Emily Atef Will Next Direct Series About a Decadent Family-Owned French Fashion Empire (EXCLUSIVE)
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Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire.
While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.
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The series was created and penned by Jose Caltagirone (“Les Combattantes”) and Valentine Milville (“The Bureau”), and will star a high-profile French ensemble cast, including Lambert Wilson (“Benedetta”), Carole Bouquet (“En Therapie”), Amira Casar (“Call Me By Your Name”), Zita Hanrot, Pierre Deladonchamps (“Stranger by the Lake”) and Antoine Reinhard (“BMP Beats Per Minutes”).
“It’s hard to compare anything with ‘Succession,’ but we could say it’s a bit like a French ‘Succession’ set in the fashion world,” revealed Atef, whose made several incursions in TV throughout a career, most recently with “Jackpot” and episodes of “Killing Eve.” She also compared “La Maison” with “The Crown,” because the French fashion clan “lives like they’re in a monarchy,” and are very “lonely” and “derogatory” towards outsiders.
“La Maison” is being produced by Alex Berger at the Oligarchs Prods., whose credits include “The Bureau” (currently being remade into “The Department” with George Clooney attached to star). Atef said the series has been ordered by Apple TV+. The streamer will soon launch “Liaison,” a French-British spy thriller with Eva Green and Vincent Cassel, and they’re also making Todd A. Kessler’s “Dior and I,” an English-language series about Coco Chanel and Christian Dior’s relationship, starring Juliette Binoche and Ben Mendelsohn.
Atef, a socially minded filmmaker and a feminist, has worked in French before. She was at Cannes last year with “More Than Ever,” starring Vicky Krieps and the late French actor Gaspard Ulliel. In “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” she goes further than she’s ever been to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality.
Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, and lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.
“Making this film would have been like a suicide if I was a man. I would have been lynched,” Atef told Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere in Berlin’s competition. And yet, she says her film is “unattackable,” mainly because she’s a “very vocal feminist” who’s been “fighting for years for women behind and in front of the camera.” Indeed, all of her films have been driven by fierce female protagonists and looked at different layers of womanhood. Her previous movie, “More Than Ever,” for instance, portrayed a woman who faces terminal illness and takes charge of her life. And in “Three Days in Quiberon,” she portrayed actor Romy Schneider as a real woman rather than just a myth.
Atef said “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” could be made thanks to the birth of the #MeToo movement, which she described as “revolutionary.”
“(#MeToo) is giving us more possibilities because finally there’s a light shone on the fact that we have not been allowed to tell our perspectives. And I mean, every female perspective, even female perspectives that are not politically correct in the global context,” she said.
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