11/05/2007

French sales outfit Pathé International will arrive at the Cannes Film Festival market (May 16-27) with a robust line-up featuring major French productions.

Selected in official competition with Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (news, out May 23), the all-inclusive group will also be selling Mehdi Charef’s Cartouches gauloises, chosen in official selection as part of an evening devoted to Algeria.

Produced by Michèle Ray-Gavras for KG Productions, the film recounts the daily life of Ali, a newspaper seller for 10 years, during the spring of 1962 before the summer of independence and end of the Algerian war. The title will be released in theatres on August 8.

However, Pathé’s line-up is dominated by films in post-production and in production. Heading the bill is directing duo Thomas Langmann and Frédéric Forestier’s blockbuster Asterix at the Olympic Games [+see also:
trailer
film profile], with a star cast (see news March 31, 2006), which will arrive on French screens on January 30, 2008.

Buyers will also be eager to snap up Christophe Barratier’s Faubourg 36 (Chorists [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), starring Gérard Jugnot, Clovis Cornillac and Kad Mérad as three unemployed performers who decide to take over the music hall in a Parisian suburb where they worked and stage a show in 1936, the year the French Popular Front came to power.

Shooting this summer, the Galatée Films production will be one of Pathé’s spearheads along with Agathe Cléry, Etienne Chatilliez’s new black comedy starring Valérie Lemercier as a racist business woman working for a beauty products multinational. The tables get turned when she suddenly finds herself transformed into a black woman confronted with the realities of her new skin colour (a Charles Gassot production for Produire à Paris, filming scheduled for June).

Pathé’s sales team is also betting on the rising fame of actor Jean Dujardin, star of Jan Kounen’s 99 francs [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (see article), which will be released on September 26, and Franck Mancuso’s Counter Investigation [+see also:
trailer
film profile], released a month ago, as well as on the duo Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet, who head the bill in Claude Berri’s French hit Ensemble c'est tout [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

Other films in the outfit’s line-up include animated film L'illusionniste by Sylvain Chomet (Belleville Rendez-Vouz [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), currently in production; Abdellatif Kechiche’s La graine et le mulet [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hafsia Herzi
film profile], to be released in the second half of 2007; Marc Esposito’s ensemble film Le coeur des hommes 2 (out October 24); and Nabil Ayouch’s Whatever Lola Wants (out September 19).

Other projects in production – Loup by Nicolas Vanier (Le Dernier Trappeur), Dany Boon’s comedy Bienvenue chez les Chtis, Stephane Kazandjian’s Modern Love and Océans by directing duo Jacques Perrin (Le peuple migrateur) and Jacques Cluzaud – complete the line-up at what looks like a promising Cannes Market for the outfit.

(Translated from French)