Guillaume Campanacci Gets Thrifty With ‘The Silent Sinner’

The Cannes-born actor-director Guillaume Campanacci is a frequent attendee of the world’s most glamorous film festival, but he has a special affection for Oldenburg.

“I’ve been to the Cannes Film Festival every year, but Oldenburg is something different — I will go there with any film I have,” the Frenchman tells The Hollywood Reporter. It makes sense, then, that he would shoot his new project for no money and with just three people to be able to return to the German fest this year.

“I needed something that I could make for not a lot of money and fast… So it’s completely produced by myself,” says Campanacci about The Silent Sinner, starring himself and real-life partner Madeleine Skrzynecka as a couple, Rhett and Scarlett, who embark on a twisted spree of seduction and murder across Krakow, Poland. “The movie was really made with absolutely nothing,” he continues. “And when I say absolutely nothing, I’m not saying it like the people who say that and the film cost a million dollars. It was made for literally nothing. I could give you a number, but you would start laughing at me.”

The Silent Sinner, made by Campanacci’s CampanacCinema Studios, is mostly silent — Skrzynecka’s femme fatale is both deaf and mute — relying on music and montage to hold the audience’s attention. It’s the director’s third film to debut in Oldenburg, shot on his girlfriend’s Olympus film camera as the pair and DOP Valentin Gaigher passed it around depending on who featured in the scene.

The decision to make it a silent film was more of a logistical decision than an artistic one. “I had to be practical,” says Campanacci about the project’s nearly non-existent budget. “I needed to come up with an idea that [meant] I could erase people from the crew. So I started saying, Okay, let’s [not have] a sound department. I wanted it to be totally silent at first,” he continues. “Excuse my French, but I wanted to fuck with the audience.”

He loves the idea of making his audience uncomfortable, but the movie was in need of music and natural sound. “It blossomed into something completely different” from there on.

Still, that discomfort runs through the 71-minute movie in the characters’ bid to tear through the bars of Krakow, preying on innocent revellers and luring them to their deaths. “It’s going to sound totally fucked up, what I’m saying,” begins Campanacci, “but imagine you would like to kill people… [and] you find a person that’s willing to do the same thing with you. There’s a certain beauty to that. I like to explore where human beings are able to go.”

Having Scarlett be deaf and mute naturally allowed Campanacci to cut costs on sound, but it also suited his co-star Skrzynecka, a Polish painter who has no interest in acting again. “She wouldn’t have accepted to be part of this film if she would have had to talk,” laughs her director and boyfriend. “She’s never been in front of a camera before, and she pretty much doesn’t want to be in front of one ever again — not that she had a bad experience with me — but just because she doesn’t like it.”

She’ll no doubt decline to feature in Campanacci’s next project: a TV adaptation of his friend Brian O’Dea’s book, High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler, which the pair are shopping around some of the big streamers. “It’s a crazy, huge project, and I just want to make it with the right people, people I really love,” he says. “It’s important because it’s about my friend’s life.”

This week, however, he’s focused on The Silent Sinner. He’ll join a fraction of his three-person crew — Skrzynecka and Gaigher — in the German town on Sept. 11 to debut the movie and hopes it serves as inspiration for others to do what they can with limited resources. “Cinema is not about the camera — I really don’t care. I will use anything to make a film,” he says. “There’s no excuse. ‘Oh, I don’t have the right camera. I don’t have enough money.’ No. Just write something.”

He lauds Oldenburg for taking a chance on independent films like his, a project that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with no money. “You can make a film that [could] be projected on a big screen at one of the best festivals in the world. You just have to go and do it, it’s the only thing I would say to anybody: just fucking do it.”

Oldenburg International Film Festival 2025 runs Sept. 10-14.