The fourth edition of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s SCAD Lacoste Film Festival, running June 26 to 28 in France’s picturesque Provence region, laid on the event’s most ambition line-up to date.
Unfolding against the backdrop of SCAD’s campus in the hilltop village of Lacoste in the Luberon Valley, honorees included actor Toby Jones, director Stephen Frears, screenwriter Christopher Hampton and James Bond and Harry Potter costume designer Jany Temime.
Étoile cast members Yanic Truesdale, Taïs Vinolo and Ivan du Pontavice also made the trip for a screening, chatting to Deadline on the sidelines about the show’s cancellation, as did Laura Piani, director of French rom-com Jane Austen Wrecked My Love Life, which is currently generating nice numbers for Sony Pictures Classics at the Speciality box office in the U.S.
For the past four years, the festival has kicked off the summer term of SCAD’s 23-year-old Lacoste campus, hosting around 160 students from the college’s main locations in Savannah and Atlanta.
The 10-week summer term is attended mainly by students at SCAD’s School of Film and Acting, who spend their time in Lacoste developing and then shooting a short film as a group.
“We have a class we’ve created that we like to call ‘gently forced collaboration’… the acting, film, sound design and production design students work alongside the dramatic writing students. They choose a script and produce it here,” explains Andra Reeve-Rabb, Dean of SCAD’s Acting and Film School.
“We then take it back to the States, where we have another class that does the editing, color correction and sound,” she continues, adding that the rest of the post-production is also done in-house by students, before the films are screened in SCAD events.
The other fall and winter quarters are open to a wider range of SCAD courses including architecture, art history, fashion and fibers.
Visits to cultural French sites and events such as Paris Fashion Week and the Cannes and Annecy film festivals are also incorporated into the stays depending on the discipline.
The SCAD Lacoste campus began life in 2002, after the Savannah-based educational institution entered into an agreement with the Lacoste School of the Arts (LSA) to continue the work of its late founder, US artist Bernard Pfriem.
Cleveland-born, then Paris-based artist Pfriem had discovered the village in the 1960s, when it was in a state of near abandon following the demise of the silk industry and its depopulation as its inhabitants moved to nearby towns and cities such as Marseille and Avignon in the post WWII years.
He set about creating the school, buying up 18 local properties over the course of 20 years, which were then donated to SCAD as part of its agreement to continue LSA’s legacy.
In the interim, the Luberon Valley’s lavender fields, rolling vineyards, and picturesque hilltop villages have attracted a cohort of film folk and artists, who have made the area their summer and in some cases year-round home.
For a time, SCAD shared the village of Lacoste with French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who owned several properties including the castle at its summit, which is famed for being the final home of the Marquis de Sade.
Following Cardin’s death at the age of 98 in 2020, his estate sold many of his properties to SCAD but retains the castle. It normally hosts the performing arts-focused Festival de Lacoste created by Cardin over the summer, but the event is on a one-year hiatus this year due to renovation works.
SCAD Lacoste Executive Director Cédric Maros says the college now owns 70% of the village, with renovation currently underway on the newly acquired buildings.
Having started out as a film director, Maros who hails from the area, began working for SCAD 15 years ago when he took temporary work at its shop to tide him over between productions and then slowly rose up the organization’s ranks in France.
Today, SCAD Lacoste employs some 120 people in and around the village, which has beds to house up to up to 200 students and academic staff, and generates some $10M for the local economy, says Maros.
He explains that the film festival partly grew out of the desire to connect with the local communities living in villages such as Bonnieux and Ménerbes as well as guests to the area.
“We were inviting film and TV professionals to speak to our students, so we thought why not open this up to the wider public in the area,” he says.
Another strand of activity fostered by Maros is tourism with the village drawing some 40,000 visitors a year, particularly in the summer months when the castle is also open.
Adding to Lacoste’s charm for visitors passing through are open workshop-galleries in refurbished cave dwellings, run as part of SCAD’s Alumni Ateliers program.
Other SCAD-backed draws include fashion exhibition “Christian Dior: Jardins Rêvés” and Unfold, a permanent installation by Dutch art collective Studio DRIFT, tapping into people’s biometric data to create them a personalized digital artwork.
Back at the festival, Reeve-Rabb says the event has quickly become an integral part of the summer quarter.
“It kicks off the students’ experiences here and helps inform what they’ll do over the coming 10 weeks,” she explains. “I think our guests like the fact the event is student-centric, and we attract the right kind of people who want to give back.”
Reeve-Rabb highlights a talk given by costume designer Jany Tamime this year.
“Students got to see that she’s still going in and ‘auditioning’ for jobs and that it doesn’t matter if you’re an award-winning costume designer, you’re still at the table saying, ‘This is who I am and these are my designs and this is my research.’ For her share to that with the students is so impactful,” she says.
“Then we had Sir Stephen Frears with his whole ethos of you’ve got to make the film and learn by doing, and that is truly how we believe you learn.”
The festival has also forged connections between guests and students with Emily in Paris production designer Anne Seibel offering a SCAD student an internship this summer, after they connected in Lacoste last summer.
Two SCAD students are also currently interning with Oscar-winning Gladiator, Napoleon and House of Gucci costume designer Janty Yates, who was also a Lacoste guest in 2024.
Ahead of the event’s fifth edition, Reeve-Rabb suggests the 2026 festival line-up could be even bigger, while retaining the event’s intimate atmosphere.
“Not bigger in scope, but bigger in terms of continuing to invite more artists in that period. It’s not going to be the chaos of Cannes, we’ll retain the calm and quiet and magic of Lacoste, but I’m sure we’ll want to honor the fifth edition,” she says.
She suggests SCAD Lacoste will look to emulate the trajectory of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in November, which is increasingly becoming a stop on the awards season trail.
“Last year, Mikey Madison, Coleman Domingo and Kieran Culkin were among the many actors who passed through and went on to be either nominated or win an Oscar, but that hasn’t changed the essence of what the Savannah Film Festival is,” she says.
“We’re celebrating every year there and it’s growing in terms of the people we’re inviting, but it remains about the students and the quality of the programming and the people who want to come and share with the students.”
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