Sony Pictures Classics Picks Up Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Violette

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the rights to Violette, the new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the director of Amelie. The deal covers the United States, Latin America and Southeast Asia, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which reported it on 5 November 2026.

Acquiring rights means a distributor buys the right to release a film in a set group of countries and to show it in their cinemas. The deal was negotiated with Studiocanal, which is handling international sales for the film. Other territories are not part of this agreement.

The film is based on Valérie Perrin's bestselling novel Fresh Water for Flowers. Leïla Bekhti plays Violette, a cemetery caretaker. Melvil Poupaud plays a mysterious stranger, and Matthias Schoenaerts co-stars.

For Sony Pictures Classics, this is the fourth film it has worked on with Jeunet. The earlier three are The City of Lost Children (1995), Amelie (2001) and Micmacs (2009). In 2009, TheWrap reported that the division had bought the United States and Latin America rights to Micmacs from the Paris-based broadcaster TF1.

Sony Pictures Classics is an autonomous division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It was founded in January 1992 and works to distribute, produce and acquire independent films from the United States and around the world, according to the company's own website.

For distributors, the appeal of a deal like this is often about who gets to put a film in front of audiences in a particular region. Here, a single company now holds the main English-speaking and Latin American release rights, along with Southeast Asia. Audiences in those regions will be able to see the film once it is released there.

Jeunet's earlier films found large audiences in cinemas, and Amelie remains the best known of them. Whether Violette follows that path is a question for the months ahead, once it reaches screens.