German-French fund backs Pitts, Sokurov

At the fund’s last sitting during the German-French Film Rendez-Vous in Nancy, representatives of Germany’s German Federal Film Board (FFA) and France’s CNC decided to award €1.02m to three projects:

• British-Iranian director Rafi Pitts’ first Stateside-project Soy Negro, which reunites him with the German co-producer of his last feature The Hunter, Thanassis Karathanos and Ute Ganschow’s Berlin-based Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion, and will be produced with Paris’ Senorita Films.
• Philippe Harel’s adaptation of the 2010 Michel Houellebecq novel La Carte et Le Territoire, a double murder thriller with Lars Eidinger in the lead role, to be produced by Adora Films with Berlin-based Arden Film. and
• Stephane Robélin’s comedy #FLORA63, with Pierre Richard as a 75-year-old who falls head over heels in love with a 30 year-old woman on a dating platform after assuming the identity of his Internet coach (David Kross). The co-production between Hamburg-based Detail Film and Ici et La Productions is the first one between graduates of the Atelier Ludwigsburg Paris.

The previous two funding sessions had seen production support allocated to other projects such as Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomatie, actor Vincent Perez’s Hans Fallada adaptation Alone In Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein), with X Filme Creative Pool as German majority co-producer, Oliver Assayas’ German-French-Swiss co-production Sils Maria, starring Juliette Binoche, Alexander Sokurov’s documentary Francofonia - Der Louvre unter deutscher Besatzung, and Benoit Jacquot’s  Trois Coeurs, starring Catherine Deneuve.

2013 saw the Mini-Traité fund backing six French majority co-productions, five German majority co-productions, and one project with a 50-50 split.

Last year had seen the number of the German majority co-productions exceed the French majority ones for the first time in the fund’s history.