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This number will increase as Cannes, Venice and other summer festival titles are added to the mix alongside studio releases.

French cinemas reopen this Wednesday (May 19) after lying dark for six months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, with the country’s 100-plus distributors rushing to set theatrical dates for an estimated backlog of 400 stalled films.

As a result, French cinemagoers will have access to the richest and most diverse offering of films in the world over the coming months, spanning festival titles, local mainstream comedies and dramas, world cinema and studio blockbuster fare, as the summer advances.

As of May...

Debut film was one of 15 titles feted with a Cannes 2020 label selection last year.

Kino Lorber has acquired US and English-speaking Canada rights to French filmmaker Charlène Favier’s drama Slalom and plans to release it theatrically in April.

Set against the ski resorts of the French Alps, the debut feature stars rising French actress Noée Abita as a young alpine skiing champion who falls prey to her coach, played by Jérémie Renier.

The film was one of 15 first features to be feted with a Cannes 2020 label selection last year.

”Slalom may thrill with hyper ski action but it wins...

Announcement follows similar moves in Germany, Italy and Belgium.

French cinemas will close their doors for a second time this year as part of a new national lockdown to combat a second wave of Covid-19 in the country, President Emmanuel Macron announced on Wednesday (October 28).

”We are all being overwhelmed by a second wave which, we know, will doubtless be harder and more deadly than the first one,” Macron said in an address to the nation.

The new lockdown will take effect nationwide from midnight Thursday to Friday (Oct 30). It is expected to last at least until December 1 and could be extended.

Memento Films International has closed major territory sales on its prestige director-driven film slate, including “Persian Lessons,” “My Salinger Year” and “Under The Stars.”

“Persian Lessons,” a drama directed by “House of Sand and Fog” helmer Vadim Perelman, is set in Occupied France in 1942. The film centers on a man who is arrested by the SS alongside other Jews and sent to a concentration camp in Germany and is enlisted to teach Farsi to the head of the camp played by German star Lars Eidinger.

The movie world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section and was sold by Memento Films International to France (Kmbo), Latin America (California), Poland (Best Films), Romania (Independenta), Baltics (Kinosoprus), UK & Eire (Signature), Turkey (Filmarti), Bulgaria (6AMedia), Hungary (Cinetel), Czech Republic & Slovakia (Film Europe), Hong-Kong & Macao (Bravos), South Korea (Jin Jin Pictures), Taiwan (Movie Cloud), Australia & New Zealand (Rialto), Airlines (Captive Entertainment...

One of the widest-selling titles at the UniFrance Rendez-Vous, a showcase of French cinema that wraps Monday, is Claus Drexel’s “Under the Stars of Paris.” The French-German speaks to Variety about the pic and his upcoming prostitution documentary “The Amazons.”

“Under the Stars of Paris” centers on a homeless woman – played by Catherine Frot – who tries to help a lost 8-year-old boy from Burkina Faso to find his mother on the streets of Paris. The pic, repped by Memento Films, has been sold to more than 15 countries, including Benelux, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, Israel, Lichtenstein, Mexico, Portugal, Switzerland and Taiwan.

Drexel is finalizing his documentary “The Amazons” (previously titled “L’heure Mélusine”) about prostitutes working in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, which he hopes to conclude in mid-2020.

Drexel was born in Germany, but moved with his family to France at the age of 3, initially in Grenoble,...

A mix of comedies such as Isabelle Huppert starrer “Mama Weed” and Michaël Youn’s “Divorce Club,” and director-driven titles like Claus Drexel’s “Under the Stars of Paris” were among the most buzzed-about market premieres of the UniFrance Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. The five-day showcase kicked off Jan. 17 with the world premiere of Martin Provost’s “How to Be a Good Wife” with Juliette Binoche, and wrapped Monday.

“Divorce Club” stars Arnaud Ducret and François-Xavier Demaison as a pair of 40-something divorcees who set up a dedicated membership club. Represented in international markets by Snd, the film just won the top prize at the Alpe d’Huez Comedy Film Festival.

Jean-Paul Salomé’s “Mama Weed” (pictured) stars Oscar-nominated actress Huppert as a French-Arabic translator working for the anti-drug squad in Paris. Le Pacte has now sold the film in major territories. “Mama Weed” was also presented at the Alpe d’Huez festival.

The film stars Catherine Frot as a homeless woman who takes a lost Burkinabe boy under her wing.

Memento Films International (Mfi) has unveiled pre-sales on Claus Drexel’s French-language drama Under The Stars of Paris starring Catherine Frot, ahead of its market premiere at Unifrance’s Rendez-vous with French cinema in Paris this weekend.

The Paris-based sales company has pre-sold the film to a slew of European territories including Switzerland (Jmh distributions), Denmark (41 Shadows), Portugal (Outsider Films), Greece (Spentzos) and Bulgaria (6A Media).

It has also been acquired for Brazil (A2 Filmes), Mexico (Alamedia), China (QC Media), Taiwan...

Intelligent comedy about women’s liberation tale unfolds in all-girls school against the backdrop of May 1968.

Memento Films International (Mfi) will kick off sales on Martin Provost’s 1960s-set comedy-drama How To Be A Good Wife, starring Juliette Binoche, at the Unifrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris this week (January 17-21).

Binoche will star as the co-head of an all-girls housekeeping school in a small town in the eastern French region of Alsace in the late 1960s. She runs the school alongside husband with the mission to train teenage girls to become perfect housewives. The schools were common in...

Industry Days Alliance For Development (Afd) strand to host eight European projects.

Update: Project addition: Ffa – MiBACT: The Guard by Giulio Ricciarelli (Labyrinth Of Lies). Producer: Oliver Schütte, tellfilm Deutschland Ug.

New projects from the co-producers of The Nun and Becoming Zlatan and War writer-director Simon Jaquemet are among eight feature projects selected for Locarno’s Industry Days development and co-production strand Alliance For Development (Afd).

The platform is designed to foster co-developments between France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland by facilitating cooperation between existing co-development funds, including France’s Cnc, Italy’s MiBACT, and Germany’s Ffa.

Among selected projects this year are new films from Belle Epoque Films, the German co-producer of Guillaume Nicloux’s 2013 drama The Nun, and Italian outfit Indyca, which co-produced 2015 documentary Becoming Zlatan.

As Switzerland does not share a similar development bilateral fund, three Swiss projects looking for German, French and Italian co-producers have also been selected to join the initiative as special...

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

—Seamus Heaney, The Tollund Man

It ended, like all journeys do, in Solitude, a long way from any cinema. Solitude—or rather Zolitūde, in Latvian—is a suburb of Riga, four miles as the crow flies from the fancy Scandi-Gothic-Art Nouveau city centre; six miles on foot if the pedestrian avoids diversions. But by the time I reached Solitude on that cold December Saturday afternoon, however, my inadvertent divagations must have pushed the total to the ten-mile mark. I'd looked at maps prior to departing from my hotel, of course but deliberately didn't bring one along (not a fan); I don't...

The first winner of France’s awards season was unveiled Monday afternoon, with Olivier Assayas’ intense character study Sils Maria, starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart as an aging actress and her assistant, taking the Louis Delluc Critics' Prize handed out by former Cannes president Gilles Jacob and a jury of 20 film critics and personalities. Binoche attended a Paris event to accept the award. Read more Oscars to Consider 323 Films The shortlist of nominees was announced Nov. 28, including Abderrahmane Sissako’s Islamic fundamentalist drama Timbuktu, Jean-Luc Godard’s surreal Goodbye to Language, Bertrand Bonello’s biopic Saint Laurent and Sils Maria. Other candidates included Claus Drexel’s documentary about the

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The shortlist for France’s Louis Delluc Prize, one of the country’s highest film honors, has been released with 14 films making the cut across two categories: Best Film and Best Debut Feature. Among the eight main movies, six hail from this year’s Cannes crop. Saint Laurent – which is France’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar – by Bertrand Bonello; Olivier Assayas’ Juliette Binoche/Kristen Stewart-starrer Clouds Of Sils Maria; veteran Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D Goodbye To Language; Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu; Pascale Ferran’s Bird People, starring Josh Charles; and Claus Drexel’s Au Bord Du Monde will vie alongside Venice pics Trois Coeurs, by Benoît Jacquot, and Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys. Godard, Ferran and Jacquot are all former Delluc laureates. The Debut Feature shortlist is made up of Thomas Cailley’s well-received Fortnight film Love At First Fight; Camera d’Or winner Party Girl; Virgil Vernier...

Four Letters Apart [pictured] and Becoming an Actor among winners.

The 16th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (Tdf) and its concurrent Doc Film Market has unveiled the winners for its 2014 edition.

At the Tdf, the Peter Wintonick Audience Award for a foreign feature length documentary went to Four Letters Apart by Erlend E. Mo (Denmark), while Dimitris Koutsiabasiakos’ Becoming an Actor was the recipient of the Tdf Audience Award for Greek features.

Four Letters Apart centres on three children at odds with themselves and the world around them, at a time when more and more are being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (Adhd). The film, produced by Lise Lense-Møller, is sold by Danish outlet Magic Hours Films.

Becoming an Actor deals with a group of young actors, chronicling their anxieties and dreams throughout a three-year course of study. Produced by Koutsiabasiakos, the film is sold by the Greek production company KinoLab.

This is the second year in a row...