Making films in times of pandemic? A huge challenge, met with courage in France for over a year. Despite generally tight budgets, most projects see the light of day. Even if the bottling of films produced by the long shutdown of theaters bodes well for a difficult future.
Making films in times of pandemic? A huge challenge, met with courage in France for over a year. Despite generally tight budgets, most projects see the light of day. Even if the bottling of films produced by the long shutdown of theaters bodes well for a difficult future.
In an Ideal World is the title of Emilie Frèche’s debut film, currently being edited. In an ideal world, filming would not have been interrupted for five months by the Covid-19. No sooner had it started, in October 2020, than almost all of the thirty-five members of the team were infected. A cluster, as they say. We had to wait until March to resume, so that the natural light was more or less the same – the settings are those of the surroundings of Briançon, in the Alps. Additional cost of this setback: 400,000 euros, on a budget initially estimated at 2.5 million. A film already “fragile” at the start, according to the producer, Laëtitia Galitzine, who owes her salvation to the support fund of 50 million euros released by the National Center for Cinema and Animated Image (CNC): “Without that , we would not have resumed. “
This emergency aid, which has saved many works, explains the intact vitality – or almost – of cinematographic creation despite the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, the drop in the number of films in production was limited to 20.6%, according to the CNC – a drop that corresponds more or less to the two months of the first confinement, between March 17 and mid -may. Lively discussions within the Audiovisual and Cinema Health and Safety Committee resulted in a guide to health safety recommendations, which allowed productions to resume their stride in June. In Paris, the number of shooting days fell by only 10% year over year.
