Ask Emmanuel what he did for the first twenty-five years of his career and he will tell you, with a certain quiet pleasure: he made himself invisible.
As a film subtitler and interpreter, his work took him to Cannes and Berlinale, onto the Champs-Élysées for an hour-long masterclass with Mads Mikkelsen, into conversations with Sienna Miller and Michelle Yeoh. He was often the only one in the room who understood everything being said. The better he did his job, the less anyone noticed him.
His new idea took shape across cities, and a question he kept returning to: why do so many intelligent, curious people arrive in European cities and leave having only scratched the surface? Not just a language problem, he concluded, but an access problem: knowing which door to knock on, and who will open it.
He had already tested the instinct. In La Rochelle, he founded a film club at the city’s national theatre which had drawn figures including Paris Opera ballet director Brigitte Lefèvre. The right curation, in the right room, makes something genuine happen.
PARTANT is a weekend experience for the kind of people who have stopped being impressed by the obvious. Small groups and a host who knows everyone in the room. Encounters built around the people who rarely appear on any map: the analogue photographer, the independent gallerist, the winemaker who does not receive visitors.
“I spent twenty-five years making other people’s voices heard. I know exactly what it means to stand next to something extraordinary and remain invisible.”
The first public proof came in March: a soirée at Galerie DODA in Bordeaux, fifteen guests by invitation only. Biographer Véronique Le Bris, founder of the Prix Alice Guy, France’s award celebrating women in cinema, presented the forgotten story of Alice Guy-Blaché, cinema’s first female director, to a room that left knowing something most film lovers never do.
“I don’t want to create events. I want to create the conditions for a conversation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
A PARTANT weekend is built around that conviction. A Friday evening that opens a door, a Saturday that walks through it. You travel as a small group who share the same affinities, a love of the arts, a hunger for the real thing, and leave having both seen and done things no itinerary could have found for you. By Sunday, the city feels different. You have been shown where to look, and who to look with.
Bordeaux is the starting point, Lisbon and Paris are next. The ambition is deliberately small in scale and serious in intention. Something closer to what a deeply connected friend would offer, if they happened to know everyone worth knowing in the most interesting cities in Europe.
Some people build travel brands, Emmanuel built life first.
by A.I. M. Kowalewsky
