EXCLUSIVE: Ron Dyens, the founding CEO of Paris-based company Sacrebleu Productions, has built a reputation as one of Europe’s most original and prolific producers of independent animated features over the course of nearly 25 years.
His company is out in force at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this year.
Its new animated feature Sirocco And The Kingdom Of Air Streams opened the festival on Sunday evening (June 11) and is among 11 animated features in the running for its Cristal prize.
The company is also present in the short film competition with 1942-set Maurice’s Bar by Israeli filmmakers Tzor Edery & Tom Prezman about the memories of a former drag queen around one of Paris’s first queer bars.
Outside the film program, Sacrebleu will participate in the Works in Progress section with Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. The Latvian director’s second feature after breakout debut Away, it revolves around a loner cat forced to share a small boat with a group of other animals after a terrible flood.
The company will present a further two projects: VR work The Pond by Lucas Leonarduzzi and Antoine Morieres (in the MIFA Pitches section) and Wesley Rodrigues’s Bird Kingdom, which has been selected for Annecy’s Residency program.
Sirocco And The Kingdom Of Air is the first solo animated feature of Benoît Chieux, after a number of award-winning shorts and the joint work Aunt Hilda!, which played in the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus section in 2014.
Based on an original story developed by Chieux with screenwriter Alain Gagnol (who was Oscar nominated for A Cat In Paris), it follows the adventures of two young sisters who get trapped in the pages of a children’s book and its fantastical Kingdom of the Winds.
The $4.1 million (€4.9 million), 2D animation work is a co-production led by Sacrebleu with partners Take Five (Belgium) and Ciel De Paris (France). Haut et Court will release the film in France on December 13. Kinology is handing international sales.
Dyens founded Sacrebleu Productions in 1999. For its first 15 years of existence the company focused mainly on short format works, producing more than 50 in total including award winners Barking Island, Madagascar, A Journey Diary, Tram and Man On The Chair.
The company broke into feature animation in 2016 with Rémi Chayé’s Long Way North, which it followed with Aga’s House, Marona’s Fantastic Tale and My Sunny Maad. Its features credits also include the documentary Free Radicals, A History Of Experimental Cinema and live action drama Dark Heart Of The Forest.
Deadline talked to Dyens about Sacrebleu’s journey to date and its future animation slate.
DEADLINE: How did you break into film?
RON DYENS: The starting point is that I love art. There are a lot of artists in my family, and I studied plastic arts. I also wrote and painted too. One day a producer suggested I turn a play I’d written into a short film. I knew nothing about cinema, so I learned on the job. My first short was a terrible flop but the second one was a success, showing a at raft of festivals and achieving 30 sales deals. These first shorts were live action, but it all began there.
DEADLINE: How did you move into animation?
DYENS: I reconnected with the graphic art that had surrounded me since I was child and I started getting into animation before it became as big as it is today. It was around the time that Annecy was growing too. Something that was important for me from the beginning was the focus on the writing. That wasn’t very common at the time. People were more interested in making beautiful films with wonderful images, but there was not much attention on the storytelling.
DEADLINE: Having started out as a filmmaker, you moved into producing. What do you like about producing?
DYENS: My approach is more American than French. I see myself as an artistic producer. I try to add value though a focus on the writing and dramaturgy. I see myself as being at the service of the auteur and the story. I’m not there to steal their ideas but rather to make them coherent to the audience to create a story that touches the spectator.
Through my work with short films, I understand the challenge of creating a work that stands out. There are around 3,000 short films produced in France each year and just 20 go on to circulate worldwide.
DEADLINE: What is the magic ingredient that makes a work standout?
DYENS: I have an arborescent way of thinking. I make lots of different connections in my head when I read a project which I immediately send back to the director.
Then I wait and see how the director reacts. I want to understand whether the director really understands their subject and characters. I dig and it’s not always comfortable. If a director is willing to dig deeper that’s a good sign. I can be very demanding and this has lost me directors in the past. I don’t mind, but it’s better if this happens earlier rather than later, which is why I push hard at the beginning.
Animation is a long journey. It’s a bit like a marriage. There will be a highs and lows, but the end game is to bring a baby into the world together. The filmmaker is the mother, the one who suffers. I am the one holding their hand.
Sirocco And The Kingdom Of The Winds
Sacrebleu
DEADLINE: How did you get involved in Sirocco And The Kingdom Of Air Streams?
DYENS: It’s a bit of an unusual trajectory. I saw a trailer at Cartoon Movie. There was already a producer attached. I went to see Benoît and told him I really liked the trailer and story, and was interested in getting involved, even as a co-producer. Benoît liked the idea and told me to speak to the producer, who then decided they didn’t want to do the film any more so I took over the film with Benoît attached.
We did two short films together so we could get to know one another, to test our ability to collaborate. To use the marriage metaphor again, you need to spend some time together before you tie the knot. It worked out well and one of the short films was nominated at the Césars (Midnight’s Garden).
When it came to the feature, Benoît took a very different approach from the other animations I’ve worked on. Screenwriter Alain Guignol wrote the screenplay from his images, rather than the other way around.
DEADLINE: What were the starting elements?
DYENS: The wind, the two young girls, the mother and Selma, the singer, although she wasn’t a singer in the beginning. It all came together in a kind of ping pong match fashion with me acting as the umpire. The idea from the beginning was to create an arthouse film with commercial potential that was accessible to a larger public. However, we didn’t get any support from the broadcasters and also missed out on [CNC] Advance on Receipts funding so the budget wasn’t as big as we hoped. It was complicated.
DEADLINE: Do you have plans for a sequel or other spin-off products like a graphic novel?
DYENS: There are a lot of ideas. We recently presented a transmedia project at Cartoon Next in Marseille involving the creation of a Sirocco universe and we’re publishing a family book with publisher Acte Sud to coincide with the release of the film in December. We’re also in talks to develop a Sirocco video game as well as with broadcasters on a potential TV series, although they’re waiting to see how the film does before committing.
DEADLINE: Can you talk a bit about Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow which you are going to present as a Work in Progress?
Dyens: We’ve just started production and we’ll show some new images. It’s a film co-produced between Latvia, France and Belgium. We found the most money in France and we’re doing nearly all the work in a studio in Marseille. It’s a very exciting project. There are high expectations for the film. There’s no dialogue, it’s unclassifiable and very spiritual. It makes me think of the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer.
DEADLINE: How did you get involved in the film?
DYENS: After I saw Away, I told Gints Zilbalodis I wanted to be involved in his next film. He sent me the elements for this new film and I immediately signed up. Gints was also keen to work with a team. He made his first film all alone at the age of 24 but no-one really does that in animation. He’s pleased to have found people who want to work with him on this.
DEADLINE: You’re presenting another project called Bird Kingdom by Wesley Rodrigues at Annecy. Can you give a few more details?
DYENS: It’s a co-production with Brazil. It’s a magnificent project. For me, it’s a mix of Sam Peckinpah, Kleber Mendonça, Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s a very violent film about the Brazilian Far West told through birds. It follows in the region’s great tradition of magic realism. It’s about the interconnection between humans and their environment. The key characters are able to transform into animals and then come back as human beings. There’s a lot of mythology around this.
DEADLINE: Given the rising popularity of animation, is it getting easier or harder to finance independent animated features out of France and Europe?
DYENS: When there were one or two features a year, it was easier to finance. The culture offering has expanded in recent years, across series, cinema and video games, but the time dedicated to culture has not. It’s very difficult to make something that stands out. The Americans are strong in that. They always think on a worldwide basis rather than just domestically.
DEADLINE: Where do you produce the animation? Do you ever outsource work to places like India?
DYENS: We try to do everything in France, even if it ends up being more costly. We have a lot of good schools here and the standard of the work is very high. It also depends on where we have co-production partners. On Sirocco, some of the work was also done in Belgium.
DEADLINE: What are your thoughts around Artificial Intelligence and the impact it could have on animation?
DYENS: It’s hard to answer that one as we’re at the beginning but in general terms I think it will have as big an impact on the world as the industrial revolution. In relation to your question, I think it will have a bigger impact on everything related to VR experiences. It’s going to enable us to enter into a parallel universe and give us exactly what we want. That’s terrifying.
We’re presenting a VR project at Annecy this year [The Pond]. We think VR is going to become more and more important as it becomes associated with A.I. to create worlds catering to people’s desires and ideas of pleasure. The power of AI will substitute us. It’s going to know that you want to be taken to the beach before you’ve even indicated that’s what you want to do, or even thought it, because it knows you so well. This project won’t involve AI but we want to understand the techniques of making a VR work to prepare for the future.
DEADLINE: Is this Sacrebleu’s first VR project?
DYENS: No, we have another Mono No Ware by Boris Labbé, which we just started production on but we have yet to complete a VR project.
DEADLINE: Annecy Artistic Director Marcel Jean has said he can see the influence of Japanese Manga more and more in European animation. Do you agree?
DYENS: Yes, most certainly. With the platforms there’s more porosity, interpenetration between different cultures. Another factor is that we’re seeing more animations aimed at adolescents and adults [in Europe].
This is nothing new in Asia, where everyone reads Manga from childhood to adulthood. You see Japanese businessmen reading Manga on the train. In the West, we grow-up on cartoons shown to us by our parents which we then reject as adolescents because we want to be adults.
The Japanese are really strong in producing young adult content linked to childhood questions. They understand how to make these transition films. While when we try to make these sorts of films in the West, we talk about more adult themes, like conflict and war. That’s changing though.
DEADLINE: Do you think people can see your mark on the animation features you produce?
DYENS: There is now is a certain expectation about films by Sacrebleu. Festivals like Cannes and Berlin receive a lot animation films, but I think when it’s a Sacrebleu film they pay attention. People expect a certain level of quality when they see our label. It’s taken a long time to get to this point.
