Founded in 2010 by Martine Vidalenc, Bordeaux-based production company Midralgar (formerly Marmitafilms) has previously offered up works such as the animated movies Marona’s Fantastic Tale [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Anca Damian, My Grandfather’s Demons [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Nuno Beato and My Neighbors’ Neighbors [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Marie-Laure Daffis and Léo Marchand, as well as Alexandru Belc’s fiction film Metronom [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Alexandru Belc
scheda film]. The producer is attending the 45th Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival where she’s pitching Arnaud Khayadjanian’s fiction project The First Daughter for the Development Grant, within the wider Cinemed Meetings event (read our news).

Cineuropa: How did you come across Arnaud Khayadjanian’s project The First Daughter?
Martine Vidalenc: Two years ago, we were attending Cannes with Metronom (which won an award in the Un Certain Regard section), which was the first live-action fiction film we’d co-produced, because we were more focused on documentary and animated films back then. After that, we were sent a number of fiction projects, either from abroad or from young French filmmakers. So Arnaud Khayadjanian and his co-author Vincent Germain sent us a draft of The First Daughter and I was really moved by the quality of work they’d put in. It was a really solid first draft of the screenplay, and from our very first meeting with them, my associate Emmanuel Quillet and I could sense their incredibly promising energy and talent. Arnaud had also picked up on the fact that we represent films which are deeply rooted in women’s rights and human rights. And his film is very much that, since it’s about the emancipation of a young Armenian woman.

What exactly is the story about?
The main character is Diana, a young 20-year-old woman who has grown up in a very traditional, rural setting in Armenia. And amongst the various traditions, there’s that of selective abortion: your first child has to be a boy. So when you become pregnant with a girl, you abort it, illegally of course, because it’s policed more and more nowadays, but the tradition endures nonetheless, especially in the more backwater villages. To begin with, Diana is fairly happy to walk the path that her mother and her grandmother before her both took, but little by little, she realises that she doesn’t want to terminate her pregnancy. For this reason, she sets out on an initiatory journey and travels to Georgia to escape her village. But she also realises that she doesn’t necessarily want her daughter to grow up outside of Armenia. She just wants to be able to raise a girl in her country, whether firstborn or not. So it’s a film where several generations intersect.

The screenplay draft we’re working on is pretty much the final one, and we’re talking to potential partners in Armenia and Georgia which are the obvious countries to shoot the film in, even if the current situation in Armenia does really complicate things in terms of filmmaking on the ground, but we’re hopeful that things will improve. We’d like to prepare the production next year, with a view to filming in 2025. It’s a debut feature film, a fragile film which doesn’t tick many boxes in funding terms, so we can’t make any mistakes or cut corners, our preparations have to be solid.

What other projects is Midralgar currently working on?
In development, we’ve got the next film by Alexandru Belc, who directed Metronom, and the animated project The Trail of your Blood in the Snow by Gonzalo García Barcha and Elías Nahmías, which is an adaptation of a novella by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and is steered by Mexico’s Cine Tornado.

We’re also partners on another animated project which is at a more advanced stage: King Wray by Anglo-Romanian directors Anton and Damian Groves, which is steered by Romania’s Studiofet Production alongside Poland’s Kinhouse Studio and Hungary’s Kino Alfa.

Last but not least, there’s The Alienated by Anja Kreis, which is currently in the editing phase. It’s a second feature film by a Russian director who’s been living in Germany for ten years and who turned a fair few heads in 2018 with her graduate film Scythe Hitting Stone. The movie’s production is steered by German firm Fortis Fem Film (who specialise in films dedicated to female struggles) alongside Moldova’s Pascaru Production.