Menahem and Lepoutre launch Still Moving

Film industry veterans Pierre Menahem and Juliette Lepoutre have launched a new Paris-based co-production focused company called Still Moving.

“The aim is to first develop international co-productions, and eventually set up an international sales and distribution department, with a first slate of acquisitions to be announced in the coming months,” explains Menahem.  

The pair, who previously collaborated at production and sales outfit MPM Film in Paris alongside Marie-Pierre Macia, is in Berlin with two features which are currently in pre-production.

They comprise Romanian Radu Jude’s Scarred Hearts, which will be the director’s next production after Aferim!, which premieres in competition at the Berlinale this year.

Jude’s long-time producer Ada Solomon of Bucharest-based Hi Film is lead producing the feature.

Set against the backdrop of a Black Sea sanatorium in 1937, the film is inspired by the tragic Jewish Romanian writer Max Blecher, who is sometimes referred to as the Romanian Kafka.

Blecher spent much of his 20s confined to his bed after he contracted spinal tuberculosis, or Pott’s Disease, while studying medicine in Paris, and died in 1938 at the age of 28 years-old.

The production will loosely draw on Blecher’s semi-autobiographical work to build a portrait of the writer, capturing his adventures in hospital as well as his observations of the rise of fascism across the continent.

Still Moving has also boarded Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat’s Pendular, her second feature after the well-travelled Found Memories Historias Que So Existem Quando Lembradas set against the backdrop of a rundown coffee-producing region, which screened in Venice Days and Toronto’s Discovery sidebar in 2011

For Pendular, Murat homes in a young, artistic couple – a dancer and a sculptor – who relationship is slowly unravelling.

Tatiana Leite of Rio de Janeiro-based Bubbles Project is producing the film which has won the support of the Brazilian Cinema Agency Sectorial Fund as well as the Ibermedia and Hubert Bals funds.

“It’s an extremely profound and universal tale about love and un-love, artistic creation and self destruction, shot in Murat’s unique minimalist and poetic style,” said Menahem.