The career of the late French producer Humbert Balsan is the theme of a current Paris tribute to a champion of independent and Arab film, writes David Tresilian Over the next three weeks, the Cinژmathڈque franچaise in Paris will be screening a retrospective of films produced by the late French film producer Humbert Balsan, who died in 2005. A tribute to Balsan's long career, it is an opportunity to see again many of the Arab and Egyptian films that Balsan produced over the last two decades, including many films by the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. Born in 1954, Balsan seems never to have intended to become a film producer, least of all one with an eye for the unusual or, in the European context, challenging films. He studied economics at university, intending, perhaps, to pursue a career in business. Related to the Wendel family that once controlled the French steel industry, Balsan was a scion of the "two hundred families" said to have controlled the French economy until at least the mid century. His acting career began in 1974 when he appeared as Gawain in Bresson's Lancelot du lac, and an image from this film has been used as the poster for the Cinژmathڈque's current Balsan cycle. He then turned to production, setting up a production company, Ognon Films, and working with many of France's independent filmmakers and latterly with a group of women filmmakers, including Claire Denis, perhaps best known outside France for Beau travail(1998) and J'ai pas sommeil (1994), Brigitte Roںan, director of Post Coitum, Animal Triste(1997), and Sandrine Veysset. He began his association with Chahine in the early 1980s, producing Adieu Bonaparte in 1985 and going on to make another seven films with the Egyptian director, the last being Alexandrieة New York in 2004. At the same time, Balsan produced Palestinian film director Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention in 2002, a film about life in the Occupied Territories which won the Jury Prize at Cannes. He also produced Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah's first feature Sariqat Sayfiyya in 1985, as well as subsequent films including On Boys, Girls and the Veil (1995) and Gate of the Sun (2004), Nasrallah's film adaptation of the prize-winning novel by Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. Balsan was a friend and champion of the late Lebanese film director Maroun Bagdadi, best-known for his film Hors la vie (1991) which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and he produced Bagdadi's film L'Homme voilژ(1987). As a result of this activity, Balsan became known for his championing of Arab films, but he was also drawn to valuable work elsewhere that might perhaps have found difficulty finding other supporters. He played a role in the production of several films by filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant both before and after the pair's glory years in the 1980s and early 1990s, and he co-produced Lars von Trier's Manderlay (2006), the second installment in the string of films announced by von Trier's magnificent film Dogville (2003). In its 2005 obituary of Balsan, the French newspaper Le Monde wrote that Balsan "bet on young unknowns, or supported projects to which the majority of his fellow film producers would not have given a penny," and it quoted Elia Suleiman to the effect that Balsan "would say yes when 99.9% of producers would have said noة.He hated conventional ways of doing things, which suited me just fine." Two axes structured Balsan's career as a film producer, according to Le Monde: a "commitment to Middle Eastern filmmakers and to an artistic conception of filmmaking that represented a French alternative to the Hollywood model" of commercial film. However, Balsan was also a supporter of European film more generally, notably through his work as chairman of the Berlin-based European Film Academy. He sought to find ways of combating the American industry's dominant position in film distribution in Europe and of promoting the wider distribution of European films. This history is passed in review in the notes to the present cycle of films produced by Balsan being shown at the Cinژmathڈque franچaise, in which Serge Toubiana, formerly editor of the French film magazine Les Cahiers du cinژmaand now director of the Cinژmathڈque, praises Balsan for having worked to keep alive the idea of "a certain kind of independent cinema" from the 1980s onwards, "incarnating an idea of independence despite everything and at a considerable risk to himself." The season itself includes opportunities to see again Chahine's films from the 1990s and later, including Iskandriyya Kaman wa Kaman, Al- Massir, Al-Mohagerand Sikout Hansawwar, as well as films by Yousry Nasrallah, Maroun Bagdadi and the French directors whose films were produced by Balsan. There are also opportunities to see Balsan's early work as an actor in Lancelot du lacand Loulou (1980). However, perhaps most useful to anyone wanting an overview of Balsan's contribution to independent French cinema and to his role in supporting the work of Arab and particularly Egyptian directors is the chance to see Anne Andreu's documentary, Humbert Balsan, producteur rebelle (2006), which includes archive footage as well as interviews with filmmakers and industry figures. This film, made for French television, emphasises the way in which film seems to have functioned for Balsan as a form of escape from his privileged "grand bourgeois" background, allowing him to discover sides to himself that would perhaps have remained occluded had he pursued a more conventional business career. According to Yousry Nasrallah, interviewed for the film, Balsan would do everything he could "to make the films he liked with the people he liked," adopting an almost aristocratic disregard for money. Furthermore, once he had agreed to produce a film he would give the director "complete freedom to make the film exactly according to the director's vision of it." For Michel Piccoli, a veteran actor who appeared in many of Balsan's productions, including Chahine's Adieu Bonaparte, Balsan had a "thirst to discover what went on outside his own little world," the nine months he spent in Cairo while working on Adieu Bonaparte being an especially happy time. He "adored the project," cinema, for him, being "a way of traveling through the lives of others." However, Balsan's public manner, "hiding himself behind his joie de vivre and his perpetual elegance," in Piccoli's words, concealed sides to his personality that he never let others see. This kind of self-division, speakers in the film suggest, may go some way towards explaining his death by suicide, which shocked all who knew him. Hommage � Humbert Balsan, 5-27 May, Cin...math�que fran�aise, Paris.
