If you missed numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in this series (Andrew Dosunmu's Ma'George, Shola Lynch's Free Angela, Byron Hurt's Soul Food Junkies, Dyana Gaye's Des Etoiles, Rodney Evans' The Happy Sad, RZA's The Man With The iron Fists and Julius Onah's The Girl Is In Trouble, and Vipaka, starring Forest Whitaker, Anthony Mackie and Sanaa Lathan) click HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
Here's number 9…
I first profiled this Djinn Carrénard sophomore effort titled Faire l’amour (or Making Love) a few weeks ago, which the director is also starring in, alongside Emma Nicolai and Laurette Lalande, from a screenplay he wrote.
First a quick recap… Synopsis for Faire l'amour reads:
Oussmane is a musician losing his hearing in a loveless relationship with Laure, an air hostess desperately trying to get pregnant. Kahina is a young woman doing time in a prison somewhere in Ile de France who gets leave for a week to spend Christmas with her four-year-old daughter. Oussmane and Kahina will fall in love during this week on leave, clinging on to each other with the passion of their instinct to survive. Kahina can’t see her daughter, Kahina falls in love, Kahina has to return to prison.
Djinn's first film, the acclaimed feature film debut Donoma, was reportedly made for a few hundred dollars; we saw it, and we were absolutely enthralled by it! As Ms Williams said in her review of it on this site in mid-April, Donoma feels like discovering a delightful show on Netflix and watching the whole season in an afternoon. When it's done, you're hungry for more and disappointed that there's nothing left to devour.
And she also added, "hopefully, the director will give us more deliciousness to taste soon."
And he'll be doing just that with Faire l’amour (or Making Love), a project that's budgeted at €2.7 million, or about $3.5 million! Talk about a jump (from a few hundred to a few million) from the cost of Donoma! I'm sure he's pleased. Let's see how that affects the end product.
Financing is definitely secured (via France’s National Cinema Centre (CNC) Arte France Cinéma and Pathé Films) with the film already in full production mode, with shooting (which started earlier this month) expected to take about nine weeks in Paris.
Carrénard actually wrote Faire L'Amour before he made Donoma, and says that it'll explore similar themes as that first film, which revolved around the dynamics of several, interconnected Paris couples.
“I wrote Faire L’Amour before shooting Donoma. Having focused on one couple in a very particular situation I wanted to explore lots of different couples in a freer way and that was how Donoma was born,” he said.
And also like Donoma, Faire L’Amour's cast will comprise of mostly amateur, first-time actors, which Carrénard is selecting from acting workshops he conducted earlier this year.
I'm definitely curious about Faire L'Amour. I get the feeling that Monsieur Carrénard is a talented one to definitely watch for.
Finally, courtesy of ScreenDaily, I think you'd appreciate this paragraph on his producing, marketing and distributing Donoma. Talk about a ground effort.
Shot in 2009 on a micro-budget with a borrowed Sony camcorder and basic wireless microphones to record the dialogue, Donoma premiered in Cannes in 2010 as part of the Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema (ACID) sidebar. There, it received a handful of festival invites and was circled by the likes of EuropaCorp, Jour2Fête and Epicentre but a distribution failed to materialise. Frustrated by the film’s lack of visibility, Carrénard decided to release the film under his own steam with the support of Commune Image Média – a production hub on the outskirts of Paris home to 20 independent companies – and key members of the cast including Salomé Blechmans, Emilia Derou Bernal and Sékouba Doucouré. Together they organised a series of “happenings”, including a packed 2,800-person screening of the picture at the iconic Art Deco Grand Rex Cinema in central Paris. “There were ten of us on the team and we were charged with each contacting 50 people a day to sell tickets. In the evening we would hand out flyers,” says Blechmans, one of Carrénard’s closest collaborators. “24 hours before the screening we had only sold about 1,000 tickets but a lot of people turned up on the night.” The filmmaker and crew then took the film on tour across France in a bus emblazoned with the Donoma Guerrilla Tour logo, stopping off in some 20 towns, announcing their arrival circus style with loud speakers and flyers. Faire L’Amour, which will be distributed by Pathé, is likely to get a very different release from Donoma. “I wonder how I’m going to feel about handing it over to someone else after our experiences on Donoma,” says Carrénard, somewhat wistfully.
Gotta love the spirit and hustle of this kid… 🙂
