A few months ago, the City of Nice, Prime Video, and the Louis-Lumière National School of Advanced Studies partnered to offer a mentorship program for feature film writing.
This program will allow the selected budding screenwriters to imagine, write, and refine their very first feature film.
Following a call for projects and after receiving about a hundred applications, a committee made up notably of members from Prime Video, the ENS Louis Lumière, and the Victorine studios was able to choose six winners. These winners will be accompanied by six mentors during the five-month program.
The Winners
Here are the names of the six winners selected for the 2022 session:
- Nicolas Avrand for Echos
- Amina Sall for The Heart in Balance
- Marie-Mathilde Peyralbe for When We Were Still Children
- Nadia Salem for A Woman at War
- Roman Sitruk for The Rules of I
- Nicolas Thibaud for Fierce
The Mentors
Emmanuel Courcol, who, after starting as a theater actor, gradually shifted towards writing, co-writing, for example, four films with Philippe Lioret, including All Our Desires. He also stepped behind the camera and directed A Triumph, which won the Best Comedy of the Year award at the 33rd European Film Awards.
Delphine Gleize. She won the César for Best Short Film in 2000 for her film Sale Battars and has presented several of her films at the Cannes Film Festival.
Gilles Marchand, who collaborates with numerous artists on screenwriting (Valérie Donzelli, Cédric Kahn). He also wrote and directed the screenplays of Who Killed Bambi and Into Another World.
Mounia Meddour, director of the feature film Papicha, which was selected at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category. The film won the César for Best First Film and Most Promising Actress. It was later selected for the 2020 Oscars to represent Algeria in the Best Foreign Film category.
Laurette Polmanss. She collaborated on several scripts for Catherine Corsini, including Summertime, nominated for the Lumière Award, and An Impossible Love, nominated for the Césars.
Nicolas Saada was a program director at Arte from 1992 to 1998, before being a journalist at Cahiers du Cinéma from 1998 to 2000. He co-wrote a first screenplay for a film by Pierre Salvadori, Sand Merchants, and subsequently collaborated with Arnaud Desplechin and Frédéric Jardin.
An initial meeting session was held from January 24 to 26 at the Victorine studios. Following this, work and writing sessions will be held over the next five months, after which Prime Video may acquire the rights to these scripts and develop them with the author. These scripts could eventually become future Amazon Original films!
