“Nuestro norte es el Sur. No debe haber norte para nosotros, sino por oposición a nuestro Sur, entonces ya tenemos justa idea de nuestra posición y no como quieren en el resto del mundo.”
“Our north is the south. There should be no north for us, except in opposition to our south, so we already have a fair idea of our position and not as the rest of the world wants us to.”
Joaquín Torres García – 1943
Twenty-five years ago, Produire au Sud was born within the framework of the Festival des 3 Continents.
From the outset, the workshop carried a clear ambition: to support emerging filmmakers and producers from Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the development of their feature film projects, while encouraging international co-production.
On the occasion of this quarter-century milestone, the workshop becomes PaS – Production and Storytelling. This change of name is not a simple rebranding, but a deliberate statement.
Both in the past and today, many people—like the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García—have reclaimed the notion of the “South,” asserting an identity and a geopolitical stance. However, this term, when used from a European standpoint, remains laden with connotations that we do not wish to perpetuate.
With PaS, we affirm our commitment to supporting production, co-production, and storytelling in a relationship of equality.
This new identity comes with an increased focus on project follow-up.
In 2025, in partnership with the Bureau Français de Taipei and the Céci (Centre d’écritures cinématographiques) at the Moulin d’Andé, we launched a first writing residency for a Taiwanese filmmaker who had previously participated in our Southeast Asia workshop. This individualized and extended support, supervised by a screenwriter renowned in France and internationally, enabled the project to take a crucial step forward in its writing process.
We will repeat the experience in the summer of 2026, thanks to a new partnership with the Maison Julien Gracq in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, with the support of the Institut Français – Nantes Métropole fund.
This attentive follow-up of the talents we meet through our workshops around the world will also lead us to host in Nantes a Yemeni duo whom we first met during our Dubai workshop at the beginning of 2025. Here too, the aim is to continue developing the project with new mentors before it enters its production phase.
These new initiatives illustrate how we envision the future of PaS: a workshop that remains attentive to continuity in career paths, open to new collaborations, and always faithful to its role as a bridge between the 3 Continents and Europe.
