Eva Pervolovici Preps ‘Oceane’ With Lucile Hadžihalilović Consulting

Tudor Giurgiu’s Libra Film has boarded “Oceane,” Romanian Eva Pervolovici’s fiction follow-up to 2013 Berlinale entry “Marussia.” Giurgiu will co-produce the film with Clémentine Mourão-Ferreira, whose Bordeaux-based label so-cle launched in 2020. The French-Portuguese producer, who has over two decades of experience in the industry, has worked with the likes of Manoel de Oliveira, Aida Begic, and André Téchiné.

“Oceane” has also lined up its lead in up-and-coming French actor Celeste Brunnquell (“Being Maria”), with renowned French director Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”) acting as a script consultant. 

Pervolovici’s will follow Brunnquell’s titular Oceane, a hypersensitive, climate-anguished young woman who works as a technician on offshore wind turbines. When Oceane is sent to rural Romania for work, she meets two people who will change her life: anti-corruption activist Alex and Iulian, a non-verbal 7-year-old boy who shares the young woman’s hypersensitivity. These meetings take Oceane on a journey fighting a criminal network that is dismantling buses across European borders, leading to a dangerous late coming-of-age.

The Romanian director, whose last two feature documentaries “The Delta of Bucharest” and “Topography of the Hazard” explored the geography and the people of her native city, says “Oceane” is a character-based film “that takes the shape of a road movie across borders, between France and Romania; Bucharest and the mountains.” 

“It’s a journey of self-knowledge and a film based on when China put an end to burning forest waste on its territory, leading Western Europe to turn towards Romania and Bulgaria,” she adds. “I also aim to challenge the East-West myth by proposing a less common form of migration, from France to Romania. I want to highlight Bucharest’s activist youth, born after the fall of the wall, redefining public space in a corrupt…