Cannes ACID Doc ‘Detention’ Lands at Andana Films for Sales

Andana Films has boarded worldwide sales on “Detention” (“La Détention”), Guillaume Massart’s second feature, ahead of its world premiere in the ACID sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival later this month.

The French documentary is set inside the country’s prison officer academy, where the film observes trainees as their language, movements and certainties gradually align with the institution around them.

Céline Loiseau of TS Productions produced.

“We couldn’t have dreamed of a better premiere for this film than being part of the ACID Cannes selection,” said Loiseau. “The film is an immersion into the training of prison guards; through it, Guillaume Massart dives into the heart of the carceral system, yet keeps the prison itself off-camera, revealing the society that builds it.”

“We have been following Guillaume Massart’s work for a long time,” said Stephan Riguet of Andana Films. “The selection of his new film at ACID Cannes is a wonderful recognition of this long term project.”

“By making prison guards the protagonists of ‘Detention,’ Guillaume Massart creates a self-contained institutional setting that forces us to confront the Kafkaesque machinery of repressive bureaucracy,” ACID committee members Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Thomas Paulot and Paola Termine said in a joint statement. “From within the institution, yet without being consumed by it, Massart films the words of its agents, their silences, and a discourse that is beginning to crack. The gap between theory and practice then seems impossible to bridge.”

ACID – France’s filmmaker-led association dedicated to championing independent cinema’s theatrical distribution – has run a sidebar at Cannes since 1992. This year’s edition runs May 13–22.