Sony Pictures Classics Buys Mia Hansen-Love’s ‘One Fine Morning’ Starring Lea Seydoux (EXCLUSIVE)

Bergman Island’s writer-director, Mia Hansen-Løve, was herself in a relationship with an older film-maker, Olivier Assayas – and the story starts to feel like a refracting prism in its overlap of characters and creator. In the hands of Hansen-Løve, it’s a delicate millefeuille, layering story upon story, character upon character, until it’s hard to peel them apart.

French actress Léa Seydoux is having a big moment right now at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Not only is she set to star in the latest film from director David Cronenberg, “Crimes Of The Future” (read our review), but she is also the lead in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” (read our review) But there is another project she is opening up about that she almost did.

Refresh for latest…: The 75th Cannes Film Festival draws to a close tonight as the main awards, including the Palme d’Or, are soon to be handed out in the Palais. Scroll down for the list of winners which is being updated as prizes are announced.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentStarring Léa Seydoux,  Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” won this year’s Europa Cinemas Cannes Label for best European film at the 2022 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.Announced Thursday by Europa Cinemas, ahead of the closing ceremony this evening, the prize is one of two at Directors Fortnight, and awarded by one of the sidebar’s partners given the section is non-competitive.A second partner plaudit, the SACD Prize, handed out by France’s Writers’ Guild,  will be announced later today at an awards ceremony.“One Fine Morning” was always a frontrunner for a prize at Directors’ Fortnight, though never a shoo-in. The award comes just three days after Sony Pictures Classics announced it had acquired North American, Latin American and Middle East rights to the film.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentSony Pictures Classics has acquired Sylvain Chomet’s “The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol,” an animated feature about the life of the legendary author Marcel Pagnol. The deal covers all rights for North America, Latin America, Scandinavia, Middle East, Israel, India, Italy, and worldwide airlines and ships at sea in all languages.Two of Chomet’s previous films, “The Triplets of Belleville” and “The Illusionist” were also distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Kristen Stewart starts her day with the 2022 Cannes Film Festival photo call for her film Crimes of the Future on Tuesday (May 24) in Cannes, France.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterDavid Cronenberg attended the Cannes press conference for his film “Crimes of the Future” and called the United States “completely insane” for potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, which has kept basic abortion rights legal since its 1973 ruling. The director’s new film, which is a return to his body horror roots, addresses “who owns who’s body,” Cronenberg said.“I did write [the script] 20 years ago but you could feel, even then, that this was coming,” Cronenberg said.

Kristen Stewart just gave us another great red carpet moment!

CANNES, France -- The Cannes Film Festival, yet again, belongs to Léa Seydoux.The French actress has already shared in a Palme d’Or at the festival, in 2013 for “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which made her and Adèle Exarchopoulos the first actors to ever win Cannes' top prize, which they shared with director Abdellatif Kechiche.Last year, she had four films at the festival, but missed all of them because she tested positive for COVID-19. But this year, Seydoux gives two of the best performance of her career in a pair of films unveiled at Cannes: Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning” and David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future.” Together, they have only reinforced the view that Seydoux is the premier French actress of her generation.On a recent afternoon a few blocks from Cannes' Palais des Festivals, Seydoux greeted a reporter cheerfully.

review out of the festival praised Hansen-Løve’s attention to detail in depicting the challenges of ushering a loved one through an illness of someone near the end of his life. “With ‘One Fine Morning,’ Hansen-Løve turns her attention, and ours, toward the challenges, both tiny and immense, of loving someone through a decline such as this — one that’s not a death, just yet, but rather a disabling event, an experience that is as perplexing for Georg as it is for his family and former students,” Katie Walsh wrote for TheWrap.

Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.  The French actress, 36, looked stunning in a black, blue and white striped short sleeved T-shirt which she paired with the black trousers.  The star added some height to her frame in a pair of towering black pointed toe heels as she attended the event in the Campari Lounge at the Palais des Festivals.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentMia Hansen-Løve, the French writer-director whose last film “Bergman Island” competed at last year’s Cannes, is back at the festival with “One Fine Morning,” a romance drama headlined by Lea Seydoux. The movie world premiered at Directors’ Fortnight and has earned stellar reviews with Variety‘s Guy Lodge describing it as a “wistful, wandering character study” and “gently moving reflection on parenting one’s children and parents at once,” which marks Hansen-Løve’s “returns to French, and to form.” “One Fine Morning” stars Seydoux as a long-single mother who’s coping with her father’s degenerative illness while embarking on a new, uncertain romance with a charming, yet emotionally unavailable man (Melvil Poupaud).

Between her job as a French-English interpreter, the prospect of romantic fulfillment, and the impending deterioration of her father’s health, the woman holding together all the threads in Mia Hansen-Løve’s “One Fine Morning” navigates a wide spectrum of human emotion. In the director’s follow up to last year’s English-language meta homage “Bergman Island,” Sandra (Léa Seydoux) oscillates between desire and grief with believable fluidity.

Guy Lodge Film Critic“One Fine Morning” sounds an innocuous title for a grownup relationship drama — destined, perhaps, to be confused on streaming menus with the George Clooney-Michelle Pfeiffer romcom “One Fine Day” — and in a sense, the mellow, melancholic cinema of French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve is its own kind of comfort viewing. But as with many facets of her filmmaking, there’s a smarter, sadder, more literary undertow to the title’s sunny simplicity.

Audrey Diwan’s planned English language directing debut, the erotic tale Emmanuelle starring Lea Seydoux, has buyers buzzing as much as any Cannes Market package being shopped this week on the Croisette. But her last film Happening (which didn’t make the cut as France’s choice for Best Foreign Language Film, though many felt it would have won) might have the most lasting impact. The film is just released in the U.S. smack in the middle of revelations that the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe V Wade.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaNeon has purchased North American distribution rights to Mark Jenkin’s “Enys Men,” ahead of the horror film’s premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival.The film, which sounds very shades of “The Wicker Man,” stars Mary Woodvine and Edward Rowe. Jenkin wore a lot of hats on this one.

EXCLUSIVE: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry is readying his next project, which will be on sale in the Cannes market with French seller Kinology.

Manori Ravindran International EditorIn one of the first major deals of the Cannes market, Sony Pictures Classics has swooped on Un Certain Regard title “All The People I’ll Never Be.” The distributor has picked up rights in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.The film, which is written and directed by Davy Chou (“Diamond Island”), will be re-titled as “Return to Seoul.” It premieres in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.The pic centers on 25-year-old Freddie, who impulsively returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. The headstrong young woman starts looking for her biological parents in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions.