23/10/2024 - Cineuropa met the producer from French company La Luna Productions, who discussed the project of Tunisian director Lotfi Achour

Founder and director of French outfit La Luna Productions, Sébastien Hussenot is present at the 46th Cinemed - Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival where he is pitching the project The Woman Sitting in the Corridor by Lotfi Achour to the development aid fund of the Cinemed Meetings (read the report).

Cineuropa: After Red Path [+see also:
film review
film profile] (unveiled in Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente section, Best Film and Best Cinematography Golden Bayard Awards in Namur, Best Directing and Audience Award at Saint-Jean-de-Luz), you are continuing your collaboration with Lotfi Achour. What do you like about this director?
Sébastien Hussenot: We’ve been working together since we met in 2011. La Luna began by distributing one of his first short films, then we co-produced another, La laine sur le dos, which was selected in Official Competition in Cannes in 2016. We’ve weaved a long term collaboration with Tunisian company Artistes Producteurs Associés. Lotfi Achour is a filmmaker who’s had a successful journey in the theatre with an inventive, multidisciplinary approach, playing with visual and audio aspects, exploring many means that were close to the cinema. I was seduced by his narrative propositions with well-honed writing systems that play on several registers, and always have a connection with politics, which interests me. But this is neither demonstrative nor is it activism, rather these are stories that say powerful and rather impactful things about society, especially in Tunisia, but which also manage to go beyond their context. His new project, The Woman Sitting in the Corridor, is in this vein and Lotfi continues his collaboration with a very tight-knit team of screenwriters, including amongst others Natacha de Pontcharra and Doria Achour.

What is The Woman Sitting in the Corridor about?
It is in line with work that Lotfi did a few years ago when attending transitional justice trials, a judiciary process put in place in order to repair and reveal cases of torture, disappearance, and murder that took place in Tunisia during the Ben Ali dictatorship. This work of documentation, monitoring, archiving and filming led to a documentary commissioned by an NGO and we also made the short film Angle mort out of it. We are also developing an animated series on the subject, so the feature film The Woman Sitting in the Corridor tells one of the many stories and real events that took place back then. The plot centres on a young woman of Tunisian origins who grew up with her mother in Germany and who discovers, through the revelations of transitional justice, the truth about her family history and what her mother went through during the Ben Ali years, in particular a traumatic event and manipulation. The story will be told through both flashbacks and the current moment.

The project is in its infancy, at the treatment stage which is very well advanced and well constructed. Here at the Cinemed is the first time that we talk about and exhibit this project. We will initiate the first dialogue continuity in the coming months and we’re hoping to have a script ready in the first trimester of 2025. This is again a delegate co-production between La Luna and Artistes Producteurs Associés, but since we have a certain international ambition, and as we did for Red Path (which brought together Belgian outfit Versus and Polish company ShipsBoy), we are planning for a rather similar co-production structure with four countries in order to get the European qualification, given that financing in Tunisia remains limited. Lotfi could have alternatively situated the European side of the story in France, but that would have been a little too expected given the historical relationship between Tunisia and France, and so he looked for something different and thought about Germany, which is consequently one of the co-production leads we wish to pursue.

What is La Luna Productions’ editorial line?
We’ve produced almost 90 short films because we really like the search for young talents in order to reveal them when they are developing. This was for instance the case with Ghanaian director Amartei Armar whose short film Tsutsué (in official competition in Cannes in 2022) we co-produced, and whom we are accompanying on the development of his first feature Vagabonds (in co-production with AKA Entertainment). It was also the case with Azerbaijani filmmaker Azer Guliev, whose short film Sanki Yoxsan (in official competition this year in Cannes) we produced, and whose debut feature project The Metallic Sky of Saturn we are developing. The idea is to accompany them towards their first feature and then to establish, as with Lotfi Achour, a continuity in the work. We do a lot of international cinema, but we also have an entire development section with French auteurs, with projects more focused on genre experimentation and on potential openings to the international market. Amongst the projects, we can mention the animated feature Lucky Seven by Louis-J Gore (co-written with Ken Higelin) and Si mon coeur en vaut la peine by Oriane Bonduel (co-written with Katell Guillou).

(Translated from French)