Forceps Media: Cinema under pressure

Cinema
under
pressure.

Forceps Media Independent production
Paris
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Manifesto / 001

Founded by Maxime Berthou, Forceps Media produces auteur-driven films, series and visual works at the edge of fiction, documentary and contemporary art.

Each project begins with a rupture, a gesture, a loss, a belief, a body, a landscape, pushed beyond the point of return.

Selected Projects
Four works in motion
Dérives
01 / Fiction Feature

Dérives

A man tries to survive physically what he has already lost inside.

When Célian discovers a wreck in Brittany, his pregnant wife dies in Boston. Convinced the two events are connected, he becomes obsessed with restoring the boat in the hope of reaching her beyond death. To do so, he crosses every line: desecrating wrecks, lying, manipulating, and pushing his obsession until it begins to cost people their lives. A psychological drama about impossible grief, and the thin line between faith, obsession, and madness. Shot on 35mm, decaying into 16mm.

DirectionMaxime Berthou FormatFeature / 100' Stock35mm → 16mm
In Development
Half Life
02 / Creative Documentary

Half Life

A handmade Japanese boat journeys through the contaminated waters of Fukushima, only to be burned and reborn as charcoal.

Returned to the same river it once crossed, the charcoal becomes an act of purification. A poetic meditation on decay, renewal, and the half-life of human creation.

FormatFeature Documentary DirectionBerthou & Požlep ShootJapan / Oct 2026
In Production
Paparuda !
03 / Fiction Series

Paparuda !

She tried to return a stolen cloud. They stole the idea instead.

Based on true events. Montréal. Léo, 23, a French art student, sets out to artificially trigger rainfall on the US–Canadian border — a gesture meant to return a cloud historically stolen by the Americans. What begins as an absurd, poetic school project hardens into a technical, diplomatic and judicial affair that runs ahead of her — until the lawyer assigned to defend her appropriates her most precious idea: inventing a legal status for clouds.

FormatSeries / 8 × 52' GenrePolitico-Legal Satire DirectionMaxime Berthou TerritoryFR / CA
In Development
Soutien de Famille — affiche du film
04 / Documentary

Soutien
de Famille

From Brittany to Scotland: a sailboat, two apprentice sailors, and a promise to turn a wooden hull into whisky casks.

Aboard Soutien de Famille, freshly restored, Max and Mark sail north in search of adventure and poetry. At journey's end, a wager halfway between performance art and pure folly: dismantle the old hull and let it become whisky. A film about freedom, friendship, and what we are willing to surrender to reach the open sea.

FormatFeature Documentary / 75' Co-DirectionBerthou & Požlep Released7 Dec 2022 — Theatrical
Archive
Southwind — affiche du film
05 / Documentary

Southwind

Down the Mississippi on a handcrafted steamboat: a portrait of America held between two crises, drawn along the corn monoculture shores.

Berthou and Požlep's second feature grows out of a performance: descending the Mississippi aboard a steamboat the duo built themselves, to read the economic and ecological print of corn monoculture on its banks. The voyage opens months after one of the largest floods in U.S. history, and closes weeks before the COVID–19 pandemic and the end of the Trump mandate. What surfaces is the portrait of an America suspended between two crises, where the grain itself slowly fades from the frame.

FormatFeature Documentary / 74' Co-DirectionBerthou & Požlep Released25 Feb 2022, Theatrical
Archive

Projects, proposals, obsessions, discoveries, disagreements :