25/03/2025 - The directors of Salle Commune Productions unveiled the genesis of their French-Japanese project presented at the Co-Pro Pitching Sessions of the Series Mania Forum

Founded in 2022 by Jonas Benhaiem and Jean-Félix Dealberto, who met when working at Charades, French outfit Salle Commune Productions has been selected in the Co-Pro Pitching Session of the Series Mania Forum (read the article) with the French-Japanese series project Tokyo Crush (8 x 30’). We met the two producers, who wanted to speak with one voice, in Lille.

Cineuropa: How was the Tokyo Crush project born?
Jonas Benhaiem and Jean-Félix Dealberto: It’s a very free adaptation of the eponymous novel by Vanessa Montalbano (published in 2024). We bought the rights to suggest the project to Clémence Dargent, for whom this will be the first solo series creation. After graduating from the Fémis, Clémence had co-created the series OVNI(s) for Canal+, and more recently, she co-wrote the features Bernadette [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Bis Repetita. She has been the determining factor because we really wanted to work with her, and the author and the editor of the book shared our enthusiasm towards her. We also initiated a co-production with Japanese outfit Flag Inc., with Hiroko Oda (with whom Jean-Félix had worked a lot when at Charades). When we identified this book, we thought we were potentially the right people to adapt it, given our connection to the material, of course, but also due to our bond with Hiroko Oda, for it is after all very complicate to produce in Japan without a privileged interlocutor and because, especially for this project, we needed a sharp Japanese eye. So we developed the project on our side and at this stage, it is in pre-development at Arte, which we are very happy about, and Clémence is currently writing the series pilot. It’s the first editorial and financial block of an international project, to which we hope to attach Japanese financing and international sales agents, and potentially some co-producers.

What attracted you to this book?
Even though we’ve moved away from it a lot, what really attracted us was the expatriation experience, and what it said about a character who goes thousands of kilometers away from home to try and be someone else in Japan, a country that fascinates a lot of people throughout the world. What interested us and the thread that we pulled out of it is a chapter in the book about an “izakaya”, a traditional Japanese bar. From the moment we identified that pivot, we thought there was a “workplace comedy” engine there, with, of course, a rom-com thread as well since the book is originally about romance. What we wanted to extract was the trajectory of a character, a French chef who arrives in Tokyo to become chef in an “izakaya”, and to use gastronomy as a cultural bridge between France and Japan. It seemed an obvious link to us because Tokyo is the city with the most starred restaurants in the world, and these are two cuisines who watch and respect each other. It’s an interesting point for a character who projects herself from one world to the other and who arrives in a universe whose codes she believes she masters, but in fact not at all. It allows us to push the sliders to the maximum because there’s a rather huge cultural gap, conducive to dramaturgy and comedy. So the ambition is to make a funny and pop series, but with a very distinct universe, that of Japanese gastronomy and of Tokyo, with all you can imagine that’s sensorial and visually powerful, all while addressing, from a certain angle, the question of culture clash, of the fantasies we project onto another culture, what that says about our own, to interrogate this relationship to expatriation. The character’s vision of Japan isn’t at all realist and she will have to unravel and deconstruct the fantasies she has.

What would be your ideal schedule?
It’s hard to say because in TV, it’s very speculative, especially on such a project where there’s a lot of international financing to go and find. The writing of the pilot and of the story arcs will wrap up by early summer. The ideal schedule would be a shoot in 2026, but that needs to be discussed with Arte and with the partners who will join us, which will inevitably add development stages and another gaze. We are progressing step by step, and we will certainly know a little more about the timing after Series Mania.

What is Salle Commune’s editorial line?
Tokyo Crush is a good example of what we’re trying to do. To set up this project, we used our French network (Jonas was at the Fémis ten years ago with Clémence, who we know very well) and our international network that we developed over our six years at Charades (who invested in Salle Commune as a minority shareholder). There’s a desire to create bonds between what we have done internationally and what we want to do on the French market, to be at the crossroads of these two networks. The idea isn’t to develop only international projects and we are also developing French projects, but instead to draw the material for the projects we are going to launch today from our network and our past experiences, to capitalise on close relationships that we have with French talent, the access to French or international IP, and the ability, we hope, to finance projects in a slightly original way.

(Translated from French)