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EXCLUSIVE: In keeping with its start-of-the-year tradition, Goodfellas has rolled out the bulk of its French-language slate for 2025 ahead of the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris next week, and it’s a hot one.
The line-up features fresh additions An Affair by Arnaud Desplechin and Prime Rush by Carlos Abascal Peiró as well as half a dozen pictures that we expect to see at Cannes or Venice later this year.
An Affair marks a new chapter for Desplechin after achieving closure in 2024 with his long-running character of Paul Dédalus through Cannes-selected drama Filmlovers!, which hits French cinemas for Les Films du Losange next week.
New movie An Affair sees Desplechin collaborate with rising French stars François Civil (Beating Hearts) and Nadia Tereszkiewicz (The Crime is Mine) for the first time, in a cast also featuring Charlotte Rampling and Hippolyte Girardot.
Civil plays a pianist who returns to France after a long personal exile where an encounter with a child who looks just like him leads him to the woman he once loved.
Currently in post-production, the film is produced by Why Not Productions which is riding high in the awards season on the back of the Golden Globes success of Emilia Pérez.
Prime Rush is the debut feature of Abascal Peiró after a series of award-winning shorts, including 2018 work Jupiter!, and features a high-powered cast topped by François Cluzet (Intouchables) alongside Alex Lutz (Vortex), Karin Viard (Polisse) and newcomer Jean Chevalier.
Billed as a Conclave-style political intrigue, the film follows a young parliamentary attaché who is charged with persuading his long-estranged father, a reclusive senator, to accept the post of prime minister.
As other candidates emerge, the ambitious young man will stop at nothing to make it happen in a high stake, madcap adventure that will see him risk both his career and personal happiness. The comedy-drama has particular resonance in France which is on its fourth prime minister in a year under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.
At the upcoming Unifrance Rendez-Vous, Paris-based Goodfellas will market premiere completed titles Oxana by Charlène Favier, Dominique Baumard’s art heist tale The French Job, Hassan Guerrar’s drama Barbes, Little Algeria, and Giovanni Aloi’s crime thriller Hunting Ground, starring Félix Lefebvre as a bartender in a louche hunting lodge who finds himself caught up in a settling of scores when an escort disappears.
Favier will attend the presentation of Oxana. Her second movie after well-received debut Slalom, the film is a portrait of the late, real-life feminist revolutionary and co-founder of the FEMEN movement Oxana Chatchko, who spent the latter part of her life in Paris. Diaphana will release the film in France in April.
Barbes, Little Algeria, which was released by Jour2Fête in October, is Guerrar’s directorial debut after a career as a top film press agent. It revolves around a tech exec who reconnects with his Algerian roots during the pandemic.
The company is also laying on a market screening for Thierry Frémaux’s Lumiere! The Adventure Continues, the follow-up to his 2016 work Lumière! The Adventure of Cinema Begins, celebrating the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
The double-hatted Cannes head and director of the Institut Lumière will participate in a Q&A with buyers after the Unifrance Rendez-Vous screening.
The 2025 French slate also features Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s previously announced drama The Ice Tower, starring Oscar-winning actress Marion Cotillard as the enigmatic star of a film production of The Snow Queen who bewitches a young runaway; Rebecca Zlotowski’s murder-mystery Vie Privée, in which Jodie Foster plays a renowned psychiatrist who mounts an investigation when one of her patients dies in suspicious circumstances, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s under-the-radar first feature in three years Young Mothers. All three films are now in post-production.
Vie Privée director Zlotowski will be at the Rendez-Vous this year as the recipient of Unifrance’s annual Cinema Award, following in the footsteps of Melvil Poupaud and Juliette Binoche.
Goodfellas has also confirmed that a host of international titles expected to make their mark on the festival circuit later this year are nearing completion, including revenge drama Morte Cucina by Thailand’’s Pen-Ek Ratanaruang; Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s genre exploration of the childhood of Jesus The Carpenter’s Son, starring Nicolas Cage, FKA twigs, Noah Jupe and Souheila Yacoub; Finnish fantasy drama Nightborn by Hanna Bergholm (Hatching), Burhan Qurbani’s female-led, interpretation of Shakespeare’s play Richard III, No Beast So Fierce and Nico Ballesteros’s fly-on-the-wall Kanye West doc In Whose Name?.
The 26th Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris – which is billed as the largest market and press junket dedicated to French cinema and audiovisual works outside of Cannes – will take place from January 14 to 21.
