Yahoo Finance ‘Emilia Perez’, ‘Limonov’ & ‘Parthenope’ Financier Frédéric Fiore Talks Landmark Cannes For His Logical Pictures Group
French film finance, production and distribution group Logical Pictures is out in force in Cannes this year with connections to 11 films, including Competition titles Emilia Perez, Limonov and Parthenope.
The company helped bankroll the Palme d’Or contenders through its three-year co-production and co-financing deal with French major Pathé, which was announced in early 2023 and involves its Logical Content Ventures fund.
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Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre De La Patellière’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which world premieres Out of Competition later this week, was also partly financed under the deal.
Logical Pictures President Frédéric Fiore and COO Yannick Bossenmeyer co-founded Logical Pictures in 2016 with a focus on film finance as well as digital innovation around blockchain and rights management.
Early investments included Coralie Fargeat’s first feature Revenge, Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure as well as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s The Deep House.
Less than a decade later, the company has expanded into production and distribution and is now organized across four poles covering finance, production, distribution and technology.
Logical Studio gathers production companies Logical Pictures, Spade, The Jokers Lab, Africa-focused Black MicMac and brand content producer Loveboat, while Logical Distribution groups distributor The Jokers Films and international sales company Pulsar Content.
Bossenmeyer spearheads the technology activities as CEO of tech arm Cascade8.
In Cannes, Pulsar Content is selling Un Certain Regard title Niki by Céline Sallette, Critics’ Week selection La Pampa by Antoine Chevrollier and Camila Beltrán’s ACID title Mi Bestia.
The Jokers Films has French rights for Lorcan Finnegan’s Midnight title The Surfer, Laetitia Dosch’s Dog On Trial in Un Certain Regard, Saïd Hamich’s Across The Sea in Critics’ Week and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in Cannes Classics.
Cascade8 was also active in the market with a demonstration of its pioneering film and TV revenue management tool Blockframes, and the announcement it was joining forces with royalty management specialist Freeway Entertainment on the initiative.
Deadline sat down with Fiore for an update on recent developments.
DEADLINE: Is this Logical Pictures’ busiest Cannes to date?
FIORE: This is something of a milestone year for us. We have 11 films in Cannes this year … and now have more than 50 different collaborators working across our different activities of financing, production and distribution.
DEADLINE: On the distribution front, The Jokers Films co-founder Manuel Chiche recently handed over the management reins to Violaine Barbaroux, what’s the strategy there?
FIORE: Manu is now the head of the production pole, although he continues to oversee classic films at The Jokers Films. It’s business as usual at the label with a balance between international films, which are in its DNA, particularly Asian films, and French films such as Michel Gondry’s The Book Of Solutions, which was in Cannes last year, and worked well.
DEADLINE: How does Logical Studio operate? Is it one studio or lots of different companies?
FIORE: There are five different production companies, with seven producers. We’re producing films, series and documentaries, particularly through Jokers Lab, advertising through Loveboat, and have a focus on Africa with Black MicMac, the company we created with Pape Boye.
Black MicMac expanded this year with the arrival of TV producer Sarah Aknine to focus on series. We recently won a CNC prize at the [series incubator] DEENTAL meeting in Abidjan for Dakar Underground, which Sarah is producing. Across the group, we have 60 projects in development and have just finished production on Fabrice Du Welz’s feature Maldoror.
DEADLINE: You’re growing rapidly. A lot of big content groups have sprung up in France in recent years, such as Mediawan. Do have similar designs, ambitions?
FIORE: What [Mediawan Co-founder and CEO] Pierre-Antoine Capton has built is incredible. It’s an empire today. It has piled up companies to be present everywhere. I understand this strategy but we don’t have the same positioning. Our ambition is to have synergy between our different companies, for them to complement one another. We want to grow, but internally. We don’t want to buy lots of companies.
DEADLINE: Your founding activity was film finance and asset management. Are there any fresh developments there?
FIORE: We have our ongoing co-investment deal with Pathé in which half of our Logical Content Ventures fund is invested. We’re also launching a new African fund, Logical African Stories, which will invest in films and series as well as companies in Africa. Our aim is to position ourselves as the film financier and asset manager of reference in the audiovisual sector.
DEADLINE: Can you give a bit more detail about the Logical African Stories fund?
FIORE: There’s a lot creativity in Africa but the ecosystem isn’t very developed and there’s not a lot finance. The idea is encourage private investors, both African and international. We’re in the set-up phase, with the aim of it becoming active in late 2024, early 2025.
DEADLINE: Last September at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Logical Content Ventures was as announced as one of the first recipients of the European Commission and European Investment Fund’s new MediaInvest equity investment instrument. The EIF said it had approved an investment of up to €25M, in an agreement aimed at raising up to €70M, where are you with that?
FIORE: We’re currently going through all the legal paperwork. It’s complex but we’re in the final stages of negotiations and it should be signed off soon. We basically need to dovetail all the legal documentation for institutional investors to give it a finite time-frame. Our fund was originally designed as an evergreen for family offices, which don’t require a deadline.
DEADLINE: Will the fund be focused on institutional investors, or are family offices and other private investors still welcome?
FIORE: Everyone will be welcome, it’s just that it will have a closing date and won’t be evergreen.
DEADLINE: At the time of the announcement, it was suggested that the MediaInvest injection would result in an investment of up to €70M in European audiovisual production and distribution companies. Is this still the case?
FIORE: Yes, we’ll get there. In fact, this Tuesday, we’re organizing an event in Cannes with wealth managers based in the Cote d’Azur region to discuss film finance and the fund.
DEADLINE: In terms of the investments of Logical Content Investments fund. Are you focusing mainly on France or looking further afield?
FIORE: At the moment half the fund is tied up with Pathé and contingent on their choices. The other half is overseen by our head of film investments Céline Dornier. We receive 1,000 projects a year, 600 of them looking for finance. The aim is to invest outside of France and in particularly in Europe. We’ve worked with Augenschein In Germany in the past, for example, on The Dive and Berlin Nobody. It worked well. We believe a lot in the German ecosystem and we’re also currently looking at an Austrian film. Around 80% of our investments are European and outside of France as we’re already involved in French investments through Pathé
DEADLINE: In terms of your three-year deal with Pathé, the aim was to finance 20 films over three years. Are you going to hit that target?
FIORE: We already have 15 films with Pathé which are in the process of being financed. There’s The Count of Monte Cristo coming up as well as De Gaulle, Aznavour, Emmanuelle… it’s gone as planned and it has been a good operation. We’re purely financiers but we’ve had a good level of communication and they’ve listened to our input, even if we don’t have a say on the productions.
DEADLINE: Will you renew the Pathé deal?
FIORE: We’ll see, maybe for another year or two.
DEADLINE: Are you open to striking similar slate deals with other companies in France or Europe?
FIORE: No. That came about for unique reasons, and we won’t replicate it elsewhere. It monopolizes our money and resources. It’s important for us to be able to finance films on a case-by-case basis with projects we have selected independently ourselves, rather than as part of a slate. We have teams who like to look for projects and make them a reality.
That’s what we did with the Coralie Fargeat’s first film Revenge, for example. We’re delighted to find her in Competition this year [with The Substance]. She’s a symbol for us. We financed her first picture. Without Logical Pictures that film might not have seen the light of day… and here she is back in Competition while we’re here with 11 pictures.
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