Gaumont Sells Brizé's 'A Good Little Soldier' Across Nine Territories Ahead of Venice and TIFF
Gaumont has locked down distributors for Stéphane Brizé's "A Good Little Soldier" across nine territories before the film has even played its first public screening, according to Deadline.
The French studio, which celebrated its 130th anniversary in 2025, closed deals for Australia (Palace Films), Switzerland (Xenix), Spain (BTeam Pictures), Greece (Rosebud), Italy (I Wonder Pictures), Benelux (Cinéart), Portugal (Alambique), former Yugoslavia (MCF) and Turkey (Mars Film). Gaumont handles both international sales and French distribution, with the film set to reach French cinemas on November 25.
"A Good Little Soldier" will world-premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival in its second half, then cross the Atlantic for a North American debut at TIFF as a Special Presentation. The festival corridor — Venice in early September, Toronto immediately after — is where autumn prestige titles jostle for attention and, crucially, for the distributors still without deals. Selling out nine territories ahead of that circuit is a strong vote of confidence from buyers.
The film stars Alba Rohrwacher as Carla Moretti, a 43-year-old high-performing executive hired as HR manager of a major corporation. Her brief: promote employee well-being while maintaining demanding performance goals. What she encounters is toxic management practices that put those two aims on a collision course. Vincent Lindon plays the corporation's pushy CEO — his sixth collaboration with Brizé. Lindon won Best Actor at Cannes in 2015 for "The Measure of a Man," also directed by Brizé.
"A Good Little Soldier" is Brizé's 11th fiction feature and his fourth time in competition at Venice, following the Fipresci Prize-winning "A Woman's Life," "Another World" and "Out of Season." The new film continues a throughline that runs through "The Measure of a Man," "At War" and "Another World" — Brizé's sustained examination of the workplace and the human cost of corporate pressure.
Brizé has said the new film carries a sharper edge than its predecessors, showing "casual, shameless indecency that tips into farce, without concealing the violence of the system." That tonal shift — from the sombre realism of earlier work toward something with darker comic teeth — gives the film its own register within the workplace cycle.
The production is lead-produced by Sidonie Dumas for Gaumont, in co-production with France 3 Cinéma and with the support of Canal+. The film was still in post-production as of mid-2025, per Cineuropa, and has moved through finishing and into the festival pipeline on schedule for its Venice bow.
For audiences, the appeal is straightforward: a proven director-actor pairing, a premise rooted in workplace dynamics that many will recognise, and festival laurels that will shape its autumn release across Europe and beyond.
