20/04/2023 - The Croisette opens up to Pierre Creton, an agricultural worker and gardening filmmaker armed with a movie produced by Andolfi and voiced by Mathieu Amalric, Grégory Gadebois and Françoise Lebrun

Antoine Pirotte and Vincent Barré in A Prince (© Andolfi)

The surprise guest at the 55th edition of the Directors’ Fortnight, unspooling 17 – 26 May in the folds of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, is director Pierre Creton who has lived in Caux for almost 20 years and shot all of his films there (thirty or so), while simultaneously working as an agricultural worker (namely a beekeeper, a seasonal worker in an endive production facility, a cowherder, and a milk quality controller, to name a few roles) and, recently, as a gardener. The parallel section will see him presenting A Prince, his 5th feature film following his documentaries Secteur 545 (2005) and Maniquerville [+see also:
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film profile] (notably presented at Bafici in 2010) and his fiction films Va, Toto ! [+see also:
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film profile] (screened in the Turin Festival in 2017) and A Beautiful Summer [+see also:
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film profile] (discovered in the French competition of FIDMarseille 2019).

The filmmaker (whom the Viennale paid tribute to in 2019 and to whom the Cinéma du Réel Festival subsequently dedicated a full retrospective in 2021) also features in the cast of his new movie, alongside Antoine Pirotte, Manon Schaap, Vincent Barré, Pierre Barray and Shiman Dangi, while the characters’ inner voices come courtesy of Mathieu Amalric, Grégory Gadebois and Françoise Lebrun.

Penned by Pierre Creton, Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat and Vincent Barré, the story revolves around Pierre-Joseph (Antoine Pirotte) who’s 16 when he enters a training centre to become a gardener. Here he meets the director Françoise Brown (Manon Schaap), his botany teacher Alberto (Vincent Barré), and his employer Adrien (Pierre Barray), who are pivotal to his apprenticeship and to his discovering his sexuality. Forty years later, Françoise Brown’s adopted child Kutta (Shiman Dangi) turns up, whom he’s always heard about. But Kutta, who is now the owner of the strange Château d’Antiville, seems to be looking for far more than just a gardener…

Produced by Arnaud Dommerc on behalf of Andolfi (now on their third collaboration with the director), A Prince notably enjoyed support in the development phase from the Normandy Region. Distribution in France is entrusted to JHR Films, with international sales currently under negotiation.

(Translated from French)