Saturday night saw the buzzy Cannes premiere of James Gray’s Paper Tiger — complete with a late-night afterparty — but the next morning, one of its producers, Marco Perego, is still fresh and raring to go. He didn’t go to the party because, as he explains, over coffee at the Majestic hotel on the Croisette, he spent last night making notes for his passion project: his Artists’ Haven Pictures collective.

Perego founded Artists’ Haven a few months ago, and the plan is to form a curated community of world-renowned filmmakers that will  gather twice a year “not out of obligation, but out of kinship” at key festivals to help shape and co-invest in the future of independent cinema.

He’s just made history as the first producer to have three films in Competition at the festival, along with Paper Tiger, there’s also Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, and Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, plus Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam, which opened Director’s Fortnight, all via Perego’s production company Leaf Entertainment with producer Michael Cerenzie. But Perego is emphatic that none of this is about him. “Artists Haven is about ‘we’, not ‘I’” he says. He’s focused on riding this Cannes wave to create a call to action. We need community, he points out, of the sort that harkens back to the days of United Artists.

If you look at my background from sports, I learned from the team group, I learned the discipline, and how important it is to collaborate all the time. Football, in particular, showed me that success is never individual — it is built through trust, sacrifice, and a shared goal.

Marco Perego

His manifesto reads, in part: “In a time when the film industry was dominated by powerful studios, a group of artists—Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks—refused to be just employees of a system that limited their voices. In 1919, they made history by founding United Artists, a revolutionary company designed not by businessmen, but by artists for artists. It wasn’t just about business—it was about taking back control, protecting their creative visions, and building a new model where freedom came first.”

Using a $10M investment fund, the collective aims to “create a financial model that honors both investors and artists equally, with “a waterfall split of 50% for those that fund the dream and 50% for those who bring it to life.”

Perego says his inspiration also came from looking back on his earlier career as a soccer player and his continuing work as a conceptual artist and realizing it was the team and the collective that made it all work.

“I think it’s such an important moment right now,” he says. “I was very lucky to be part of all these four films, but the mission for me is the more important thing… I think cultural expression is the most important thing to protect. I really believe it. If you look at my background from sports, from being a soccer player to an artist, I really learned from sport, I learned from the team group, I learned the discipline, and how important it is to collaborate all the time. Football, in particular, showed me that success is never individual — it is built through trust, sacrifice, and a shared goal.”

Petrichor, the new feature he’s just directed, is a case in point. Perego gives major credit to co-writer Alexander Dinelaris (Birdman, Digger) for his fearless feedback, and this is what he hopes Artists’ Haven can give to its members. “He’s my mentor, Alex. He destroyed everything I do!” Perego smiles. “Collaborating with him is one of the more incredible things. I’m serious… I wrote the first part, then he went and rewrote it perfectly. I learned so much. When I sit down with him, I’m learning.”

Perego likens these collaborative discussions to the vital preliminary drawings he makes for his conceptual art. When he has dinner with his filmmaker friends and Zoe Saldaña, his actor-producer wife of 13 years, “That’s where the drawing is.”

The term Petrichor, coming from the Greek, means the smell of the earth after rainfall, and is about “rebirth” he says. the story was inspired by Perego’s mother’s loss of the ability to speak for three years, caused by stroke. Her aphasia has now thankfully resolved. The film stars Isabella Rosselini, Valeria Golino and Victor Almanzar.

As for why Perego believes a sense of community has been lacking for filmmakers of late, he says, “It’s a complicated question. It’s multiple things, multiple factors. I think we tend to come in more and more with a ‘product placement’ in everything we’re doing.” For example, he likens the way that “A painting now becomes just an object and a pure commodity.”

He has a radical approach to his conceptual art he says, explaining he’s currently working on a project involving growing live mold. But he wants to bring that radicalism to filmmaking. This approach, plus the fact that he’s relatively new to producing film, means, he says, “You can say I’m not part of the system. I’m just a community person.” He and Saldaña are “community people”, he says, and believing in his fellow filmmakers’ vision is what pushed him to work hard to find funding for films like Paper Tiger. “My partner is an incredible human being and very inspiring. She’s always building a community zone for women. I think about Zoe and I think [building community] what we do together very well.”

Part of Artists Haven’s manifesto is about not dropping filmmakers when a project fails in some way, but instead, sticking with them. “If one project does not succeed, we move forward together and make another. We are in the same boat, sharing the same risks, the same hopes, and the same commitment to creating meaningful work.”

With all his success at the festival right now, Perego is full of plans to strengthen Artists’ Haven for the future: “I have a very strong family-like community of people, of artists and I just want to start to have this conversation after Cannes.”