WHO WE ARE
Silence&Conversation is a pioneering company founded in January 2025. Headed by Isabelle Fauvel, it absorbed Initiative Film, founded 32 years earlier and specialised in audiovisual development advising and talent support. Silence&Conversation aims at encouraging thought and fostering reflection on the renewal of tools designed to nurture creation and the circulation of talent.
THE VISION
Silence&Conversation was born of my 40 years in the film industry, 32 of which have been devoted to the exciting period of development : from the birth of an idea to the film's production, from the project to the film, from desire to reality.
This unique activity has taken me all over the world and given me a wide range of responsibilities. I have dealt with thousands of projects and hundreds of professionals at different stages in their careers and ambitions, on a wide variety of assignments. Invited to share their questions, doubts, desires, opinions, visions and, of course, projects, it appeared to me I had never addressed the full scope of this crucial stage in the maturation of a project.
Although the importance of development is now recognized internationally, giving rise to new professions born of the need to support talent, I have been witnessing interventionist drifts in the course of this fragile process, gradually leading to a levelling out of projects. A levelling out from the middle, a standardization of form and a loss of diversity of content. Above all, I have observed a paradoxical shift away from talking about mise-en-scène, where there is no longer any room for evoking the cinematic nature of a project, as if assessing the script were enough.
Over time, I have noticed that freedom of form and content is being curtailed in the name of the so-called industry, while the latter is barely registering more ticket sales by indirectly imposing this subtle form of normalizing censorship, while simultaneously wielding the paradox of wanting original talents to emerge.
Year after year, I see the risk of confusing nurturing with control when supporting talent and writing. The risk is that we size up films so that, like the tasteless fruit and vegetables on our supermarket shelves, they fit in the boxes, flatter readers at first glance in their role as first viewers, and meet the supposed needs of a globalized market. A market with an ever-growing appetite for stories to be transformed into images for all kinds of media, resulting in overproduction and a form of asphyxiation of the imagination.
Realizing that it was possible to make more and more films while it was increasingly difficult to make cinema, I questioned my personal responsibility. The concern that I might be participating in this drift, in one way or another, led me to reflect, and reflection led to change.
The desire to take a step back and propose something different was a formidable spur to initiate this new professional turning point, and to get back to the roots of a pioneering way to tackle the development process. It was then that I realized the importance of the notion of silence in order to concentrate fully on the act of creation.
Inviting in silence, followed by sustained conversation, sets us apart from the constant chatter of the contemporary world, frees us from the reign of opinion and provides the ultimate way of confronting ourselves and others.
Silence&Conversation is built around a new philosophy that embodies different methods and ambitions, and positions itself as a place for R&D.
The ideas of fostering reflection and confronting it, of opening up areas of freedom far from the diktat of opinion, of inventing in a more specific and exclusive way, are at the heart of the reinvention of the structure, in order to offer :
- new development tools,
- new settings for listening, discussion and transmission
- answers to the threat of standardization
- bulwarks against all forms of hypocrisy from which the artistic gesture should be liberated.
But above all, to open up a new range of possibilities by rethinking our way of working in the light of recent developments in the creative field and in those who nurture it.
Building on this unique experience and a renewed energy to take on new challenges and prepare the ground to rethink development off the beaten track, in January 2025 Initiative Film will give way to Silence & Conversation.
Isabelle Fauvel
CONTACT US
contact@silence-conversation.com
+ 33 (0)1 53 34 19 89
SILENCE&CONVERSATION
8, Cité Rougemont, Paris 75009, France