Newtopia, the new production company of director Cyril Dion, producer Magali Payen and Marion Cotillard, has been invited to the Festival Lumière in Lyon. Offering films, series and documentaries around the challenges of tomorrow is the ambition described by Magali Payen, who came to present this new project to the Lyon public.
Announced last May then launched with the crowdfunding platform KissKissBankBank, Newtopia already has several projects in the works. “We are going to propose newtopias, these are not dystopias that demotivate us to act, nor utopias, disconnected from reality, but they are proposals on what the world of tomorrow could look like in respect of planetary limits”, explains Magali Payen, co-founder of Newtopia.
When Cyril Dion and Magali Payen met in 2018 during the Climate March, they came to a similar conclusion: the world of cinema and audiovisual have a role to play in climate action. “We know what is happening, climate change, the collapse of biodiversity and so on. We also know the solutions. So we just need one thing: the desire to act“, says Magali Payen.
This desire to act must be driven by the artists according to the producer, they are the best placed to imagine the world of tomorrow with audiovisual stories of fiction or documentaries. “The challenge for artists is to make us want sobriety as a societal transformation and to get us out of this imaginary of rationing, for example.“, details Magali Payen.
Three projects have already been launched, two films and a mini-series. The Great Vertigo marks the first passage to fiction for Cyril Dion. Adapted from the book by Pierre Ducrozet, the film will question the ways of acting as an ecologist. The mini-series Francoise will be devoted to the writer and activist Françoise d’Eaubonne, also a pioneer of ecofeminism. Finally, the production company is planning the release of a nautical and ecological fable titled The Giant Bakelite.
But Newtopia will not be limited solely to the audiovisual sector. The objective, as described by Magali Payen, is to create a cultural wave that can extend to literature, comics, podcasts or even video games. And to reach the youngest, the producer relies on partnerships with youtubers and influencers, already present on her movement. We are readylaunched in 2018.