– After a Golden Bear in Berlin for Yellow Letters, the Belgian company has its sights set on the Palme d’Or for Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film
A Woman’s Life by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet
Be For Films had reason to celebrate back in February when one of its favourite directors, Ilker Çatak, won the Golden Bear in Berlin with Yellow Letters. Now, in this year’s Marché du Film (running 12 – 20 May), which is unspooling within the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the Brussels-based company will get to wager on A Woman’s Life, by French filmmaker Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet. Pamela Leu is clearly a faithful collaborator for the latter, since she also handled sales on the director’s debut feature, Anaïs in Love, which was selected in Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2021.
This new film sees the director progressing to the big league with another portrait of a woman: Gabrielle, a fifty-something who puts her heart and soul into her work. A surgeon and head of department, she’s constantly on edge, weighed down by the burden of her responsibilities and leaving little time for her personal life. But when a novelist turns up on the ward to conduct immersive research into her life, she gradually loses her footing… In the role of Gabrielle, we find Léa Drucker, who’ll be incredibly hard to miss on the Croisette, where she’ll also be appearing in Blaise, which is screening in the ACID line-up. Alongside her are Mélanie Thierry, Charles Berling and Laurent Capelluto. Produced by Les Films Pelléas (France) and co-produced by Versus Production (Belgium), the film should be released in the autumn in France and the Benelux union, among other territories.
The Marché will also see Be For Films presenting a handful of completed films, including The Loneliest Man in Town by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, which was unveiled in competition in Berlin, as well as The Girls From Above, Belgian actor and filmmaker Bérangère McNeese’s feature film debut which was recently released in France and Belgium. Also on the slate are Maturity, Belgian actor and director Jean-Benoit Ugeux’s first feature, and Enjoy Your Stay by Dominik Locher and Honeylyn Joy Alipio, which was discovered in Berlin’s Panorama section.
Be For Films will also be unveiling three particularly intriguing projects currently in production, starting with the new film by Eric Gravel, who made a splash with the intense work Full Time and is now shooting Avant la tempête with a five-star cast (Mélanie Thierry, Ludivine Sagnier, Cédric Kahn, Laetitia Dosch, Lyes Salem, Sara Giraudeau and Dali Benssalah), which is an ensemble film set in a rural environment (read our news); L’Incident by Victoria Musiedlak, who’s assembled Tahar Rahim, Alba Rohrwacher, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Catherine Mouchet and Micha Lescot for a timely drama about a family conflict (read our news); and finally Le Courage des oiseaux, Mathilde Profit’s the feature debut showcasing a surprising trio of actresses: Emmanuelle Béart, Nadia Tereszkiewicz and Shirley Souagnon (read our news).
(Translated from French)
