The films that impressed French audiences at Angouleme 2024

Mathias Mlekuz’s road movie A Bicyclette! and Louise Courvoisier’s Cannes prize-winning Holy Cow wowed France’s Angouleme Francophone Film Festival which closed on September 1.

Angouleme is an essential first stop on the busy autumn festival circuit for the French film industry and a proven launchpad for upcoming releases.

A Bicyclette! was the festival’s standout selection, winning the audience award as well as best director and best music prize. Mlekuz also stars in the film, a fictionalised version of the real-life bike pilgrimage he took with his co-star and friend actor Philippe Rebbot from Charente-Maritime to Istanbul to pay homage to his son after his death. 

It is produced by F Comme Film and M.E.S. Productions, who are now in talks with interantional sales agents.

The jury, presided over by Kristin Scott Thomas, awarded the best film prize to Courvoisier’s first feature Holy Cow. The film about an 18 year-old who enters a cheese-making competition to save his family farm has sold widely for Pyramide International since launching at Cannes, including to Kino Lorber for the and US-Canada and to Zeitgeist and Conic for UK-Ireland.

The event drew a record 60,000 people, up 10% from last year that was already 40% more than the year before. Press and industry accreditations also reached a record 3,600.

The world premiere of Julie Delpy’s immigration-themed comedy Meet the Barbarians opened the festival ahead of its Toronto Gala screening, and Guillaume Nicloux’s romantic biopic The Divine Sarah Bernhardt was the closing-night film.

Further world premieres that impressed both industry and audineces were Frederic and Valentin Potier’s Prodigieuses, starring Emily In Paris’ Camille Razat as piano prodigy twin sisters dealing with a debilitating disease weakening their hands, Sylvain Desclous’ thriller The Victoria System starring Damien Bonnard and Jeanne Balibar, and Cyprien Vial’s Guadalope-set volcano drama Magma.

Xavier Beauvois’s La Vallée Fes Fous starring Jean-Paul Rouve as a man who tries to get his life back together by entering a virtual sailing race was also warmly welcomed, as was Hassan Guerrar’s debut feature Barbes, Little Algeria about a working class neighbourhood in Paris that stars Sofiane Zermani, Karim Massouai’s Alger-set literary adaptation The Vanishing exploring generational trauma, and Marieke Engelhardt’s Syria-set Rabia about a young girl who rebels against a system of power dominance. 

Family dramas also stood out. In particular, John Wax’s A Mother’s Special Love about the single mother of an autistic boy, and Morgan Simon’s mother-son relationship tale Somewhere In Love, starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

“Cannes is good place to discover a film. Angouleme is the trampoline that catapults it into cinemas,” suggests festival co-founder Dominique Besnehard, the former talent agent known for creating and producing hit series Call My Agent! based on his life, He launched Angouleme in 2008 with Marie-France Briere. 

“We select films so they can find their audiences.”

Le Pacte’s founder and president Jean Labadie is a regular attencee.

“Angouleme is extremely important for both French producers and distributors,” says the veteran Labadie, who is releasing Meet the Barbarians on September 18 in France.  “As distributors, we always worry about how a film will be received by audiences, but when a festival shows it can make a film work, we return with more films.”

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