How did you get into cinema?
I got into cinema through the door marked “passionate about films” and through a school. I believe in training. I studied at a place called INSAS. I majored in directing and when I saw films by Renoir or other great masters, I decided it was better to be an average producer than a really bad director. So I became a producer, much later on.

What motivates your choices as a producer?
I started producing in 1987, twenty years ago and I decided to focus on fields where there was a sense of real urgency, meaning mostly in developing countries and mostly first films, always seen from the inside, with filmmakers from countries that interested me. At first, I produced a lot of documentaries because it was important to me to immerse myself in a range of realities. Then from around 1990 or 1992, I started producing fiction. It adds up to about one hundred films, with around thirty feature films for cinema. The rest were films for Arte or similar channels: Channel 4 or German TV.

In twenty years as a producer, have you seen any changes?
The overriding trend is still the same. The deregulation of all the systems means that today, it’s all about ratings, with everyone competing for a very wide audience making it pretty difficult for non-mainstream works to exist. Obviously, this trend worries us.

You also have experience as an actor.
I played the leading role of Vincent in the film Lundi matin by Otar Iosseliani. It was a chance encounter. I used to run into Otar Iosseliani every day in the staircase and one day, he offered me the role. He likes working with non-professionals. For me, it was a wonderful experience, no doubt about it. What I’m worth on-screen is another story but as a producer, it was wonderful. Being in this role taught me things about films from another angle.

What are you up to at the moment?
First up, we’re extending our editorial policy to DVD, so we’re releasing four new titles: Tinpis Run, the first film in the history of Papuan cinema, which is a distant echo to our editorial line in the 1990’s; the film Cahiers de Médellin a magnificent documentary by Catalina Villar; Le chant des baraques, Robert Bosis’ very strong film on Portuguese immigration and last up, Femmes du Hezbollah on a subject that is very much in the news.

What are your projects?
We have five feature films in production: one in Palestine that starts shooting next month, which is the first film by a young woman; an Argentinean first feature film that starts shooting in September; a major film by Tsai Ming Liang to be shot next February, with Raoul Peck, about Marx’s childhood and finally, the next film by the great Spanish director Agusti Villaronga called Barbares d’occident, whose films include El mar and Aro Tolbukhin.