Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu is preparing to shoot his first film in more than six years, he told Variety late Sunday at Visions du Réel, a film festival in Nyon, Switzerland, which is holding a retrospective of his films.
Porumboiu’s new project will be shot in French and in France, where the writer-director now lives. He is presently casting and hopes to start production in September, although the project is yet to complete financing. Porumboiu has identified locations near his home in Biarritz, France.
The lead producers on the film are France’s MK2 Films, which was the international sales agent on his last film “The Whistlers,” and Lumen, the company founded last year by Juliette Schrameck, the former managing director of MK2 Films. Porumboiu’s production company, 42 Km Film, is not attached to the project, and is largely dormant, he said.
Porumboiu didn’t confirm the title, but it has been previously referred to as “The Costume.” He described the project as “an adventure,” adding enigmatically that it will be “quite different to what I did before,” although the plot remains under wraps.
Film noir “The Whistlers,” which premiered in 2019 in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, was largely shot on the island of La Gomera in the Canaries, in a mix of Romanian, English and an ancient whistling language.
His previous fiction features were all shot in Romania in Romanian, starting with “12:08 East of Bucharest,” winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2006, followed by “Police, Adjective,” winner of the Un Certain Regard jury prize in Cannes in 2009, “When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism,” which premiered in competition at Locarno Film Festival in 2013, and “The Treasure,” which premiered in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2015, picking up the section’s A Certain Talent Prize.
He has shot two feature documentaries, 2014’s “The Second Game,” and 2018’s “Infinite Football,” which both premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
Visions du Réel runs April 4-13.
