France's Elle Driver unveils biggest ever Cannes slate

Paris-based sales company Elle Driver is heading to Cannes this year with one of its biggest and most diverse slates to date.

Adeline Fontan Tessaur, co-chief at Elle Driver, said: “We’ve got a strong line-up of confirmed directors as well as a diverse range of female filmmakers.

“The slate is a mix of auteur works, high concept titles and edgy comedies – we’re pleased with how it’s come together this year.”

Recent pick-ups include Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s highly anticipated Arctic-set, love triangle drama Nobody Wants the Night starring Juliette Binoche and Rinko Kikuchi as two women who are in love with the same man.

The film is inspired by the true story of 19th century Arctic explorer Robert Peary who took his upper-class wife Josephine on his expeditions but also fathered several children by Inuit women. Binoche stars as Peary’s wife opposite Kikuchi as an Inuit woman who is pregnant with Peary’s child.

Festival titles on the Elle Driver slate include Rebecca Zlotowski’s tragic romance Grand Central, starring Tahar Rahim and Léa Seydoux, which premieres in Un Certain Regard. Fontan Tessaur describes it as “a little gem”.

The company also recently picked up Indian director Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly which is premiering in Directors’ Fortnight.

New titles

New French titles on the slate include the latest films from André Téchiné, Benoit Jacquot and Albert Dupontel.

Téchiné’s provisionally entitled L’homme que l’ont aimait trop reunites the director with Catherine Deneuve.

It is inspired by the true case of Agnes Le Roux. The young heiress disappeared in the late 1970s after becoming embroiled in a Mafia-backed plot to force her mother Renée to sell the family casino on the French Riviera.

Renée accused former confidant Maurice Agnelet, a playboy lawyer who also became Agnes’ lover, of murdering her daughter. To this day, the young woman’s body has never been found and Agnelet proclaims his innocence. The case was a cause celebre in the French media in the late 1970s. 

Deneuve plays Renée opposite Guillaume Canet as Maurice and upcoming actress Adèle Haenel as Agnes. Elle Driver will have a script in Cannes for the film, which started shooting in the South of France this month.

It marks the seventh time Téchiné and Deneuve have worked together. The pair first collaborated on Hotel America in 1981. This was followed by Scenes of the Crime, My Favourite Season, Thieves, Changing Times and  most recently The Girl on a the Train.

3 Hearts; 9 Month Stretch

Deneuve also features in the cast of Benoit Jacquot’s star-crossed lovers tale 3 Hearts alongside Benoit Poelvoorde as a man who unwittingly falls for two sisters played by Léa Seydoux and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

The film, produced by Anne Girard and Edouard Weil of Rectangle Productions, is due to start shooting in September. It is Jacquot’s first picture since Farewell My Queen which was a top seller for Elle Driver last year.

The other new French addition to the slate, actor-director Albert Dupontel’s 9 Month Stretch, stars Sandrine Kiberlain as a strait-laced lawyer who mysteriously falls pregnant by a hardened criminal even though she cannot remember having slept with him. A promo-reel is available for the picture which is currently in post-production.

Dead Snow 2

Elle Driver will also continue sales on Tommy Wirkola’s comedy zombie film Dead Snow 2: War of the Dead, which is due to start shooting this summer. Thus far, it has been picked up by E1 in a multi-territory deal for the UK, France and South Africa and also sold to Germany and Benelux (Splendid) and the Middle East (Gulf Stream).

It will also market screen Cherien Dabis’ May in the Summer, about the chaotic lead-up to a young American Arab women’s wedding in Jordan. Premiered to critical acclaim in Sundance, it has already sold to the US (Cohen Media), Benelux (Wild Bunch), France (Memento), Scandinavia (Koch Media), Switzerland (Xenix) and Brazil (Immovision) and  Spain (Vertigo).

Comedy, documentaries

Other previously announced titles, include Randell Einhorn’s comedy The Late Bloomer, starring Elijah Wood as man who goes through puberty when he hits 30. The picture has sold to Russia and Eastern Europe (EEAP), the Middle East (Phars) and Australia (Transmission).

On the documentary front, Elle Driver will screen Twenty Feet From Stardom, about the lives and aspirations of the music business’s top backing vocalists, for the first time since its success in Sundance. It has already been sold to France (Mars), Australia (Transmission), Japan (Comstock), Scandinavia (Selmer Media) and Benelux (Wild Bunch).

The company also has a promo for its fashion documentary Mademoiselle C, which was recently picked up by Cohen Media for the US.