Amazon Prime Video France is reteaming with director Melanie Laurent for the feature Sulak and has greenlit five new French feature films and three original series. Laurent directed Amazon’s first French-language original The Mad Women’s Ball in 2021.
Sulak will star newcomer Lucas Bravo as Bruno Sulak, a notorious real-life French criminal known for his non-violent heists on multiple jewelry stores in the 1980s. Sulak managed to escape from prison several times in order to reunite with his lover and accomplice, becoming public enemy number one in the process.
Thomas Dubois, head of Originals for Prime Video France, described it as “a scintillating prestige drama and love story with a bit of action” and said it is illustrative of the streamer’s local strategy to focus on “blockbusters, but with an auteur touch.”
The film will shoot in Paris and southern France this summer, produced by Alain Goldman’s nascent Pitchipoï Productions and with a script co-written by Laurent with Christophe Deslandes.
“For us, making films with streamers gives us international exposition we couldn’t do otherwise,” said Goldman, who described it as “a modern Catch Me If You Can”. The straight-to-240 countries model is “a celebration of technology, which for a producer, is exciting.”
Goldman’s other production company, Montmartre Films, also produced Amazon France’s first French series Alphonse, directed by Nicolas Bedos and starring Jean Dujardin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nicole Garcia and Pierre Arditi.
Further films in the pipeline at Amazon France include Jeremy Guez’s heist thriller Tigers And Hyenas Co-written with Louis Lagayette, the film is produced by Cheyenne Federation and stars Fianso, Waël Sersoub, Géraldine Nakache, Olivier Martinez and Olivier Marchal.
Also in the works is comedy Feuilleman, based on a viral video with French actor Pierre Niney alongside comedy duo McFly and Carlito that amassed more than 17 million views. In the video, Niney pitches the first-ever French superhero. Prime Video came on to bring the fictional superhero to life and is now developing the project with the trio who produce via Ninety Films and Fatbros 2.0.
Frederic Forestier’s comedy Les Infaillibles, produced by Monkey Pack, is set to shoot this summer. It stars Inès Reg and Kevin Debonne as two police officers who don’t get along – one from Paris, the other from Marseille – who have to work together to take down a dangerous gang.
Arthur Sanigou’s The Stunning Christmas Of The Silestone is a genre-buster produced by BAF Prod about a police officer too busy fighting crime over the holidays to take care of his daughter who body swaps with the leading man in a fictional Christmas romantic comedy. Co-created by Sanigou and Pierre Dudan, the cast includes Eric Judor, Ragnar le Breton (Mathias Quiviger) , Alex Lutz and Laura Felpin.
“We give creators the opportunity to push the envelope in their respective genres,” said Dubois of the strategy of Amazon France. “We want our films to have an offbeat tone.”
Event series
Dubois also confirmed the company has greenlit Trash, a drama series about the colossal success of real-life early 2000s French pop culture phenomenon, the reality TV series Loft Story. Created and written by Matthieu Rumani and Nicolas Slomka and directed by Louis Farge, the series will focus on the three young producers who launched the series. It is being produced by Screenline and 27 Tribe’s Georgia Poivre, Clara Levy and Frederic Lussato and original Loft Story producer Alexia Laroche-Joubert.
Prime Video launched in France in 2019 and now produces around 12 original film and TV productions a year. Feature films remain “the heart of our slate,” said Dubois and notably Amazon France is producing Cuties director Maimouna Ducoure’s second feature, the coming-of-age story Hawa.
Amazon France solidified its ambition to work closely with the French film industry by signing a four-year agreement in December 2022 with several producers’ unions to support independent projects and promote gender and ethnic diversity. It agreed to invest 85% of its financing into local French production and support a “diversity of audiovisual genres” with a minimum of 13% of its total spending in documentaries, animation and live performances, up from its present 6%.
The agreement, says Dubois, “doesn’t change anything, it just sets in stone what we’ve already been establishing. We want to work in confidence with producers and creators – now it’s more visible.”
“We’ve created a Prime Video family,” Dubois said of the increasing crossover talent attached to multiple projects for the platform. “We want to build long-term relationships with our talent.”
Dubois said the collaborations are “not exclusive, but our talents know that when they come home, they want to express their craziest ideas. Four years ago, no one came to us. Now we know who we are and what we want.”
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