AFM: Trudy Blue (Dakota Johnson), Above and Below (Antonio Banderas)
Palisades Park Pictures (The Revisionist) has picked up The Magic Faraway Tree starring Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, The Social Network, Red Riding)alongside Claire Foy (All of Us Strangers, 2023). The children’s book series features trees reaching the clouds and gnomes stealing from elves and chocolate houses.
B-Rated International (Sorella di Clausura) secures rights to Buzzheart, a genre-bending thriller set in 90s Greece from horror filmmaker Dennis Iliadis (Delirium). The shocking drama had its world premiere last year at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
Being sold by Germany’s Kinostar (Run), the new Armie Hammer comeback film Citizen Vigilante (fka The Dark Knight) finds distribution with Free Wind for German-speaking Europe and Event Film (Free Shift) for everywhere else.
Watermelon Pictures (The Voice of Hind Rajab) snags worldwide rights to Shoot the People, a documentary following the life and work of photographer Misan Harriman. Directed by BAFTA winner Andy Mundy-Castle (White Nanny, Black Child), the political drama doc premieres in the U.S. at Doc NYC later this month.
Rebel Wilson’s directorial feature debut, The Deb, goes with Protagonist Pictures (The Brutalist) for worldwide sales (outside of Australia and New Zealand). The Deb follows an outcast who clashes with her cousin during one chaotic night leading up to the town’s debutante ball. Vertigo Releasing (Dead of Winter) is distributing the film in the U.K. and Ireland.
Kid’s time-travel adventure film The Secret Floor goes international with Munich’s The Playmaker (Never Alone). The sales agent has made deals in Germany’s Farbfilm, India’s BookMyShow, the Baltics’ Unlimited Media, and Encripta for Latin America.
Reenactment
Cast: Ana De Armas (attached), Benicio Del Toro, Cameron Diaz
Dir: Grant Singer (Reptile)
Sales Rep: 193
Shearing The Love
Dir/Wri: Tom Hern (2nd unit dir. Shadow in the Cloud)
Star: Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean)
Prod. Company: Four Knights Film (The American)
Sales Rep: Essential Film Group (Netflix’s Night of the Reaper)
Synopsis:
Brian Castlehead, a once-famous hairdresser to the stars, is called home to his rural hometown of Masterton, New Zealand to avert a family crisis. Brian enters the World Championship of competitive sheep-shearing to save his family from shame and financial ruin.
The Outer Threat
Dir/Wri: William Woods (wri. The King Tide)
Star(s): Constance Wu (Crazy Rich Asians) and William Fichtner (Contact)
Prod: Maddy Falle (Witches in the Woods) and Albert Shin (In Her Place)
Sales Rep: The Coven (Terrifier 3)
Synopsis:
An astrophysicist’s alien discovery forces him and his family to flee their home, chased by a mysterious pursuer. Their escape tests the limits between cosmic truth and paranoia.
Children of The Resistance (Les enfants de la Résistance)
Dir/Wri: Christophe Barratier (The Chorus)
Star(s): Julien Arruti (Heartbreaker) and Pierre Deladonchamps (A Kid)
Prod. Company: Axel Films (Babysitting franchise)
Sales Rep: StudioCanal (I’m Still Here)
Synopsis:
A group of 13-year-olds in Nazi-occupied France who form an undercover cell to resist the Nazis, sparking a quiet resistance movement in their village.
VMI Worldwide will handle world sales for Boop, a horror reimagining of 1930s cartoon icon Betty Boop. The film follows horror podcasters investigating an abandoned theater haunted by the vengeful starlet. This is in the same vein as other public domain slashers like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, a popular and strangely lucrative horror genre.
Jessica Alba plays a spy. She will star in The Mark from director Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl).
Synopsis:
When a covert spy named Eden (Alba) pulls an unsuspecting single father into her mission, he’s mistaken for the world’s deadliest assassin. She uses the mix-up to expose a powerful network of corruption, while he tries to find a way back to his daughter.
The film is being sold at AFM by Highland Film Group.
Alba has not had top billing on a domestically released film since A24’s Barely Lethal (2015), which did $933K worldwide. But she shocked everyone with the top-most-watched streaming film last June with Trigger Warning (Netflix), which pulled in 46M hours viewed in 3 days.
Alba is still wildly popular from Fantastic Four and Sin City. Highland Film Group (Rust, Land of Bad) produces.
Trudy Blue
Dir: Angus MacLane (Finding Dory)
Wri: Ewan Twohy (Sundance’s Bubble & Squeak)
Star: Dakota Johnson (Materialists)
Prod: Johnson’s TeaTime Pictures (Splittsville) and Saks Picture Company (Fool’s Paradise)
Sales Rep: 193 (Die My Love)
Synopsis:
Follows an outlawed android maid who awakens in a landfill 2,000 miles from home and must journey through a foreign world to return where she belongs.
Woozy
Dir/Wri: Joey Bicicchi
Star(s): Jeff Adler (Deliver Me from Nowhere) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild)
Prod. Company: Unified Pictures (Break)
Sales Rep: Archstone Entertainment (Succubus)
Synopsis:
A man’s structured life to cope with mental health issues unravels when a horrifying apparition called Woozy starts tormenting him, forcing him to confront his fears.
Above and Below
Dir: Jesse V. Johnson (Chief of Station)
Star(s): Antonio Banderas and Laura Marano (Austin & Ally)
Prod. Company: AF Films (Sorry, Baby)
Dist: Capstone Global (Fall)
Sales Rep: Capture Entertainment (Doin’ It)
Synopsis:
Friends embark on a dream vacation of parties and diving, but their trip takes a terrifying turn when criminals attack them at sea.
Trial By Combat
Dir: Renny Harlin (The Strangers franchise)
Wri: Matthew Wilson (The Virgins)
Star: Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight)
Prod. Company: Thunder Road Pictures (John Wick)
Sales Rep: Architect (I Don’t Understand You)
Synopsis:
Follows John Porter, a once-great Champion in a near future where legal trials are settled by gladiatorial combat, who seeks revenge against his nemesis in a battle to destroy a corrupt judicial system.
Fish
Dir/Wri: Carlo Hintermann (The Book of Vision)
Star(s): Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction) and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria)
Prod. Company: Amour Fou Luxembourg (Hannah Arendt)
Sales Rep: Minerva Pictures (The Secret Agent)
Synopsis:
Art history professor Fish Osborne discovers that he is turning into a fish, and his students begin to discover they too are mutating - physically, emotionally, or spiritually - as part of a greater evolution.