Christie Molia’s first interest in film was triggered by a Polaroid. At the age of three, she was so fascinated by the camera that she suddenly dropped her newborn baby brother. When she was 15, she returned from Australia with her head full of images. “I was frustrated that they were fixed images; I wanted them to move,” she recalls. That was when she decided she wanted to work in film.

She didn’t know in exactly what capacity at the time, but she obtained a vocational training certificate in audiovisual production, entered the Fémis film school in Paris with the goal of becoming a continuity girl – “a job at the very nerve centre of film production” – and obtained a master’s degree in special effects, with dreams of becoming a director. “I never found my true calling,” she stresses. “But my studies helped me define the type of cinema to which I wanted to devote all my energy.”

Christie Molia finally found her true calling as a producer. She didn't even try working for others; rather, at the age of 26 she started her own production company, which she called Tournez S’il Vous Plaît (TSVP), with her two sisters, one a journalist and the other a chartered accountant. “To make up for my lack of experience, I needed a strategy,” she asserts. To ensure the viability of her company, she opted for producing special reports, TV documentaries, and then short films in order to identify promising directors.

“Once I proved myself, I was ready to start a second company specializing in feature-length drama and comedy,” she explains – and that is exactly what she did in order to undertake the production of Les Grandes Personnes an intimate Franco-Swedish film directed by Anna Novion.

Achievements since winning the grant

She has created her second production company, called Moteur s’il vous plaît, dedicated to fiction. Her first company, which she launched with her two sisters and her brother François-Xavier Molia (winner of the Foundation’s writer’s grant in 2000) is called Tournez s’il vous plaît (TSVP). Dedicated to television content, TSVP has produced a number of documentaries this year for France 3’s program Des Racines et des Ailes (Un siècle au Grand Palais, De Napoléon à François 1er, La Sicile baroque, le Japon, entre tradition et modernité, le Goût de l’Afrique and others).


www.tsvp-prod.com