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A lonely fishing village on France’s Opal Coast becomes ground zero for a cosmic tug‑of‑war, where everyday routines collide with interstellar ambition. Under windswept skies and among weathered boats, Bruno Dumont stages a minimal‑ism‑meets‑spectacle narrative that hooks you from the first shot of sand dunes meeting the sea.

Here, two alien factions—the radiant Ones and the shadow‑draped Zeros—have descended in human guise to claim Freddy, nicknamed “the Wain,” a toddler prophesied to tip the balance of power. On one side stands Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), a taciturn fisherman bound to Beelzebub’s dark empire; on the other, Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei), a warrior for the Ones who finds her loyalty tested by the village’s raw humanity. Hovering above them are the queen of Good (Camille Cottin) and the devilish Beelzebub (Fabrice Luchini), each issuing orders that echo through the dunes.

The Empire...

Bruno Dumont’s The Empire – Season 1 plunges an extraterrestrial struggle into the windswept dunes of Northern France, where mythic forces lurk beneath fishing‑village calm. Across six episodes (approximately three hours total), the creator who once championed social‑realist austerity turns his lens toward metaphysical farce.

Set in French (with subtitles), the series riffs on space‑opera rituals through a self‑aware prism. Two alien orders—the luminous Ones and shadowy Zeros—assume human guises among villagers as they contest the fate of Freddy, a toddler prophesied to become ultimate evil. Dumont recruits Lyna Khoudri (Line), Anamaria Vartolomei (Jane), Brandon Vlieghe (Jony), Fabrice Luchini (Belzébuth) and Camille Cottin (the Ones’ queen), alongside returning non‑actors as earnest gendarmes.

Deadpan dialogue, sudden musical interludes and widescreen compositions recall the emotional clarity of parallel cinema in India—where Satyajit Ray once used serene landscapes to probe spiritual conflict—and Bollywood’s emerging sci‑fi ambitions,...

Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind. However intriguing its premise may be, the film becomes tedious in practice, as what few homegrown ideas it has to offer lack for substantial development. Built almost entirely on the very tropes that it sets out to undermine, The Empire mainly succeeds at hollowing out itself.

A present-day fishing village in Northern France would seem to be an unlikely battleground for a galactic conflict between good and evil, and it’s this incongruity of setting and story that forms a basis for The Empire. The 1s and the 0s, as the opposing forces call themselves, must take human form to properly exist. On the 0 side, there’s the fisherman Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), father to the Wain—a toddler destined to...

The Empire (French: L’Empire) is a 2024 sci-fi comedy-drama written and directed by Bruno Dumont. The film pokes fun at the Star Wars series and big Hollywood blockbusters, all set in Dumont’s home region of northern France.

This international production, involving France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Portugal, premiered on February 18, 2024, at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, winning the Silver Bear Jury Prize. It was released in French theaters on February 21, 2024.

The cast of ‘The Empire’ features Lyna Khoudri as Line, Anamaria Vartolomei as Jane, and Camille Cottin as The Queen, alongside Fabrice Luchini as the villainous Belzébuth. Supporting roles include Brandon Vlieghe, Julien Manier, Bernard Pruvost, and Philippe Jore.

As the movie is getting closer to its U.S. release the first trailer has dropped and you can check out for yourself what the hype is about:

Related: 15 Top-Selling Sci-fi Franchises of All Time (Ranked)

The film premieres...

Playing his signature brand of rural French absurdity in stark counterpoint to the grandiose strains of a space opera, Bruno Dumont returns with The Empire: his Barbarella bourguignon, his dijionnaise Dune. The Empire is the story of two warring factions: one whose mothership resembles the palace of Versailles; the other’s as if someone glued together two Notre Dames, crypt to crypt. It follows their envoys on earth, now in human form and attempting to capture a toddler who they believe to be the Chosen One––whose mere presence makes them bow down like bodies in rigor mortis. There are blasé beheadings with lightsabers, a group of men on Boulonnais horses who call themselves the Knights of Wain, and, for no apparent reason, the commandant (Bernard Pruvost) and lieutenant (Philippe Jore) from P’tit Quinquin.

If that all sounds like a mixed bag it’s probably because The Empire is...

Out of the many movies you could imagine emerging from the mind of French auteur Bruno Dumont, a Star Wars parody was probably somewhere at the bottom of the list.

And yet it’s been some time since the Cannes Grand Jury Prize laureate, who broke out in the late 90s with viscerally stylized, hard-hitting works of Gallic realism like The Life of Jesus and Humanity, has strayed far from his gritty roots towards a brand of accentuated arthouse satire.

His latest effort, the sci-fi farce The Empire (L’Empire), definitely fits the latter mold, although it’s loaded with enough VFX, light saber battles, spacecrafts and prophecies to give George Lucas a run for his money. That is, if Lucas decided to set the next Star Wars in a sleepy northern French city, used a local mechanic to play one of the leads and tossed in a few flagrant sex scenes,...

It is increasingly weird to recall that for a while, French director Bruno Dumont was the kind of filmmaker who reminded you, often forcibly and somewhat against your will, that the word “auteur” contains most of the letters of “austere.” “The Empire,” another of the director’s proudly off-kilter comedies that pitches the bumbling denizens of a small French village into a vast, sinister conspiracy extending far beyond their foreshortened horizons, hovers several light years — and two janky light sabers — away from austerity. Unfortunately, though, the air out there is also a little thin on hilarity, with the film’s one-gag setup becoming stretched to the point that it doesn’t even matter that it’s a pretty good gag.

The humor, as ever with the Dumont of “Li’l Quinquin” and “Slack Bay,” derives largely from the collision of the grandiose with the drolly mundane. This time out, harking back to,...

Memento International has secured pre-sales to Bruno Dumont’s The Empire to several key territories ahead of its world premiere in Berlin’s main competition and has unveiled the first English-language trailer for the auteur-sci-fi French film.

The Empire has sold to Njuta in Sweden, Vertigo in Hungary, McF Megacom in Ex-Yugoslavia, Scanorama in Baltics, Beta in Bulgaria, and Pt Falcon in Indonesia with more territories in discussions. The film will be released by Arp Selection in France, Cineart in Benelux and Academy Two in Italy.

Set in a quiet fishing village on the Opal Coast in Northern France, The...

The Berlin Film Festival on Monday unveiled the titles selected for its official competition and its sidebar Encounters competitive section.

A total of 20 films have been selected for the international competition, with highlights including La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruiz Palacios and starring Rooney Mara. The pic is described as a “kinetic and cinematic love story” set over a single day in a Times Square kitchen. French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop returns with Dahomey, a 60-minute doc about art repatriation and Hong Sangsoo plays in competition with A Traveler’s Needs, starring Isabelle Huppert. Scroll down for the full lineup.

The Berlin Film Festival takes place February 15-25.

Organizers have already announced more than 100 titles across sidebars spanning Panorama, Forum, and Berlinale Special. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a feature documentary about influential British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger narrated by Killers of the Flower Moon...

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival unveiled its full lineup Monday at its official press conference in the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Berlinale managing director Mariëtte Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian presented the films that will compete for this year’s Golden and Silver Bears both in the competition and encounters sections.

Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios, a Berlinale regular and two-time Silver Bear winner — for A Cop Movie in 2022 and Museo in 2018 — returns to Berlin competition with his English-language feature debut La Cocina. Rooney Mara and The Cop Movie alum Raúl Briones star in the drama set over the course of a single day in a bustling New York City restaurant. Briones plays an undocumented cook in a relationship with Julia (Mara), an American waitress who cannot commit to their relationship. Fifth Season and WME are selling North American rights to La Cocina with HanWay handling international sales.