In this profile series, Revry is highlighting authentic contributors to the LGBTQ media and entertainment community. We ask questions to find out who they are and where they are going in the future. The questions remain the same but the answers tell their unique story. It’s time to explore and celebrate true representation beyond the limits of Hollywood. 

Simon Helloco is a writer and director who lives in Paris. After 4 years as the artistic director of MyFrenchFilmFestival (the first online film festival), Simon wrote and co-directed HUGO: 6PM, a short film that has won several awards and has been selected in fifty festivals. The film will be soon broadcasted on Canal Plus. At the start of 2021, he finished OUR OWN LAND, his second short fiction, produced by Mood Films Production and distributed by Manifest. Simon Helloco joined the Scenario Workshop of La Fémis to develop the screenplay for his first feature film. In addition, he produces and edits clips and trailers (for ACID, UniFrance, Orange Studio, the Cinémathèque française) and demo tapes of actors (Reda Kateb, Cécile de France, Laurent Lafitte, etc.).

What are you best known for?

I would say HUGO: 6:30 and OUR OWN LAND, my two shorts.

HUGO: 6:30, co-directed with my friend James Maciver. The film tells the story of Hugo, a young actor who is asked to improvise narrating a story where he’s the actor and director at an audition. He unfolds a tale that explores sex, disease and self-emancipation. The film has already been in almost 50 festivals around the world and has won several awards. It will be soon broadcasted on French TV. I am very grateful that the film has touched so many people around the world.

OUR OWN LAND, my second short film, is a coming of age story with two young brothers that grow up in a rural part of France. Somewhere between the drama and the thriller, the film has started his career in some international film festivals in France, Italy, Spain and Brazil. 

What is the first thing you worked on?

Since I was 10 years old, with my mother's VHS camera (received as a gift when I was born), I have made many movies with my friends ; failed adaptations of my favorite horror movies. In one of them, we shot a chase scene in a corn field behind my house. The funny thing is that 15 years later, I shot a chase scene in that same field with real actors and a real crew. The result wasn’t the same!

What are you working on that no one knows about yet?

I am writing my first feature film at La Fémis. The story is about a young man who discovers, via a VHS tape in the form of a diary, the passionate queer love story that his mother lived with his own school teacher, in a rural part of France of the 1990s. By being immersed in this unknown past, he will discover the impact of this story in his present.