Elias Belkeddar: Last News

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Iconoclast, the international production group behind Romain Gavras’ Venice competition film “Athena,” is setting a wide-ranging slate of projects with emerging filmmakers from different audiovisual fields, including Leo Berne from the artists collective Megaforce, and Elias Belkeddar and Said Belktibia from the collective Kourtrajmé. The company is also producing the next projects of Harmony Korine and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, among others. In a rare interview, Nicolas Lhermitte, who co-founded Iconoclast with Mourad Belkeddar, says the company has emerged from the pandemic with a record number of developed projects. “We took the opportunity during the pandemic to develop a lot of projects, and today we have around 30 projects in the pipeline, spanning films and series that are set up at our studios in France, the U.S. and Germany,” says Lhermitte, who adds that Iconoclast aspired to “accompany multi-disciplinary artists to venture from one field to another, films, TV series, branded content, and music videos.”

Designed as something akin to a Greek tragedy for today’s moment, Venice Film Festival Competition title Athena is a torrent, an inundation, a cascade of rage, fury and frustration over the realities of life for a particular group of French families. Such conditions exist in most societies, some more dire than others, but here the wages of pent-up anger are presented with a single-minded intensity and extended duration that would be hard to exceed.

EXCLUSIVE: Romain Gavras’ Athena will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, and we’ve got a first-look at the trailer for the immersive modern tragedy from Netflix — check it out above. Following Athena’s Lido bow, it will be released globally on Netflix September 23.

Netflix today provided a taste of its slate of original French productions coming up in 2022, which includes 25 new titles for launch this year and 20 projects currently in production. The slate, selected and developed by the Netflix France creative team, reps a total investment of more than 200M euros ($221M) across 2022. The streamer recently signed a deal with the French industry in which it committed to producing at least 10 local films per year, investing about 40M euros ($45M).   Among the projects highlighted during a presentation in Paris today was Romain Gavras’ formerly untitled feature, which is now called Athena. An immersive and modern tragedy, it stars Dali Benssalah, Sami Slimane, Anthony Bajon and is co-written with Oscar nominee Ladj Ly (Les Misérables) and Elias Belkeddar. The logline reads: In the space of a few hours following the tragic death of their younger brother in troubling circumstances, the men’s lives will tip over into chaos.