“My passion for the cinema goes back to the day when I saw 2001, a space odyssey for the first time. I was six years old when my father – an actor and cinema enthusiast – took me to see the film”, explains Dante Desarthe. A eureka moment, “I realised that cinema could be more than just a story, it could be poetry”. He attempted to enter Idhec, the French film school. “I was eighteen years old and I was rejected. I was angry and upset, so I decided to abandon my studies and start from the very bottom”, initially as a trainee then as an assistant.  At the age of twenty one, using his savings and a number of loans, Dante founded a short film production company. The films produced and/or directed by Dante (le Fardeau, la Mort d’une vache, Lady bag, etc.) were successful and won awards. Thanks to the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation, Dante was able to produce (and direct!) his first feature length film. Fast, or “the unintentional rise through a fast-food company of a young man with a simple heart, whose only dream is to find his first love”.

Achievements since winning the grant

In 1995, Fast, Dante Desarthe’s project which was awarded the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation grant, won the prize for the best French film of the year at the SRF Festival in Paris.
In 1998, Dante Desarthe’s production company, Les films du Bois-Sacré, developed and co-produced Karnaval, the first feature length film by Thomas Vincent, which won the prize for the best first film at the Berlin Film Festival. The same year, Dante Desarthe produced Acide animé, by Guillaume Bréaud.
In 1999-2000,  Dante Desarthe produced Cours toujours, a co-production between MK2 and Les films du Bois-Sacré. Distributed in Canada and the United States, the film opened the San Francisco Film Festival. In the same year, he produced Ma vie active, by Frédéric Gélard and Marc Fitoussi.
In 2006, he produced Je me fais rare.