French technology entrepreneur Adrien Nussenbaum, co-founder of e-commerce giant Miracle, is getting into the film business with a new production company, Palatio Films, which will make its Cannes debut with Daniel Auteuil’s World War II drama “When Night Falls.”
The film, which bowed at its Cannes premiere, marks a significant career turning point for Nussenbaum, who recently stepped down from his operational role at Miracle to focus on production. Nussenbaum, who has already backed Dimitri Rassam’s Yapurka banner, is now aiming to build scripts for mainstream films with top writers through Palatio Films.
Mirakl, a technology company he previously co-founded, was recently valued at over $3.5 billion, making it France’s biggest technology success story. But movies remained Nussenbaum’s lifelong obsession.
“When I was a kid, I had posters of Paul Newman and Robert Redford on my bedroom wall,” he says. “I always wanted to work in film.” That dream took shape through La Troisième Nuit, which Nussenbaum created after discovering the little-known story of Jewish children rescued during a roundup in Venissieux, France. The film is set in August 1942, when the Vichy regime was rounding up foreign Jews. Antoine Reinartz plays a young civil servant tasked with determining the fate of arrested Jews, while Auteuil plays the humanitarian priest Abbe Alexander Glasberg who fights to save Jews. Luana Bajrami and Gregory Gadebois also appear.
Nussenbaum spent years developing the project, then hired Les Films Velvets producer Frédéric Jouve, and finally Auteuil, who was committed to directing and starring immediately after reading the script.
The film, made on a budget of just under 6 million euros, arrived at Cannes in a year that was unusually packed with stories set in World War II, alongside László Németh’s Mulan, Emmanuelle Marr’s Man of the Ages and Antonin Baudry’s De Gaulle. But Nussenbaum believes When Night Falls is set apart by its deep focus on French bureaucracy, moral compromise, and unarmed acts of resistance. “In reality, it’s up to the French to decide whether to comply or not,” he says.
Now that Palacio Films is in full swing, Nussenbaum has several projects in development that span memory, mental health, and identity. Among them are “Les Souvenirs Inachevés,” the story of an ethically adrift real estate executive who rediscovers meaning in an idyllic community in the south of France, and “Les Accords Retrouvés,” a father-daughter road movie centered on teenage mental health.
