Having founded La Belle Affaire Productions in 2016 (which he runs with partners Flore Cavigneaux and Jean-Loup Pochoy) after working for, among others, Les Films Pelléas, Playtime and Artificial Eye, Jérôme Blesson has credits that include the features Amor Fati (Visions du Réel 2020) and Wolf & Dog (Best Film Award in the 2022 Giornate degli Autori), both by Cláudia Varejão. He is attending the 48th Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival, where he is pitching I Will Drink With the Bees (J’irai boire avec les abeilles), a project by French filmmaker Léa Triboulet, at the Cinemed Meetings Development Grant.

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Cineuropa: What made you want to produce I Will Drink With the Bees?
Jérôme Blesson: It will be the first feature by Léa Triboulet, who directed several short films that I had seen before we worked together on two shorts: The Bridge and La Passée. The former, a documentary short, is close to the subject of the fiction feature I Will Drink With the Bees: experiencing the loss of someone close from the perspective of a teenage girl and finding a way to build resilience in the face of that loss – in this case, through nature and bees that repopulate a village in the Pyrenees and help our young protagonist heal her wounds.

Léa Triboulet took her first steps at the Film Factory in Sarajevo, working with the great Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who passed away not long ago. That experience enabled her to develop an aesthetic sensibility and a directorial vision that I want to support, beyond the deeply personal themes she explores in her films. As a producer, it is important to bring these stories to audiences and potentially help people who have gone through such difficult periods in their lives to heal.

What stage has the project reached, and what kinds of partners are you looking for?
We are still working on the screenplay, although development is quite far advanced. We will begin financing production at the end of this year, with the hope of shooting next summer in the Pyrenees. It is a project that lends itself quite well to co-production, as we will be working near the Spanish border. The idea is to recruit key members of the technical and creative teams in Spain and potentially shoot part of the film there. We are also considering Serbia, since Iva Brdar, the film’s co-writer, is Serbian, and bringing in one or two Serbian heads of department would make sense. But we remain open to other territories. For example, we met a few Eastern European producers at the Sofia Film Festival’s co-production market. These are territories that interest us and would make sense for the project.

What is La Belle Affaire Productions’ editorial approach?
Precisely to support first films and help emerging talent flourish, all with a spirit of kindness and care that is reflected in the projects we champion, which seek to offer support and healing. In a world that is losing its bearings, I think this is essential. Bringing cultures together, and helping them meet and connect, is also part of La Belle Affaire’s DNA, as illustrated by the movie we are currently shooting: Les Neiges de Grenade, the first feature by Simon Helloco, starring Léa Drucker, Victoria Luego and Théodore Pellerin. It is a highly ambitious picture whose shoot takes us to Brittany, Granada and Montreal, and which Flore Cavigneaux and I are producing together.

What other projects are you working on?
We have begun location scouting in Armenia for a feature-length documentary by Nora Martirosyan, who directed the fiction feature Should the Wind Drop, selected for Cannes in 2020. It will be a contemporary portrait of Armenia, a landlocked country surrounded by several sensitive territories. In particular, the film will document the rapidly growing trade route between Iran and Russia, where major economic interests are at stake, while also exploring the culture of resilience among Armenians, who have endured some profoundly dark years.

Your company is based in Montpellier and Paris. How does this regional base shape your identity as a production company?
We are drawn to local stories that can resonate nationally and internationally. We seek to connect these dimensions, as we did, for example, with Erratics by Thomas Woodroffe, presented last month in San Sebastián’s New Directors section, with Denis Lavant in the lead role. The film is predominantly French-language and was shot mainly in Chile, but also in Toulouse, and centres on a 1925 archive film entitled La Terre de feu. It is precisely this intersection between French stories and more distant narratives that drives us: how to connect the local with the international and take stories that might seem confined to one territory much further afield.