Oscar-nominated French filmmaker Ladj Ly has admitted to mishandling funds from his production company and the charity organisation behind his film schools, and will pay a fine to avoid trial.
According to French reports, the Les Misérables and Les Indésirables director and producer at Lyly Films and his brother Amadou, president of both that company and the association La Cité des Arts Visuels, admitted to what translates as ’breach of trust’ in the French legal system.
Public officials said the brothers have since paid back the €300,000 in funding they were accused of mishandling between December 2020 and February 2022.
Ladj has agreed to pay a €50,000 fine and Amadou was sentenced to a six-month suspended prison term, a €100,000 suspended fine and a five-year ban on working in a commercial or industrial profession.
Both will now avoid a public trial.
The charity organisation in question, La Cité des Arts Visuels, was behind Ly’s free, open-application Kourtrajmé film school founded in 2018. The brothers were held in police custody for two days in 2021 after authorities suspected them of using funds meant for the association and production company for personal use.
The Ly brothers’ lawyer Julia Minkowski could not be reached for comment.
On Monday (July 22), Ly issued a public statement saying that the affair was officially closed, that he had cooperated with authorities from the start, reimbursed any questionable funds and said that neither the Bobigny public prosecutor’s office nor investigators had charged him with using the money in question for “personal enrichment”. The statement said the organisation in question “has been completely restructured and put in place more strict measures allowing for more rigorous, clear and transparent account management.”
In a post on his own social media, the filmmaker cited “five years of persecution against me and my Kourtrajmé film school” and said that the school has trained more than 300 students since its launch, 60% of whom are women, and produced 30 short films.
Filmmaker Ly’s explosive debut feature Les Misérables won the jury prize at Cannes plus four César awards including best film and was Oscar-nominated in the international feature category. His follow-up feature Les Indésirables premiered at Toronto last September.
He is now in pre-production on the final film in what will be a trilogy of titles set against the same backdrop of his native Montfermeil neighbourhood produced by longtime producer partner Srab Films.
The filmmaker previously came under fire in late 2019 ahead of the Oscars when reports of a criminal past surfaced among French media outlets. While he did serve a two-year prison term for complicity in a kidnapping case in 2009 followed by more minor offenses in 2011 and 2012 for protesting police violence with online commentary and verbal assault on a public official respectively, Ly ended up suing two right-leaning French magazines Valeurs and Causeur for defamation and false reporting.
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