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Anatomy of a Fall French producer Marie-Ange Luciani put in a flying appearance at the Berlinale this week with Claire Burger’s coming-of-age drama Langue Étrangère which received a warm reception in competition.

With the Berlin premiere taking place the day after the Baftas in London (where Anatomy of a Fall won Best Screenplay) and eight days before the January 27 voting deadline for this year’s Academy Awards, Luciani was also in the thick of the awards campaign.

She co-produced the Oscar hopeful with David Thion at Les Films Pelléas under the banner of her Paris-based banner Les Films de Pierre, the company created by Yves Saint Laurent’s long-time business and life partner Pierre Bergé which she acquired on his death in 2018.

New production Langue Étrangère is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale starring Lilith Grasmug as French teenager Fanny who travels to Germany on language exchange trip. Her German counterpart...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSubscribe to Notebook magazine before November 1 to receive Issue 4, which explores cinematic soundscapes in their diverse sonic forms and includes contributions from filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Garrett Bradley, and Dominga Sotomayor, pop musician Julia Holter, plus a wide range of artists, writers, and scholars. Subscribers will also receive with this issue a very special gift, a seven-inch record featuring a song by filmmaker Gus Van Sant and a field recording by sound designer Leslie Shatz.This week brought the sad, shocking news that the legendary Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has retired from filmmaking due to illness. Hou's family confirmed in a statement that he is battling Alzheimer's, and the effects of long Covid have forced him to stop making films; they requested privacy during this time, adding that he is healthy overall, in the presence of family.

Thankfully recovering after a brutal bout with Covid-19, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev will return with Jupiter. Variety reports the “politically-minded movie” tells the story of “a Russian oligarch’s reckoning with the harsh reality of his family’s future,” with a shoot set in Spain and France this spring. “The nature of absolute power is a universal theme, and through this prism we can look at any cultural landscape or historical era,” the director said.

Following Summer 1993 and Alcarràs, Carla Simon is prepping a summer shoot for the final entry in her trilogy with the flamenco musical Romería. Speaking to Variety, the director said, “Since I discovered that my biological mother was passionate about flamenco, a great curiosity began to grow in me for this genre, because of its history and its exceptional capacity to connect directly with emotion.” She added “This time music and dance will become the challenge...

A Cannes Film Festival regular with her Critics’ Week showcased Ava (in 2017) and Directors’ Fortnight selected The Five Devils (2022), Léa Mysius has found her third feature. The French filmmaker will adapt Laurent Mauvignier’s recent French thriller Histoires De La Nuit (The Birthday Party) – it sounds like a great read per The Guardian. The Screen Daily folks report that Les Films de Pierre’s Marie-Ange Luciani and F Comme Film’s Jean-Louis Livi will produce. No cast has been attached yet, but it looks like there’ll be a meaty part for a lead female. Shooting is planned for May 2024, which means they’ll likely submit this for the Palme d’Or comp in 2025/ It’s worth mentioning that Mysius has technically been included in the comp before as she helped write Claire Denis’ Stars At Noon, Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts, Oh Mercy!…

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Mysius is a Cannes regular whose credits include ‘Ava’ and ‘The Five Devils’.

French writer-director Lea Mysius is set to write and direct her third feature, an adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s best-selling French thriller The Birthday Party (Histoires De La Nuit).

It is being produced by Marie-Ange Luciani’s Les Films de Pierre, whose credits include the Palme d’Or winning Anatomy Of A Fall, alongside Jean-Louis Livi’s F Comme Film, which produced Florian Zeller’sThe Father.

Set in a hamlet in rural France, the story follows a man and his wife, their daughter and an artist neighbour.

With 2017’s “This Is Our Land,” director Lucas Belvaux examined the ways in which far right movements attract, recruit and reformat new converts, curdling contemporary anxieties for acrid political goals. With his follow-up, “Home Front,” the Franco-Belgian auteur explores the roots of those prejudices. The film, which was part of Cannes’ selection last year, is screening this week at UniFrance’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in Paris (Jan. 13-15).

Adapted by Belvaux from Laurent Mauvignier 2009 novel “The Wound,” the film follows two working-class cousins as they fulfil their colonial military duties in 1960s Algeria and as they nurse their scars and traumas in Burgundy of 2003. While the more cerebral Rabut has tried to forge ahead, his cousin Bernard remains a livewire, looking for any provocation to snap back into violence. Local draw Catherine Frot rounds out the cast.

Synecdoche and Artemis Productions are producing. The Party Film Sales in partnership...

Paris-based sales powerhouse to launch new titles by Maïwenn, Stephane Brizé, Louis Garrel and Bruno Podalydès.

Wild Bunch is to launch sales on new films by Maïwenn, Stéphane Brizé, Louis Garrel and Bruno Podalydès at Unifrance’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris next week (January 16-20).

Drawing on her own complex history, Maïwenn’s fifth feature DNA revolves around a woman with close ties to a beloved Algerian grandfather who protected her from a toxic home life as a child. When he dies, it triggers a deep identity crisis as tensions between her extended family members escalate revealing new depths of resentment and bitterness.

Early 2019 slate also includes Sundance selection ‘Midnight Traveler’.

Doc & Film International will kick-off sales on Belgian filmmaker Lucas Belvaux’s upcoming Algerian War legacy drama Des Hommes, co-starring Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Frot, at the Unifrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris next week (Jan 17-21).

Based on the eponymous novel of Laurent Mauvignier, Depardieu co-stars as the tortured, alcoholic figure of Feu-de-Bois, a brutish troublemaker haunted by a tough childhood and the horrors he saw as a young French soldier in Algeria during the country’s 1954-62 independence war.

The story unfolds some 40 years later in remote Burgundy region...

Early 2019 slate also includes Sundance selection ‘Midnight Traveler’.

Doc & Film International will kick-off sales on Belgian filmmaker Lucas Belvaux’s upcoming Algerian War legacy drama Des Hommes, co-starring Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Frot, at the Unifrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris next week (Jan 17-21).

Based on the eponymous novel of Laurent Mauvignier, Depardieu co-stars as the tortured, alcoholic figure of Feu-de-Bois, a brutish troublemaker haunted by a tough childhood and the horrors he saw as a young French soldier in Algeria during the country’s 1954-62 independence war.

The story unfolds some 40 years later in remote Burgundy region...

Intelligently barbed, emotionally naked chamber dramas about families in crisis are what we’ve come to expect from Belgian writer-director Joachim Lafosse. So when his latest, “Keep Going,” opens on wide, mighty-skied vistas of far-flung badlands, the effect is disorienting — at least, until his characters open their mouths, and it becomes clear that Lafosse’s brand of domestic claustrophobia has merely taken a remote, outdoorsy vacation. An earthy, surly neo-western built surprisingly around the fractious, semi-estranged relationship between a struggling single mother and her temperamental teenage son, this is a two-hander as unadorned and straight-ahead as the bare Kyrgyzstan steppes on which it takes place, acted with doughty fixity of purpose by Virginie Efira and Kacey Mottet-Klein.

Commercially, the international prospects for “Keep Going” — adapted from French author Laurent Mauvignier’s well-regarded 2016 novel “Continuer” — may be narrower than those for Lafosse’s last feature, the thorny, Bérénice Bejo-starring breakup drama “After Love.

Six of the 12 films in the main programme are by women

Six of the 12 features in Venice Days are directed by women for the first time in the event’s 15-year history.

They include Real Love (C’est Ca L’Amour), the second feature from French filmmaker Claire Burger, who co-directed Party Girl, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2014. Real Love is a semi-autobiographical drama starring Belgian actor and director Bouli Lanners as Mario, a man left to bring up his two turbulent teenager daughters on his own after his wife walks out on the family. Indie Sales has international rights.