An independent production house, with a slate built around the optical and storytelling traditions of mid-century European cinema, deployed for stories that live in this century.
GLADiiUM Films develops, finances, and produces feature films and serialized short-form content with an emphasis on rigorous craft and singular voice. Our first slate is The Fortune Teller of the Golden Lane — a three-film trilogy set in Prague, accompanied by a twenty-one-piece spinoff constellation. The trilogy is the studio's first principal-photography commitment and the framework against which our optical, narrative, and production methodology is being tested.
We work in Prague, Los Angeles, and across Europe. Our production discipline favors small unit photography, documented optical lineage, and locations as their actual selves — the city in the script is the city in the frame. The Fortune Teller's kit is built around French and British cinema glass of the late 1950s and early 1960s, deployed on modern sensors, in service of a story the lenses were not, originally, made to tell.
Francisco Javier is the writer and director of The Fortune Teller of the Golden Lane. He works between Prague and Los Angeles. Fortune Teller is his trilogy commitment — the project around which GLADiiUM Films was built.
His filmmaking is grounded in the belief that the camera is not a recording device but a witness, and that the witness's voice — the lens, its lineage, its choice of aperture and squeeze — is part of the storytelling. He writes in long form (each of the three feature scripts runs above 110 pages) and treats production design, casting, and the optical kit as part of the same authorship.
A small set of working principles that hold our productions together.
We deploy lenses with documented provenance — the optical foundation is researched, sourced, and verified at academic-grade rigor. The kit travels as a documented working archive of cinema technology.
Whenever a script names a real location, the production shoots that location. The Café Louvre is the Café Louvre. The Charles Bridge is the Charles Bridge. Constructed sets are reserved for what cannot be photographed in the world.
We favor compact unit photography with the deepest possible head-of-department craft. The kit is large; the unit is small. Most days carry one A-camera and a defined creative scope.
The Fortune Teller is written in English, Czech, and German — every casting document we publish exists in the languages the role lives in. The trilogy's audience is European before it is global.
We develop projects as slates — features and short-form together — and finance them as one creative ask. The shorts are not bonus material. They are the trilogy's fourth movement.
Every craft document — lens bible, casting spec, location scout, sound brief, VFX breakdown — is treated as a finished deliverable from the first draft. Production happens during preparation; principal photography is its execution.
For festival programmers, press, prospective partners, and the genuinely curious: hello@gladiumfilms.com.
For credentialed financiers and distributors requesting the investor package: investors@gladiumfilms.com.