Created in 2001 and headed by François d’Artemare, the Parisian production company Les Films de l’Après-midi is present at the 44th Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival where it is pitching for the Development Grant of the Cinemed Meetings (read the news) the project The Other Wife (L’autre épouse), which will be the first fiction feature from Meriem Mesraoua.

Cineuropa: What attracted you about the project The Other Wife?
François d’Artemare: I met Meriem Mesraoua a few years ago. She had shown me her short film Our Time is Running Out and I found her talented. We therefore decided to work together and I produced her next short film, À fleur de peau, which was selected in Competition in Venice in 2020, with the goal to develop a feature film next. We are now moving forward with that project, The Other Wife, which tells the story of a couple whose relationship suffers a bit after the children leave, and after 20 years of marriage. By taking extreme measures to save the illusory refuge that is this marriage, Salima, the protagonist, will be forced to face the fragility of its image, fixed for too long. But the film will of course have a wider resonance, about women in Algeria today, their social, professional, family situation, and how they try to exist. 

We are still at a rather early stage of writing and I am in fact looking for a co-writer to help Meriem — who knows perfectly well what story she wants to tell — structure the film. I hope that I can begin financing at the beginning of next year. I have worked on many co-productions, and have therefore developed a solid network in that area, so I have great hopes of reuniting with partners I’ve already worked with before. I am absolutely open to co-production with Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, with Eurimages as the next objective. And Qatar will no doubt be part of proceedings, since it is already financing the development of the film. In terms of filming, it will take place in Oran because that is where the story is set, and where Meriem is from.

Is this project representative of your editorial line at Les Films de l’après-midi?
I don’t know that I have a predetermined editorial line, but one thing is clear: for 20 years, I have been producing more films by female directors than by male directors. I find that there is a superior energy with them, a desire for cinema and no doubt to change things. Sometimes, male directors are afraid of losing power, but female directors have nothing to lose. I mostly work with filmmakers, from France or elsewhere, in whom I can feel this desire and this energy. Moreover, the films I producer talk about the world and try to find a usefulness of the way we look at it, be it from a social or a political point of view with Made in Bangladesh [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Rubaiyat Hossain, or from a more intimate point of view with I Want to Talk About Duras [+lee también:
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entrevista: Claire Simon
ficha de la película] by Claire Simon.

Because I started my producing career in Portugal, this gave me an opening on the Portuguese-speaking world, and I have produced films in Brazil, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola. Then, with my French company, I of course continued to work with Portuguese directors (João Salaviza, João Viana, Marco Martins, etc.), but I also turned to other countries, depending mostly on my encounters with filmmakers: Aida Begic in Bosnia, Radu Muntean in Romania, etc. It is encounters that have shaped my editorial line, but I also want to maintain at all cost this artisanal model of production.

What other projects are you working on?
Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures [+lee también:
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entrevista: Marco Martins
ficha de la película] by Marco Martins was recently presented in Competition in San Sebastián. Currently in post-production is Banzo by Margarida Cardoso. I am also co-producing Music [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Angela Schanelec, which has been completed. The documentary Français, langue étrangère from Japanese filmmaker Madoka Nishino, about young students who have fled to France, is currently filming. Claire Simon and I are thinking about her next fiction film, and Rubaiyat Hossain’s next fiction film is now at the financing stage.