Official US Trailer for ‘The Empire’ Extra Wacky French Sci-Fi Comedy

Official US Trailer for ‘The Empire’ Extra Wacky French Sci-Fi Comedy

by Alex Billington
January 27, 2025
Source: YouTube

“The gendarmes on it.” “Humans are useless.” Kino Lorber has finally revealed an official US trailer for The Empire, the strange French sci-fi film from filmmaker Bruno Dumont. After first being unveiled in 2023 and premiering in early 2024, it’s only now getting a US release starting in March 2025 – it already opened in Europe last year and didn’t do very well. We also posted the first French trailer for this way back in 2023. Dumont’s sci-fi The Empire (called L’Empire in French) is set in a quiet fishing village on the Opal Coast in Northern France, and tells the story of a child who’s apparently so unique & peculiar it unleashes a secret war between extraterrestrial forces of good & evil. Starring a very French cast including Virginie Efira, Lily-Rose Depp, Camille Cottin, Lyna Khoudri, Anamaria Vartolomei, & Fabrice Luchini. This received quite a few negative and mixed reviews, apparently it’s a bit too kooky and uneven to be a hidden gem. But I gotta say the sci-fi side of this still seems amusing and entertaining – even if it doesn’t all work.

Here’s the official US trailer (+ poster) for Bruno Dumont’s The Empire, direct from KL’s YouTube:

You can rewatch the original French trailer for Dumont’s The Empire right here, for even more footage.

From the banal daily life of a fisherman’s village on the Opal Coast, emerges epic parallel lives of knights from interplanetary kingdoms. Rival clans are engaged in fierce & bloody battle after the announcement of the birth of Margat, the resurgent Prince, purple and ugly, the Beast of the End Times — located here on the Opal Coast, he is the child of a young couple already separated, as is common to life in a working class neighbourhood… L’Empire is both written and directed by French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, director of the films The Life of Jesus, Humanity, Twentynine Palms, Flanders, Hadewijch, Outside Satan, Camille Claudel 1915, Slack Bay, Joan of Arc, and France previously. Produced by Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat, Bertrand Faivre, Muriel Merlin, Andrea Paris, and Matteo Rovere. This hasn’t premiered at any festivals or elsewhere, as for as we know. ARP Sélection originally released Dumont’s L’Empire in French cinemas first on March 13th, 2024 last year; it also premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival last year. Kino Lorber will finally debut The Empire in select US theaters starting March 7th, 2025 coming soon. Who’s curious?

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