Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired all North American rights for Catherine Breillat’s drama Last Summer (L’été dernier) following its well-received premiere in competition in the final days of the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27).
21.05.2023 - 04:43 / variety.com
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Flawless, XYZ Films and Tea Shop Productions have acquired the Cannes Critics’ Week selection “Vincent Must Die” for all English-speaking territories from Goodfellas. Flawless, the pioneering film technology company and a leader in the field of visual translation, recently announced it has launched a partnership with XYZ Films and Tea Shop Productions to acquire rights to foreign-language films, converting them to English for distribution in relevant markets. Directed by Stéphan Castang, “Vincent Must Die” is written by Mathieu Naert, produced by Thierry Lounas and Claire Bonnefoy, and stars Karim Leklou and Vimala Pons. In the film, an ordinary man finds himself fighting for his life after he goes out one day and is mysteriously attacked by random strangers in the street with the intent to kill him.
This is the first film from the production company Wild West. Goodfellas and Capricci joined forces to create Wild West, a production company dedicated to the broadest possible range of genre cinema (fantasy, horror, science fiction, whodunit, thriller). Every year, feature films and series will be developed, drawing on both the creativity of young French artists, and the project laboratory of the SOFILM genre screenwriting residencies. Flawless will implement its TrueSync technology to create perfectly lip-synced visual translations of acquired titles, while XYZ will leverage its distribution and sales resources to maximize each title’s theatrical, VOD, and OTT opportunities in English-speaking markets. The partnership unlocks the potential of foreign-language films that until now could not reach a mainstream audience due to immersion-breaking subtitles and out-of-sync dubs.
Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired all North American rights for Catherine Breillat’s drama Last Summer (L’été dernier) following its well-received premiere in competition in the final days of the Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27).
Last weekend was a huge one for the blue half of the city. There will have been plenty of sore heads on Monday morning after Manchester City celebrated winning their third Premier League title in a row. It is a feat only matched by Sir Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the modern era.
Christopher Vourlias XYZ Films has closed a raft of deals for Czech filmmaker Robert Hloz’s science-fiction feature “Restore Point,” which is part of the company’s recently launched New Visions slate of genre films. The film has been sold to Germany and Switzerland (Plaion); Scandinavia (NonStop); France (The Jokers); and Australia/New Zealand (Umbrella). Several other territories are in active negotiations, while XYZ is also confirmed to handle the U.S. release of the film. “Restore Point” is set in the year 2041, when the gaps in social and economic inequality have left the world on the brink. A breakthrough in science has given humanity the ability to bring victims of a violent crime back to life by backing up their brain every two days. This affords an ambitious young detective the opportunity to solve a case of a murdered couple when the restoration team is able to bring one of them back.
Marta Balaga In collaboration with Mexico’s Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), Cannes’ Critics’ Week has presented four shorts by upcoming Mexican directors on Thursday: Daniela Silva Solórzano’s “The Things I Tell You”; “The Short Film” by José Luis Isoard Arrubarrena; “To Go Away and Come Back” by José Permar: and “A Hand Beneath the Snow” by José Esteban Pavlovich. “We started by presenting Critics’ Week’s films at our festival, because it’s an important section for Mexico. That’s where Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu were first discovered,” explains FICM’s director Daniela Michel.
Having previously won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for “The Son’s Room” and premiered the majority of his films in competition, Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti has been a mainstay at the Cannes Film Festival for several decades.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Leonardo Di Caprio, Tobey Maguire, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Queen Latifah were among the guests at Aston Martin’s 110th anniversary party Wednesday at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. The luxury car company also unveiled the first in a new generation of sportscars, the DB12. Other actors in attendance included Kate Beckinsale, James Marsden and James Bond actor Jeffrey Wright. They were joined by singer-songwriter Adam Lambert. The world of fashion was represented by leading models Winnie Harlow, Lais Ribeiro, Alessandra Ambrosio and Poppy Delevingne.
With the Cannes Film Festival heading towards its conclusion on Saturday, the first awards are starting to trickle out. Sidebar Critics’ Week, which is devoted to first and second features, closed this evening, honoring Amanda Nell Eu’s debut Tiger Stripes with its Grand Prize. (Scroll down for the full list of winners).
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Tiger Stripes,” the debut feature of Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics Week, the Cannes sidebar dedicated to first or second films. The prize was awarded by a jury presided over by Audrey Diwan, the Venice prizewinning director of “Happening.” The French Touch Jury Award went to Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “It’s Raining in the House,” a film about adolescence, while the Revelation prize from the Louis Roederer Foundation was handed out to Jovan Ginic, the actor of Vladimir Perisic’s “Lost Country.” The SACD prize, meanwhile, went to “Le Ravissement” by Iris Kaltenbäck.
Naman Ramachandran Global distributor, streamer and production company MUBI has acquired Felipe Gálvez’ “The Settlers,” which bowed on Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section. MUBI has acquired the film for North America, U.K., Latin America, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Benelux and India. MUBI will release the film theatrically in the U.S., U.K., and additional territories with release plans to be revealed soon. “The Settlers” is set in Chile at the beginning of the 20th century. A wealthy landowner hires three horsemen to mark out the perimeter of his extensive property and open a route to the Atlantic Ocean across vast Patagonia. The expedition, composed of a young Chilean mestizo, an American mercenary, and led by a reckless British lieutenant, soon turns into a ‘civilizing’ raid.
EXCLUSIVE: Indie distributor Breaking Glass Pictures has acquired Holistay, a horror genre feature from first-time director Mary Gallagher.
Christopher Vourlias XYZ Films has acquired North American sales rights to “StayOnline,” from Ukrainian director Anton Skrypets, which uses the innovative Screenlife format to tell the story of a young Kyiv woman who risks her life to help a boy whose parents have gone missing after the Russian invasion. “StayOnline” was co-written by Skrypets and Eva Strelnikova, who also served as director of photography. It was produced by Marina Kvasova and Alla Lypovetska of the Organization of Ukrainian Producers (OUP). The film begins when a young woman volunteering in Kyiv is given one of the thousands of laptops donated by ordinary Ukrainians to support the war effort. She’s asked to install a sensitive military application and deliver the laptop to her brother serving on the frontline.
EXCLUSIVE: AI is in the eye of the storm in LA right now amid the writers’ strike and is also a talking point at the Cannes Film Festival due to the de-aging of Harrison Ford for Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny.
In an early scene of French director Stéphan Castang’s Cannes Critics’ Week entry Vincent Must Die, a colleague of the film’s titular protagonist whacks him around the head with his laptop. A little later, another workmate stabs him in the arm. “He’s just an average guy who wakes up one morning to discover that everyone wants to kill him,” Castang explains. The debut feature follows in the wake of Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Just Philippot’s The Swarm as French genre titles to be championed by the first and second film-focused Critics’ Week.
Recently split from his co-worker girlfriend, Vincent (Karim Leklou) is having a bad day at the office. First, a young intern batters him over the head with a laptop, and then Yves from accounting stabs him savagely with a pen. And after a meeting with human resources, the poor guy is left with the curious feeling that, somehow, he deserved it. Even his shrink, who has a print of J.M.W. Turner’s ironic masterpiece “The Fighting Temeraire” on his wall, thinks so, planting further seeds of doubt in Vincent’s mind. “I think you’re looking for attention from those who attack you,” he decides.
Naman Ramachandran XYZ Films has unveiled the first clip from Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection “In Flames,” a Pakistani-Canadian horror film directed by Zarrar Kahn. The film, produced by Anam Abbas and executive produced by Shant Joshi, Todd Brown and Maxime Cottray, is part of XYZ’s New Visions slate. As revealed by Variety, XYZ had boarded the title last year. In the Karachi-set film, after the death of the family patriarch, a mother and daughter’s precarious existence is ripped apart by figures from their past – both real and phantasmal. They must find strength in each other if they are to survive the malevolent forces that threaten to engulf them.
EXCLUSIVE: UK company Architect was recently founded by sales executives Calum Gray and Max Pirkis, together with Patrick Fischer and Richard Kondal of financier Creativity Capital.
EXCLUSIVE: Maika Monroe (It Follows) and Troy Kotsur (CODA) have been cast as leads in crime thriller In Cold Light which will mark the English-language debut of French-Canadian director Maxime Giroux (Felix And Meira).
Brie Larson didn’t understand why she was being asked specifically how she felt about Johnny Depp‘s film opening for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
“Elemental” and Martin Scorsese’s Apple-produced “Killers of the Flower Moon” an additional veneer of vindication. As to the box-office futures of the 20-odd films competing for this year’s Palme d’Or, certainly none will reach the international highs of James Mangold’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” but then, none were ever expected to.Instead — and at its best — Cannes works as a sophisticated shell game, channeling the glamour of the red carpet and the frenzy of 40,000 accredited guests to make glitzy international events out of existential Turkish dramas like Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses,” existential Finnish dramedies like Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves”or intimate two-headers about 19th-century French gastronomy like Tran Anh Hung’s “The Pot au Feu.”Other Palme d’Or contenders will come with built-in SEO, as Wes Anderson’s more-star-packed-than-usual “Asteroid City”threatens to saddle red-carpet rubberneckers with a permanent case of whiplash once the Texan auteur’s full repertory company mounts the Palais steps alongside new additions Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson.That all the aforementioned filmmakers could walk those Palais steps in blindfolds is another notable element of an official competition marked by staggering high fidelity.
EXCLUSIVE: Actor Esai Morales is in negotiations to star in the action thriller Shadow, which XYZ Films has boarded and will introduce to buyers this week in Cannes.