The Marching Band: Preview Club Wrap-Up

by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio

As part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for The Marching Band, presented by JBFC Film Programmer Ian LoCascio on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2026:

Hi all,

I was delighted to be back for the second film of this season of Preview Club on Tuesday—and I look forward to a great season ahead.

This month’s Preview Club title was The Marching Band, which we will open for a run on August 28 courtesy of our friends at Greenwich Entertainment.

The film was directed by French filmmaker Emmanuel Courcol and had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, before making its US premiere at Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema last year—where it won the audience award.

The film’s director, Emmanuel Courcol, began his career as an actor and he worked for decades, mostly on stage in France, before directing his debut feature, Ceasefire in 2016 at the age of 58. Since then, he has directed two more features—The Big Hit in 2020 and The Marching Band. Courcol has described filmmaking as being “a late vocation,” for him, saying that across the years he spent working as an actor, he gradually realized that he wanted “more” without knowing what that meant. This desire led to writing plays, which led to writing screenplays, until he found that he increasingly disagreed with the directors directing his screenplays, and thought about all the things he would have done differently, before taking that dissatisfaction as a sign that he should be the one in the director’s chair.

Courcol has described his experience in front of the camera as being “invaluable” to his work as a director, saying that he thinks it helps to build an initial foundation of trust between him and the actors he works with, as he is intimately familiar with their craft and speaks their artistic language.

The casting process for the film began with the casting of Pierre Lottin for the role of Jimmy, the trombone-playing half-brother of orchestra conductor Thibaut. Pierre Lottin had starred in Courcol’s previous film The Big Hit and Courcol wrote the role of Jimmy specifically for him. If Pierre Lottin looks familiar to you, it may be because he appeared in Francoise Ozon’s film adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which screened at the Burns earlier this year. After that, Benjamin Lavernhe was cast in the role of Thibaut. Lavernhe has been a resident of the Comédie-Française, France’s illustrious state theater, since 2012, where he has consistently performed in plays by such titans as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, Brecht, Ibsen, and Euripides—just to name a few.

During the scenes when Benjamin Lavernhe is conducting the orchestra, he was actually conducting a live orchestra, which meant that he needed extensive training in the lead-up to the shoot because any mistake he made could throw the orchestra off and ruin the take. Similarly, Pierre Lottin, the actor who played Jimmy, had to spend several months in the lead-up to the shoot taking trombone lessons so that he could confidently play the instrument in the film.

Filmmaker Emmanuel Courcol has described watching a documentary about marching bands called La Fanfare Ne Perd Pas Le Nord and, having been struck by the documentary, he got in touch with the marching band depicted in the film, who were located in a town called Lallaing in the North of Franch. He recalls arriving at one of their rehearsals and, just as with Thibaut’s character in the film, they immediately welcomed him in, inviting him to spend time with them (and drink with them). From this point on, Corcoul has said that he immediately knew that he had found the group of musicians who would serve as the Walincourt Marching Band in the film. The film was shot in this marching band’s actual rehearsal space, and Courcol set out to make the professional actors “indistinguishable” from their non-professional counterparts. Sarah Suco, who plays Sabrina, and Jacques Bonnaffe, who plays Gilbert, are both professional actors—but as far as I can tell, the rest of the band in the film are members of the actual marching band in Lallaing.

This is, obviously, a French film, but I was struck by how much certain elements of The Marching Band, particularly the plight of the factory workers in Walincourt, felt inspired by “kitchen sink dramas” from the United Kingdom. That term originated in the mid-21st century to describe British films, plays, and novels grounded in social realism that depict the struggles and frustrations of the British working class, particularly in more industrial towns and cities. I think that Tony Richardson’s 1961 film A Taste of Honey is arguably the foundational kitchen sink drama, at least cinematically; and the term is often used to describe the work of such directors as Mike Leigh, whose film Hard Truths was a Preview Club title last year; Ken Loach, whose film The Old Oak was a Preview Club title two years ago; and Clio Barnard, whose film Ali & Ava was a Preview Club title four years ago. All of which is to say that, whether you were aware of it or not, any longtime Preview Club subscribers reading this are likely no strangers to the art of the kitchen sink drama.

Still, a key difference between The Marching Band and the quintessential kitchen sink drama is that, although the film is certainly bittersweet and doesn’t gloss over its more tragic elements, I don’t think that I’d describe anger or despair as the primary emotion that this film elicited for me—something which, according to the film’s director, was very much by design.

Emmanuel Courcol has talked about being wary of the “feel good movie” and not wanting to make something that is, to quote him directly, “too marshmallowy,” but he also said that he wanted to make sure that the audience doesn’t leave the cinema feeling “desperate,” saying that “so many films these days are just sad; they make you feel pessimistic about the whole human condition” and “if you add that to what’s already going on in the world and everything we see on the TV, it’s a lot,” concluding that he “prefers making others feel a little bit better when the lights go up.”

I found The Marching Band to be a moving character drama with a lot on its mind, which, at the same time, served as a welcome palate cleanser during these dark and crazy times—a deceptively tricky balancing act.

I hope you enjoyed the film and I look forward to seeing you next time!

Best,

Ian LoCascio

The Marching Band opens for a run at the JBFC Theater on Friday, Aug. 28.

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