On the eve of the 17th Les Arcs Film Festival (read our article) and the associated Industry Village which notably includes the highly anticipated Work in Progress (WiP) section, with 12 films gracing this year’s agenda (article), we met with the festival’s artistic director, Frédéric Boyer (who also holds the same post in Tribeca and Reykjavik).

Cineuropa: This year, as often happens, a lot of films whose first images were unveiled in Les Arcs’ WiP section have subsequently been selected in major festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno and Rotterdam), with Sound of Falling [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mascha Schilinski
scheda film] leading the pack. What’s your secret? And does this kind of success create a certain sense of pressure?
Frédéric Boyer: With Sound of Falling, Thierry Frémaux chose to place a first feature film - which was also a really long film (2 hours and 29 minutes) - directly in competition in Cannes. When I saw extracts from it in our Work in Progress line-up, I thought it was a wonderful film, but before its selection in Cannes it hadn’t yet found a sales agent. So you have to trust programmers in major festivals - whether Berlin, Cannes or Venice - when they take risks. More broadly speaking, all those successive selections in major festivals lead to high expectations among the professionals who come to see our WiP line-up. We do the best we can with the films we receive (163 this year). We chose 12, which isn’t very many at all, and it’s hard to predict the impact they’ll have, because we only see 20, sometimes 30 minutes of them before subsequently showing 8 to 10 minutes of them.

It’s true we’re working in a very particular area, because films which are finished or thereabouts and which have already been shown to professionals, aren’t of interest to us. We try to build surprise and maintain total confidentiality until the day of the WiP event. A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra, for example, by Jacqueline Lentzou is still pretty much in the filming phase, some of our other selected works have shooting planned for February-March time, and most of them are only in the beginning or middle phases of editing. Even if they have their "final cut" ready, we encourage our selected teams to show "rough" sequences, because it means the professionals in the room know exactly what they’re seeing and it’s far more interesting that way. Obviously, project bearers aren’t allowed to show their films before they’re screened at Les Arcs and we don’t offer any screeners. But the most important thing is the "one to one" meetings after the WiP event, because the selected works get their first feedback from professionals and we get them on track in the industry, all in the convivial and welcoming atmosphere of Les Arcs. Because even though we obviously hope that all the films we’re presenting will do well in 2026, it’s not just about Cannes or the other major festivals, it’s also important that these films are well made, and that’s what we’re looking for. And we’re really pleased to see our previous WiP participant, Johannes Nyholm, returning with Weird Elliot, nine years after he unveiled the first images for Koko-di Koko-da [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Johannes Nyholm
scheda film] in Les Arcs.

Have you picked up on any trends among the projects submitted for your WiP section?
There’s a particular focus on the structure of films and on the audience; films are arguably less contemplative and their screenplays try to break the mould. It’s the case for The Matriarch by Alison Kuhn, Girl Beast by Selma Sunniva (editor’s note: Lars von Trier’s daughter) and The Difficult Bride by Rubaiyat Hossain, for example. Lots of the films in the WiP line-up are based upon brilliant stories. Competition in global arthouse cinema is incredibly intense these days, and you have to stand out. And what festivals, sales agents and audiences want is to be drawn in by a story with a particular voice and style. We’ve also seen a lot of good if not brilliant German projects: there’s a real wave of filmmakers who are trying to distance themselves from the Berlin School. Lots of documentary directors are being tempted into fiction, where they can draw on their experience of exploring the past, observing, prepping, positioning the cameras… This is especially relevant for Jannis Lenz, who’ll be presenting Oasis and who we discovered through her documentary Soldat Ahmet [+leggi anche:
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What’s your opinion on the state of the market and falling cinema admissions?
Maybe we haven’t had films which shore up the entire market this year, like The Comte of Monte-Cristo [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] in France in 2024, for example. But in the film world, we also have festivals with full-to-bursting auditoriums all over the world. For filmmakers, it might be the only time in their lives where they get to share their film with so many viewers: it always provides a thrill and it’s also a way for films to exist, an exceptional moment which gives creators hope. In terms of film distributors, even if they’re standing strong there’s no denying the situation is far harder and that things are deteriorating. But production is still going strong; we’re seeing huge numbers of good films, and festivals like Berlin, Cannes and Venice are managing to unearth talent. And co-production markets and platforms are still very dynamic.

But over and above making a film, recording admissions or managing to survive, there are far deeper questions on producers’ minds. What should films focus on nowadays? How can we keep making "coming of age" stories? Should we make "road movies"? How do we go about representing the world? What affects us in the current context? There are a huge number of essential questions, because viewers want to see films which speak to them. Souleymane’s Story [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Boris Lojkine
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