11/02/2025 - We homed in on the current situation and aims of the new French international sales agent which is unveiling its first ever line-up in Berlin, boasting two Golden Bear contenders

Making a spectacular entrance into the world of international sales, new French firm Lucky Number will be kick-starting its activity at the 75th Berlinale’s European Film Market (running 13 – 19 February) with a line-up boasting two titles in the running for the Golden Bear: The Blue Trail [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Gabriel Mascaro and What Marielle Knows [+see also:
film review
interview: Frédéric Hambalek
film profile] by Frédéric Hambalek. We met with the firm’s three partners in Paris: Olivier Barbier (head of acquisitions, formerly of mk2 and Wild Bunch), Ola Byszuk (head of sales, also formerly of mk2, as well as of Nord-Ouest Films) and Lenny Porte (managing director, formerly of Orange Studio), who chose to speak as one.

Cineuropa: The international sales sector is incredibly competitive and is notably full of brilliant French sales agents. What made you want to create Lucky Number?
Olivier Barbier, Ola Byszuk and Lenny Porte: We believe there’s room in the market for agile organisations. The market, especially for arthouse cinema, is definitely very competitive; it’s become more complex on an international scale and there’s now a polarisation between sales agents focused on festivals and companies (including independents) which tend to look for "bigger" films or who include more films in their line-ups. We’re not only convinced that there’s still a real place for arthouse cinema, we also believe there’s a space currently opening up between these two approaches and that a real market exists for films – especially arthouse ones – which are ambitious but which are also first, second or third feature films which can only really exist using a tailored approach. So we’re positioning ourselves in this niche and taking a "boutique" approach, i.e. with a lower number of films in our line-up - seven or eight fiction films and two to three animations per year – so that we can devote more time to each of them. A significant percentage of our line-up will be composed of ambitious arthouse films which are open to the world, so we decided to create a company which would be sufficiently well-funded to be able to support producers whilst also retaining its human size and flexibility and agility.

You’re starting out with two titles in competition in Berlin. How did you find them?
We came across What Marielle Knows by Frédéric Hambalek in October in the Work in Progress line-up in Cologne, and it was selected to compete in Berlin just as we were negotiating over it. In terms of The Blue Trail by Gabriel Mascaro, whose career we’ve been following for a long time without ever having worked with him, when we learned that the film had been selected for Berlin and that he was looking for a sales agent, we got ourselves into position very quickly. We signed both the films at the beginning of December. They’re two very different films, but it’s in this kind of a gap that we want Lucky Number to be situated: linking up with brilliant, open, arthouse films, movies with real pitches, concept films, boasting a real market and a clear marketing path to get them into cinemas. The Blue Trail is about a society which gets rid of its elderly citizens by putting over-75s in a "colony" because they’re not productive enough. It mostly tells the story of an elderly lady who decides she won’t be disappearing this way, so sets off in a boat to escape and finally live her life. What Marielle Knows is the satirical story of a young woman gifted with telepathy who unwittingly becomes aware of the highly dysfunctional nature of her parents’ relationship. They’re two films whose narratives are very easy for distributors to understand and which are subsequently easier for them to position.

Also, on the marketing side of things, we’ve forged a partnership with French firm Metanoïa, who make promo reels, trailers, posters, etc. These days, for reasons related to time or costs, there’s very often just one type of marketing delivered all around the world, which is a mistake because films can be positioned very differently if they’re being released in Japan as opposed to in Germany, for example. To give arthouse cinema the best possible chance, regardless of how good films are, in a context of lots of films and a competitive market we have to provide distributors with strategies, give them the keys, guide them so that they can help these films do as well as they possibly can in their markets. And ahead of time, in order to offer as broad a range of options as possible, we offer to enter into co-productions with producers - without any obligation to do so, obviously - and we also offer post-production services through various partnerships concluded with IIW Studio (who specialise in VFX) and LUX (a moving images laboratory).

What other titles feature in your EFM line-up?
We’re co-selling Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir - in league with mk2 Films - whose three previous feature films (Salt of This Sea [+see also:
trailer
film profile], When I Saw You [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Wajib [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) were selected in Cannes, Toronto and Locarno and were also Palestine’s entries at the Oscars. The film, which is currently in post-production, looks back on the great Arab rebellion of the 1930s when the Palestinian people opposed the British Mandate in place at the time. The cast mainly includes Saleh Bakri, Hiam Abbass, Jeremy Irons, Liam Cunningham and Billy Howle.

We’ll also be kicking off pre-sales on Mrs. by David Roux (article – toplined by Mélanie Thierry) which is currently being shot. We immediately fell in love with the screenplay, which is very "Chabrolesque", and which revolves around the provincial middle classes found in many different places all over the world, and the fate of a woman in love with an overly rich man who tries to extricate herself from the sway and oppressive burden of family traditions.

In pre-production, we’re launching the family adventure film Pipaluk: The Girl Who Raced the Wind by Thierry Machado (who was director of photography on Winged Migration and Microcosmos), which is produced by French firms Agat Films & Ex Nihilo and Galatée Film in co-production with Anorak (Greenland) and Snowglobe (Denmark), and which revolves around a little girl who dreams of taking part in the biggest dog sled race in the world, held in Greenland.

Last but not least, and also in pre-production, there’s the animated film Rose and the Marmots by Alain Ughetto, who won multiple awards for No Dogs or Italians Allowed [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alain Ughetto
film profile] and who’s working in 3D for the very first time to tell a story set at the beginning of the last century about a little poor girl who tries to make a place for herself in the world, earning money in her town by singing and dancing with the help of two capricious marmots.

(Translated from French)