Ghosts City Films
Producing ground-breaking feature films
Ghosts City Films was created in 2019 by Franck Priot after a thirty-year career in French and international cinema including being for 10 years the COO of the French Film Commission. Ghosts City Films produces mainly feature films, but also documentaries. Our daughter company Ghosts City, created with Chinese producer SHU Ye, provides production services to Asian films and series willing to shoot in France, coming from China, Taiwan or Indonesia. Or Europê sometimes.
At Ghosts City Films, we are cinephiles, but also citizens. So projects with an inclusive dimension are important to us. Most of our upcoming productions feature main characters from all genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities that we think are not represented enough in the entertainment industry.
We mostly produce feature films by Asian filmmakers, daring movies whose artistic intensity can only be fully enjoyed on the big cinema screens, and sometimes are pushing the limits of cinéma as a medium. As does for our recently completed British allegorical adult fairy tale King Baby, by Kit & Arran, which had its world-premiere in Rotterdam this year, in Bright Future section. The movie will be soon in Edimburgh festival, where it is part of the Midnight Madness section.
Last summer we shot in Kuala Lumpur You Are Here, a strange meta-comedy by Joon Han Yeo, shot on film stock (16mm and 35mm) currently in post, and soon in a major festival. And we still have our amazing animated queer superhero movie in production Zsazsa Zaturnnah vs the Amazonistas of Planet X currently going on in Manila, in it’s director Avid Liongoren’s studio, Rocketsheep.
Ghosts City Films is also developing documentaries about cinema. We aim at resurrecting forgotten characters of its history, often erased by the never-stopping brainwashing of the promotion system. Our motto: “There is no worst impertinence than a deep memory” (Michel Polac). And sadly, these forgotten personalities are often women…
The first one, Yoko de Montmartre, revives the incredible and forgotten story of Yoko Tani, who was the first Asian female icon in European cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Written by Franck Priot, the doc will be directed by Joël Farges.
Franck Priot is also the Vice-chairman of Bridging the Dragon.
Ghosts City Films is based in Paris, Toulouse et Beijing
Ghosts City
Line producing, consulting
Between France and Asia.
Ghosts City is specialized in consulting and line production between France and China. Created at Christmas 2016 in Paris and Beijing by Franck Priot and Shu Ye, Ghosts City supports French companies in the film, TV, and digital sectors in their development in China. In parallel, we accompany Chinese companies to France, for their filming or promotion.
We provide commercial support services, supporting investor research, sales of audiovisual rights, co-production arrangements. We also work in IP management, helping intellectual property owners adapt and promote them from one country to another.
The asset of Ghosts City is to be established simultaneously in France and China, with solid knowledge of the two countries, since Franck and Ye together have 15 years of professional experience of Franco-Chinese relations in the film and TV sectors, in government institutions or the private sector.
Our approach is to anticipate and mitigate the differences in functioning and behaviour between the two countries. These differences are especially important in the creative industries, more imbued than others by the times, but also charged with political issues, so very regulated by the national authorities.
Since 2020, Ghosts City has also worked with India, where the company is represented by Deborah Bennatar (La Fabrique de Films in Mumbai). Ghosts City has already been involved in several Indian feature films, to help give them an international dimension.