Jean Jacques Annaud Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Thierry Frémaux is best known internationally as the long-time head of France’s Cannes Film Festival, which is organized out of its offices in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood.

The American French Film Festival (TAFFF), which had been due to take place in L.A. from October 18 to 22, has been shelved due to the writers and actors strikes.

Fans of The Name of The Rose author Umberto Eco turned out in NYC, boosting the documentary on medieval scholar turned novelist and social commentator to over $9.1k on one screen – a nice showing by The Cinema Guild for a foreign language documentary on a solid weekend for some indie and arthouse fare.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent The American French Film Festival, formerly known as COLCOA, has set the dates of its 2023 edition to Oct. 18-22. Organized by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, the festival will host its 27th edition at the Directors Guild of America Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. “Created by the Franco-American Cultural Fund, this event is the largest French film festival in North America and the largest festival dedicated to French Films and TV programs in the world,” said Cécile Rap-Veber, CEO of Sacem (the guild for authors, composers and publishers of music) who presides over the Franco-American Cultural Fund.

The Serpent and The Mauritanian star Tahar Rahim will preside over the 48th edition of France’s Cesar Awards, taking place at Paris’s historic l’Olympia concert venue on February 24.

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor The American French Film Festival, formerly known as COLCOA, will kick off Oct. 10 with the North American premiere of docudrama “Notre-Dame on Fire,” from “Quest for Fire” director Jean-Jacques Annaud. The weeklong festival at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles closes with Dominik Moll’s thriller “The Night of the 12th,” about a cold case where the only certainty is the night it occurred. Moll will also be the focus of the festival’s annual “Focus on a Filmmaker.” “Every year, The American French Film Festival presents the very best of French cinema and television, and this year is no exception. I am personally excited about the opening night selection of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s ‘Notre-Dame on Fire’ as I think it perfectly embodies the Franco-American Cultural Fund’s mission,” said Andrea Berloff, writer and board member of the Franco-American Cultural Fund.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Pathé, which operates France’s leading cinema circuit, is planning to enter the Paris stock exchange in 2024, Variety has confirmed. The company’s president, Jérôme Seydoux, revealed the group’s long-gestated listing project in an interview with the French publication Les Echos. Seydoux said the company suffered a loss of approximately €100 million during the financial years 2020 and 2021, mainly due to the fact that theaters in France were shut down for a total of 300 days during the pandemic. While it ruffled feathers by selling “Coda” to Apple at Sundance in 2021 in a splashy $25 million deal, the company was one of the rare French studios which maintained its release plans for major local productions during the health crisis, for instance Martin Bourboulon’s “Eiffel” with Romain Duris and Emma Mackey, and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Notre Dame on Fire.”

Annika Pham For its 50th edition unspooling Aug. 20-26, Norway’s top film event, the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund, will be treating its 400-plus international guests and local audiences with a beefed-up onsite program of 72 feature length films and 19 shorts.“We’ve had more films to choose from than ever before, “says festival honcho Tonje Hardersen about her non-competitive program, put together in close collaboration with local distributors and exhibitors.

Naman Ramachandran Disney’s “Thor: Love And Thunder” topped the U.K. and Ireland box office for the second consecutive weekend with £4.06 million ($4.8 million), according to numbers released by Comscore.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentPathé may be one of France’s oldest film groups, but it is young at heart. The only French film company that is still fully involved in exhibition, production, distribution and sales, Pathé has been confronting the challenges wrought by the pandemic and the arrival of streamers with bold steps and ambitious new projects.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentAfter a year marked by a two-month lockdown and COVID restrictions, the volume of French productions surged by 43.5% in 2021, with 340 films made after widespread postponements in 2020, according to a report unveiled by the CNC (National Film Board).The number of movies produced last year is even 13% higher than in 2019, before the pandemic. Along with production levels, the investment in French films skyrocketed by 73.5% to €1.1 billon ($1.2 billion), the second-highest figure of the decade — behind 2016.

EXCLUSIVE: European film giant Pathé, which owns more than 1,000 cinema screens across the continent, will always be a theatrical-first business. That doesn’t mean it can’t also move with the times.

Ben Croll Building on the critical success and renewed public interest drummed up by the Canal Plus series “The Bureau,” and inspired by the U.S. Defense Department’s various Hollywood liaison offices, France’s Ministry of Armed Forces launched its own outreach post, opening the Mission Cinéma in 2016.Meant to be a one-stop-shop for all production needs, the Mission Cinéma presents itself as a single point of access to France’s defense department, offering filmmakers technical support, trainings sessions and immersive residencies free of charge.In practical terms, that means coordinating requests for costumes, locations and highly guarded materials (including the Presidential plane, apparently a common request), while organizing creative scouting missions for screenwriters and producers, depositing film pros on aircraft carriers and letting them witness training drills in order to kindle the spark of imagination.

Franz Ferdinand have spoken about how the 2001 film Enemy At The Gates inspired their classic hit ‘Take Me Out’.The band’s frontman Alex Kapranos broke down the writing and recording process of the 2004 single during the latest episode of the Song Exploder podcast (released yesterday, January 26).“The night before [the idea emerged] I’d watched a film called Enemy At The Gates, and it’s set during the Second World War around the siege of Stalingrad. One of the themes of the film is this stand-off between two snipers,” he explained.“Jude Law is the Soviet sniper and Ed Harris is the evil Nazi.

Ben Croll After going online only in 2021, the Paris Images Trade Show will return for its ninth edition as a hybrid event, offering both in-person and online attendees the chance to take in a broader view of France’s audiovisual production infrastructure. Running Jan.

Michael Lonsdale, who starred as the mad villain Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker and the dogged detective in the Fred Zinnemann-directed crime thriller The Day of the Jackal, has died. He was 89.

Andreas Wiseman International EditorEXCLUSIVE: Pathé will launch sales at the Cannes virtual market on Notre Dame On Fire, a big-canvas movie drama about the iconic Notre Dame fire of 2019, which shocked people around the world.Wolf Totem, Enemy At The Gates and Seven Years In Tibet director Jean-Jacques Annaud is teaming up with A Prophet and Rust And Bone scribe Thomas Bidegain on the ambitious French-language feature, which will combine archive footage with filmed drama to tell the story of