Sylvia Kristel: Last News

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaLéa Seydoux and Audrey Diwan are teaming up for “Emmanuelle.” The film will mark the English-language directorial debut of Diwan, who has received critical raves and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for “Happening,” the story of a woman obtaining an illegal abortion in the 1960s. Seydoux will play the title role in the film.

It’s a surprise to find out that director Audrey Diwan had never seen the original Emmanuelle — a gauzy soft-porn feature that got le tout France hot and bothered when it was allowed to be shown in normal cinemas in 1974 — before she was approached to do this remake, which opens the San Sebastian Film Festival in Competition. In its day, Emmanuelle spawned a string of sequels, each reputedly worse than its predecessors, while star Sylvia Kristel became so immediately famous for taking off her clothes that the expectation blighted her entire career. It also made a huge amount of money.

French director Audrey Diwan is opening the San Sebastian Film Festival this evening with third feature Emmanuelle, in the company of its star Noémie Merlant and supporting cast members Will Sharpe, Chacha Huang and Jamie Campbell Bower.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Audrey Diwan’s erotic quest movie “Emmanuelle” has dropped a first trailer and poster ahead of its world premiere screening in September at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Shot in Hong Kong, the film is freely adapted from Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel of the same name. It casts a female gaze on the intimate quest of the woman whose name still evokes one cinema’s most provocative characters.

Audrey Diwan‘s Emmanuelle has been announced as the opening film of the 72nd San Sebastian Festival, in competition.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Two-time Oscar nominee Naomi Watts has joined the cast of “Emmanuelle,” Audrey Diwan‘s highly anticipated erotic drama, Variety has confirmed. Diwan’s follow-up to the Venice-prizewinning “Happening,” the film is inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel and is based on a script co-developed by Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski (“Other People’s Children”).

EXCLUSIVE: The success of Audrey Diwan‘s sophomore feature Happening made her next gig as a filmmaker an intriguing one. Her choice of project, created even more intrigue.

Todd Gilchrist editor The panorama of bedfellows depicted in erotica, and erotic cinema (or “sexploitation”), is vast; even if it’s somebody else’s yuck, there’s likely at least one scene or movie that captures your particular yum. But capital-A art, and especially academia, doesn’t always take this work as seriously at it deserves — as part of film history, much less as sociopolitical commentary on the people, places and times in which stories are told. Severin Films hopes to remedy that in a big way with its new 15-disc, 24-film box set, “The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle.” Enlisting as producer and curator Canadian filmmaker and programmer Kier-La Janisse, who directed the documentary “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror” and founded the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Severin produced the most ambitious and comprehensive chronicle ever assembled about the work of Laura Gemser, whose legacy in cinema as “Black Emanuelle” has heretofore existed largely as a footnote to the French film series starring the late Sylvia Kristel. To examine Gemser’s actual impact in this rarified (and often reductively-viewed) corner of cinema, Janisse worked with Severin to create more than 40 hours of special features including commentaries, video essays and documentaries, as well as a 356-page book, “The Black Emanuelle Bible,” featuring archival interviews with the actress and contemporaneous essays from film experts and scholars.