Publish date: 2024-07-19

After starring in Mona Achache’s “Little Girl Blue” which played at Cannes, Marion Cotillard will work with another daring French female auteur, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, on her next film “La tour de glace.”

The long-gestated film marks the first collaboration between Hadzihalilovic and Muriel Merlin (“France,” “The Truth”), producer at 3B Productions. Hadzihalilovic’s follow up to “Earwig,” which won the jury prize at San Sebastian, “La Tour de glace” is expected to be the director’s most accessible and ambitious film to date. The movie will reteam Hadzihalilovic with Cotillard who had starred in her 2004 film “Innocence.”

Co-written by Geoff Cox, “La tour de glace” is set in the 1970s and follows Jeanne, a teenage girl who runs away from her orphanage located in a mountain village. She flees to Paris with big dreams to fulfill and finds shelter in a warehouse which turns out to be used as a studio where The Snow Queen is being filmed. The film’s star, Cristina, a beautiful woman in her forties, takes Jeanne under her wing, exerting a dangerous and overpowering influence over the young girl she sees herself in.

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“The power dynamic between this seductive character and teenage girl mirrors the plot of ‘The Snow Queen,’ creating a mirroring effect,” said Merlin, who added that the film “symbolizes the coming of age of an adolescent propelled into adulthood even though she’s still a child.” “La tour de glace” will also boast fantasy elements of a fairy tale. Merlin, whose credits include Ziad Doueiri’s “The Insult” and
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “The Truth,” said Hadzihalilovic had delivered a storyboard for the movie and will work with the set designer to create a “Georges Méliès-style aesthetic.”

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The film has been boarded by Metropolitan Films and is being represented in international markets by Goodfellas (“Titane”). It’s expected to start shooting early next year in France.

Merlin, who is still raising financing for the film, has just enlisted a German producer, Ingmar Trost at Sutor Kolonko.

Having lured a well-established French distributor like Metropolitan Filmexport which handles some of the biggest local and international movies underscores the film’s potential to reach audiences beyond the arthouse niche, Merlin continued. Hadzihalilovic has directed four films in the last two decades, starting with “La bouche de Jean-Pierre” which played at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. Her biggest success to date is “Evolution” which won best cinematography and jury prize at San Sebastian in 2015.

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