AFC’s Conversations

Avi Nesher’s latest film, shot between Łódź and Jerusalem, is in competition for the Golden Frog at Camerimage this year. Michel Abramowicz, AFC, discusses the making of this period film that plunges viewers into Israeli society of the 1970s.

The winner of the 2023 Pierre Angénieux Tribute is a filmmaker who loves movement. He honed his skills shooting documentary films,when his passion for cinematography led him to cross paths with British director Ken Loach who offered him the opportunity to shoot Riff Raff, in 1991. He teamed up with Loach on several major films (Raining Stones, Ladybird, My Name is Joe, amongst others) until their The Wind That Shakes the Barley won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2006.
He then altered dircetion and worked with Paul Greengrass (United 93, Captain Philips) and filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, whose films The Hurt Locker and Detroit he shot. Barry Ackroyd, BSC, reminisces with us about his exceptional career and discusses how he creates cinema. (FR)

After The Nile Hilton Incident, Tarik Saleh, a Swedish director of Egyptian origin, continues his exploration of genre film. He moves more towards a more realistic drama on Boy from Heaven but still keeps us in suspense with, this time, a power struggle at the heart of Sunni Islam. The cinematographer Pierre Aïm, AFC, who already worked with Tarik Saleh on The Nile Hilton Incident, has created a more restrained, naturalistic image that pushes us to eliminate the border between reality and fiction. Boy from Heaven is being presented in Official Competition at the 75^th Cannes Film Festival. (BB)

Pierre Aïm undertook a very realistic reconstruction of Sarajevo for Sympathy for the Devil, the first film by Guillaume de Fontenay (Quebec director who started his career in the theatre). The film, released in Paris in late 2019, was selected at Camerimage this year in the “Director’s Debut” competition. Here, he discusses his influences for this film, fake wartime reporting and cigar smoke…

After having shot his last film in France, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi decided on Spain for his latest film, a family thriller that is reminiscent both of classical tragedy and westerns. A family behind closed doors in a village of the sierra outside of Madrid, set amongst grape harvests, passions, and jealousies. The great Spanish (and French-speaking) cinematographer José Luis Alcaine is opening this year’s Competition at Cannes with this authentic firework display of actors and cinematography. (FR)

After their first film, Syngué Sabour, in 2012, Atiq Rahimi called on Thierry Arbogast a second time to film the adaptation of the eponymous novel by Scholastique Mukasonga. This story, somewhere between a Bildungsroman and a bloody tragedy, takes place in Rwanda in the 1970s against a background of sundrenched hills, rainy dawns, and dreamy forests, and is set in a Catholic boarding school far outside of the city whose pupils are upper-class young ladies.

Although the special effects and post-production are still being worked on, the first trailers and on-set stories have begun to appear on the Internet from Luc Besson’s adaptation of Christin and Merières cult comic. Thierry Arbogast, AFC, a member of Besson’s innermost circle (and of EuropaCorp, the production company he founded), is, of course, this film’s director of photography. He first worked as a director of photography on a Besson film 20 years ago on The Fifth Element, and is here to discuss with us the particularities of this new “space opera”.

For his first project filmed inside the Cité du cinéma, Luc Besson decided to make an adaptation of Tonino Benacquista’s novel depicting a reformed New York ‘godfather’ forced to live under a false identity in the Normandy countryside. A mix of comedy and film noir that is largely carried by the presence of a cast that would make even the largest Hollywood studios jealous (Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, and Michelle Pfeiffer). Here, along with Thierry Arbogst, AFC, who regularly works alongside Besson, we take a look at this film’s approach to visuals and filming in studio. (FR)

Thierry Arbogast, AFC is best known for his more than twenty-year-long collaboration with director and producer Luc Besson that began with La Femme Nikita in 1990. But he was also the director of cinematography of The Horseman on the Roof by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, The Crimson Rivers by Mathieu Kassovitz, and Ridicule by Patrice Leconte. In The Patience Stone, he accompanied writer Atiq Rahimi in the screen adaptation of his novel, which was awarded the Goncourt Prize in 2008.

With her first film, entitled Swallos, director Carlo Mirabella-Davis portrays a young woman suffering from a compulsive eating disorder. But this is also the story of a young woman searching for freedom and truth in a very artificial world. American cnematographer Katelin Arizmendi invites us backstage…

2055: Youtuber Steevy Shady recounts for his followers the tormented passion between Mimi Madamour, a starlet born of a Star Academy-type TV talent show, and Billie, a punk rocker who performs in lesbian clubs, from the early 2000s to 2015, then 2055. From the meteoric rise to the disgrace of each of them successively, this glittering musical comedy draws on flashy pop references and playfully mixes eras and image regimes to paint, under its parodic guise, a most political love story. (HdR)