10/05/2024 - The French participant for the Producers on the Move programme looks back on her career, her editorial line, her projects and her outlook on the state of the market

Having co-founded French firm Tripode Productions (based in Montpellier) with Guillaume Dreyfus in 2017, the French participant for the European Film Promotion’s Producers on the Move initiative, Delphine Schmit, is notably responsible for Our Mothers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Cesar Diaz
film profile] by César Diaz (awarded Cannes’ Golden Camera in 2019), Love According to Dalva [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Emmanuelle Nicot
interview: Emmanuelle Nicot, Julie Esp…
film profile] by Emmanuelle Nicot (honoured in Critics’ Week 2022), The (Ex)perience of Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ann Sirot & Raphael Balboni
film profile] by Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni (screened in Critics’ Week 2023) and Elbow [+see also:
film review
interview: Aslı Özarslan
film profile] by Asli Özarslan (screened in this year’s Berlinale Generation line-up).

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Cineuropa: How did you become a producer and what have been the milestones in your career?
Delphine Schmit: After studying anthropology, I trained as a screenwriter at La Fémis and then as a documentary director in the Ateliers Varan workshops. I was mostly drawn to writing because I’ve always read and written a lot. In fact, I’d co-written a short film which won an award at the Angers European First Film Festival in 2004. Then, completely by chance, as often happens in this line of work, just as I was about to move to Berlin, I found myself involved in shooting a short film in the small village where my parents lived, which I was passing through and where they ran a guest house where the two child actors in the film were staying. I got chatting with the producer, Isabelle Mathy of Perspective Films, and she offered me a production manager role. Then I became her right-hand woman and, eventually, her partner. Further down the line, when she made a few changes in her life, I took over the company, and then I founded Tripode Productions with Guillaume Dreyfus in 2017.

What is Tripode Productions’ editorial line?
I’m in the habit of saying we don’t have one, but actually our films are all either politically, socially or artistically engaged. Love According to Dalva by Emmanuelle Nicot explores incest, Mexico 1986 by César Diaz (in post-production, co-produced by Need Productions) is about political engagement, Tear Gas by Uta Beria, which we’re scheduled to shoot in Georgia (in co-production with 1991 Productions and 70 STEPS), examines the Russian invasion of that country, and the same thing applies on a formal level with our artistic works, like Bilingual, an upcoming film by Alexandre Koberidze (who competed in Berlin in 2021 with What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexandre Koberidze
film profile]) which we’re going to co-produce with Germany’s New Matter Films. We act on impulse and we love international co-productions, which we invest in very early on in the development stage, but we also produce majority French feature films such as Three Times Jenny by Milena Beurer Doenst, which we’ll be co-producing with Germany’s Weydemann Bros. and which I’ll be bringing to Producers on the Move.

What other projects are you working on?
We’re also developing Solastalgie (working title) by Kathy Sebba and Culioli by Anthony Lemaître. But I’m just as interested in animation and I’ve notably just taken part in the CEE Animation Workshop TV Special with a project called The Great War of Marie Curie by Camille Alméras (who co-directed Le grand Noël des animaux, which is set to be presented in Annecy). We’re also working on Our Wildest Days by Vasilis Kekatos (co-produced with Greece’s Blackbird Productions, Belgium’s Hélicotronc and Germany’s Achtung Panda),which is in post-production, and La otra orilla (co-produced with Peru’s Chullachaki Producciones and Mexico’s Piano Producciones), which is in the funding stage. And in a few weeks, filming’s going to begin on Sauvons les meubles by Catherine Cosme (starring Vimala Pons and Yoann Zimmer), which we’re co-producing with Belgium’s Hélicotronc and Swiss firm Alva Film.

What’s the situation for high-quality production, in your opinion?
The aim is to finance "arty" films in the proper way, but we don’t produce the most radical films in the world. The journey which inspires us the most and which gives us confidence - which doesn’t happen every year or with everyone - is Justine Triet’s: her first film racked up 30,000 admissions in France, her second was screened in Critics’ Week, her third competed in Cannes, and she scooped the Palme d’Or and enjoyed major success with her fourth. It proves that it’s possible to make beautiful, intelligent and engaged films which appeal to wider audiences. Authors just need time to develop their ideas and their talent so as to become solid filmmakers who are capable of creating great films. It’s not easy though; I get the feeling lots of people compromise on quality. I don’t know whether it’s because of TV or platforms, but there’s a tendency to want to go quickly, a kind of pressure. We have to stand strong, keep innovating; we’re lucky that European co-productions exist. Moreover, when you look at the 20 Producers on the Move this year, you realise how powerful you could all be together. We’ll doubtless need one another more and more, and it’s a wonderful idea, a lovely overview of Europe, not least because there are 15 women and 5 men this year, which is also good to see.

(Translated from French)