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BERLINALE 2015 Market / France

Two Golden Bear hopefuls for Elle Driver

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- Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants The Night and Benoît Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid stand out on the agent’s slate

Two Golden Bear hopefuls for Elle Driver
Juliette Binoche and Rinko Kikuchi in Nobody Wants The Night by Isabel Coixet

Paris-based international sales agent Elle Driver looks set to be in an enviable position when it turns up at the European Film Market during the 65th Berlinale (5-15 February 2015), with two hopefuls for the Golden Bear taking pride of place on its slate.

Indeed, the team headed by Adeline Fontan Tessaur and Eva Diederix is selling Nobody Wants the Night [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile
]
by Isabel Coixet, which will open the festival in competition. Co-produced by Spain, France (Noodles Productions) and Bulgaria, the film boasts French actress Juliette Binoche, Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi and Irish actor Gabriel Byrne in the lead roles.

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Elle Driver will also be pinning its hopes on the Franco-Belgian co-production Diary of a Chambermaid [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
by Benoît Jacquot, starring Léa Seydoux and Vincent Lindon as topliners. The film promises to lead to some good deals, in a similar vein to Farewell My Queen [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benoît Jacquot
film profile
]
, which proved to be a great success for the Elle Driver-Benoît Jacquot partnership at Berlin in 2012.

Also turning heads on the line-up is Standing Tall by Emmanuelle Bercot (whose last work, On My Way [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
, was in competition at Berlin); it is currently in post-production, and stars Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and Sara Forestier in the leads (read the article).

Elle Driver is pre-selling another French feature film in post-production: La dernière leçon [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
 by Pascale Pouzadoux, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, Marthe Villalonga, Antoine Duléry and Gilles Cohen. Produced by Fidélité, the film sees 92-year-old Madeleine make the decision to set the date and circumstances of her own death. By making the announcement to her daughter, Diane, and her son, Pierre, she intends to soften the blow and prepare them for her imminent absence as gently as possible. But her children are shocked, and conflict flares up. Right up until the end, Madeleine will maintain her approach of using dignity, a sense of humour and a zest for life in order to give them all, and Diane in particular, a moving “final lesson”.

At the market in Berlin, there will be a screening of the Uruguayan horror film Local God by Gustavo Hernandez, and we also find Dégradé by Arab and Tarzan Abunasser (co-produced by Mille et Une Films, Les Films du Tambour de Soie and Made in Palestine Project) on Elle Driver’s line-up; this feature in post-production and set in the present day revolves around ten or so women trapped in a hairdressing salon one afternoon because of an armed confrontation in the Gaza Strip.

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(Translated from French)

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