Anne Deligne (1947-2021)

The Belgian producer Anne Deligne has passed away. In 1987, she founded the production house Cobra Films with Daniel de Valck with a clear goal: “We intend to produce our projects, which are often fragile by nature, in adequate financial conditions. Our main goal is to help the author to translate his personal view on the world in a unique imagery and to make his ideas visible in the form of a true cinema project.” They produced films by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd, Xavier Lukomski, Yael André, Caroline D’hondt, Aya Tanaka, Sophie Bruneau, Annik Leroy and many others.

In 2016, the Belgian website Cinergie published an interview with Anne Deligne and Daniel de Valck, in which they were asked about their specific views on production:

Cinergie: How do you choose the films you produce? Is the subject the most important thing?

Anne Deligne: You can make a film about a teapot and make it very interesting. You can use a teapot to tell the story of a family’s adventures, for example, or the way of life of a country. It all depends on the director’s perspective. In principle, any subject can be interesting, it all depends on the treatment. What interests us is the personal involvement of the director in the subject. We meet him, we want to know his universe, understand how he wants to treat the issue, at what level of depth. And above all, we try to estimate whether or not a person has the necessary stamina to deal with the subject. Because it’s very long!

Daniel de Valck: In documentaries, projects are often deeply linked to the person who makes them, either by their history or by their way of life. For us, the most important thing is to accompany the director in a film project, to help him or her to realise it at all levels, but above all to relieve him or her of the extremely heavy aspects of financing and organisation. There’s no point in sending us projects, we don’t go and read them, we rather meet with people.