his fiction features (at Cannes in 2002, 2008, 2013 – winning the Best Screenplay Award – 2015 and 2018, and at Venice in 2000, 2004 and 2006 – winning the Golden Lion, no less), the Chinese maestro nevertheless makes regular forays into documentary territory, as he has demonstrated in the past with Dong and Useless (both screened at Venice, in the Orizzonti section in 2006 and 2007), and with 24 City and I Wish I Knew (unveiled at Cannes, in competition in 2008 and in Un Certain Regard in 2010, respectively). In Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, prominent Chinese writers and scholars gather in a village in Shanxi, a province of China and the hometown of Jia Zhang-Ke. This starts an 18-chapter symphony about Chinese society since 1949. Narrated by three important novelists born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, respectively, telling their own stories with literature and reality, the film weaves a 70-year spiritual history of the Chinese people.

In Panorama, mk2 will have high hopes for Little Girl [+see also:
film review
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interview: Sébastien Lifshitz
film profile] by France’s Sébastien Lifshitz. After initially starting his career with the fiction titles Come Undone (2000), Wild Side (Berlinale Panorama in 2004) and Going South [+see also:
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film profile] (2009), the filmmaker successfully turned his hand to documentary, helming Les Invisibles [+see also:
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film profile] (Special Screening in Cannes’ Official Selection in 2012 and the winner of the César Award for Best Documentary in 2013), Bambi [+see also:
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film profile] (a 57-minute film that scooped the Teddy Award for Best Documentary in the Berlinale Panorama in 2013), Les Vies de Thérèse [+see also:
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film profile] (unveiled in the 2016 Directors’ Fortnight) and Adolescentes [+see also:
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film profile] (which won an award in the Locarno Critics’ Week last summer). Produced by Muriel Meynard for Agat Films & Ex Nihilo and co-produced by Denmark’s Final Cut For Real with backing from Arte France, among other sources, Little Girl revolves around Sasha, who is seven years old and who has always known she was a little girl, even though she was born a boy. As society fails to treat her like the other children her age – in her daily life at school, dance lessons or birthday parties – her supportive family wages a constant battle to make her difference understood and accepted.

Also featuring prominently on mk2’s line-up are The Big Hit [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Emmanuel Courcol and the documentary The Brain [+see also:
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film profile] by Switzerland’s Jean-Stéphane Bron, both in post-production, as well as Mali Twist [+see also:
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film profile] by Robert Guédiguian, the shoot for which is about to get under way.

(Translated from French)