Two years have passed since May 25, 2019, when the Cannes Film Festival awarded its Palme d’Or to Parasite, by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. However, the film’s distributor, Manuel Chiche, is still struggling to hold back his tears, and does it twice before he can whisper: “This prize suddenly came to reward us for all the hardships. I felt happy, not so much for myself as for my team, who had drooled over it. “
His team are the three young collaborators who surround him in the distribution company The Jokers, which he created in 2014. An independent ministructure decided as such from the start and which should remain so.
“My job is to support filmmakers and help them achieve the recognition they all want, emphasizes Manuel Chiche. However, this work, I need to carry out it in an almost artisanal way, by maintaining a very simple and direct proximity with the artists, which one cannot do within a big box, where you are. forced to do volume and multiply projects. ”
So there was a before and an after Parasite. Because the beautiful story does not stop at the gates of Cannes. Released in theaters in June 2019, the seventh feature film by the South Korean filmmaker has attracted more than 1.6 million spectators in two months, becoming the Palme d’Or with the highest number of admissions, in France, for fifteen years. Then, in February 2020, the film triumphed in Hollywood and won four Oscars, including that of the best film. What to bring the team of The Jokers on a cloud.
The company, which was on the verge of chaos after several business failures – aside from the Park Chan-wook movie Miss (2016) –, can finally repay its debts and put its accounts afloat. “The whole press picked up on this story – the struggling little box that suddenly won Mickey’s tail. I was happy with this spotlight which made people talk about us. But I felt, after this moment of euphoria, that the team was sinking into a kind of depression and that a real project was needed to re-motivate it ”, remembers the distributor.
“Taste of stories”
Manuel Chiche doesn’t like habits. He likes to surprise. He therefore decides to invest in an area in which his company has never set foot before: French cinema. But on a specific niche, that of young authors who are in their first or second film. The idea germinates, spreads. “I spoke of this desire in an interview and the following days, an avalanche of scripts reached us. A few years ago, I did not have a very positive outlook on French cinema. But I realized that something was happening with the new generation, that they had stories to tell, that they were able to move the lines, both on the subjects and in the way of staging them. “
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