The esteemed French producer Marianne Slot has built her reputation around an impressive array of top festival and art films, not only from Europe but from around the world. This year she will be the recipient of the Raimondo Rezzonico Award at the Locarno Film Festival, followed by a screening of Benedikt Erlingsson’s 2018 Women At War, which her aptly named company Slot Machine produced.
It is a richly deserved recognition to a far-sighted producer who has proven adept at working with directors with very individual visions of cinema, on genre-bending films that otherwise might never have been made.
Perhaps the producer’s most popular, regular (and controversial) director is Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. Their collaborations began with Breaking the Waves in 1996 and include the daring Nymphomaniac, Dancer in the Dark, Melancholia and Antichrist, films that have pushed the limits of art cinema, spurring audiences to react with joy and sometimes with anger. Argentinian auteur Lisandro Alonso is another regular at Slot Machine.
A glance at her filmography shows that Marianne has worked with an impressive swathe of women directors, who have included Lucrecia Martel, Albertina Carri, Emma Dante, Juliette Garcias, Dinara Drukarova, Naomi Kawase, Yesim Ustaoglu, Susanne Bier, Malgorzata Szumowska and Paz Encina, to name a few.
She has also served the film community in other positions: she was the Scandinavian delegate to the San Sebastian Film Festival and presided over a cinema initiative co-created by the French Ministry of Culture. And yet, these official positions are a footnote to a life so passionately dedicated to thought-provoking movies and contemporary issues. One remembers her walking up the Cannes red carpet five years ago, alongside 81 other women, to protest sexism in cinema.
Back in 2015, Marianne was asked what she thought about the future of co-productions with regards to arthouse films. She responded with optimism, saying she hoped “very much that the situation that we are in today, where culture is being attacked and cut down, won’t last forever, and that we have the strength and the institutions to turn it around somehow. We have to keep the support system for cinema alive – that is paramount.” Well, it’s thanks to producers like her that the support system she spoke about remains in place for auteur filmmakers.
In an official note, Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, remarked, “At a time when cinema risks flatlining into an endless repetition of existing models, Marianne Slot leads by example, demonstrating the beauty of both freedom and risk.”
He is, of course, right. But then again, for the lady whose production company was set up three decades ago, there will always be more to say. For now, it should be enough to offer her congratulations. At the award ceremony taking place on the 5th of August, there will no doubt be much more to say about this champion of fierce, fearless cinema.
