Amazon Prime Video and French Cinema: Between "Hyper-Local" Comedies and National Non-Specificity

The last decade has seen American streaming platforms become some of the biggest players in the production and circulation of French cinema, with scholarship attempting to make sense of the changes that they have wrought. Up to now, that attention has focused almost exclusively on Netflix. This article breaks from this tendency by chronicling and analysing the production activities of Amazon Prime Video (APV) in France. This begins with an overview of APV's time in the country and "original" production of series and films. The article then turns to close analysis of APV's original French content. The article goes on, providing case studies of three of the platform's original French films - Medellín (Franck Gastambide, 2023), Sentinelle (David Caviglioli and Hugo Benamozig, 2023) and Un stupéfiant Noël!/Dealing with Christmas (Arthur Sanigou, 2023) - and one of its original French series Salade grecque/Greek Salad (Amazon Prime Video, 2023). Each of these are shown to typify different aspects of French cinema during the streaming era, but the case studies also focus on the balance that each work attempts to strike between APV's "hyper-local" ambitions and the desire to make films and series that are attractive to international audiences.

Amazon Prime Video and French Cinema: Between "Hyper-Local" Comedies and National Non-Specificity Articles