Canal+, Federation, Echo team for Nadia

Nadia has been filmed over the past year

SUNNY SIDE: France’s Canal+, Federation Entertainment and Echo Studio have teamed up on a feature doc about a former Afghan refugee who became a star player for French football club Paris Saint-Germain’s women’s team.

Nadia (90’) comes from Wonder Boy maker Anissa Bonnefont and tells the story of Nadia Nadim, who was forced to flee Afghanistan at the age of 11 with her mother and four sisters after her father was killed by the Taliban.

Nadim grew up to become a star striker for both PSG and the national team of her adoptive country, Denmark. The film follows Nadim as she hopes to return to Afghanistan to retrace her father’s footsteps, while her mother and aunt – host of the country’s most famous talent show – try to dissuade her from putting herself in danger again.

Filming began last June in France and Denmark and finished when the PSG women’s team clinched the league title earlier this month.

The film is a Canal+ Creation Originale documentary, coproduced with Federation and March of the Penguins maker Echo Studio, and is part of Sunny Side of the Doc’s Women Talent Hub – spotlighting women non-fiction filmmakers. International factual market Sunny Side of the Doc is taking place in La Rochelle, France, this week.

The project comes from Bonnefont, whose critically acclaimed feature Wonder Boy, which also premiered on Canal+, received a special jury mention at the Tribeca Film Festival and was nominated for best documentary film at the César Awards 2020.

Nadia will be available this autumn, with Federation distributing. The company is also working with Canal+ on  documentary Wenger, Invisible, a copro about former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, with Yvette Production and Noah Media Group. French-British duo Christian Jeanpierre and Gabriel Clarke are the directors.

Also at Sunny Side this week, France Télévisions commissioned a Federation docuseries exploring the unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in 2014.