Alice Diop’s Venice Prize-Winner ‘Saint Omer’ Acquired By Neon’s Boutique Label Super

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Iranian director Jafar Panahi remains behind bars in Tehran but his cinema continues to travel.

Alice Diop’s Saint Omer has been selected as France’s entry to the best international film category.

Neon, has bought U.S. rights to “Sanctuary,” Zachary Wigon’s much-buzzed-about thriller starring Margaret Qualley as a dominatrix who becomes entangled with a wealthy client, played by Christopher Abbott. The movie world premiered at Toronto, where it earned strong reviews (it currently holds a 93% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes). The acquisition of “Sanctuary” underscores Neon’s ambition to scale up its Super label with higher-profile titles. The company beat out three other distribution banners that bid for the movie, according to a source close to the production.

EXCLUSIVE: French director Alice Diop’s breakout feature Saint Omer has secured distribution in a raft of territories for Paris-based Wild Bunch International (WBI) following its Venice Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize win.

Houman Seyyedi’s darkly comic drama World War III has been named as Iran’s entry for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, taking place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on March 12th, 2023.

Christopher Vourlias Spanish production and distribution company Elamedia has acquired “Tengo sueños eléctricos” (I Have Electric Dreams), the Locarno prize-winning debut by director Valentina Maurel, which will screen in the Horizontes Latinos section of the San Sebastian Film Festival. Elamedia will be releasing the film in Spanish theaters later this year. Set in Costa Rica, “Electric Dreams” follows Eva (Daniela Marin Navarro), a strong-willed 16-year-old girl who lives with her mother, her younger sister and their cat, but desperately wants to move in with her estranged father (Reinaldo Amien Guttierez). Clinging onto him as he goes through a second adolescence, she balances between the tenderness and sensitivity of teenage life and the ruthlessness of the adult world.

Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” has scored U.S. distribution with Neon’s boutique label Super after making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won two major competition awards.Super will release the film in theaters, following its U.S.

Neon’s boutique label Super has secured U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s acclaimed drama Saint Omer, following its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature.

Belgium has selected Lukas Dhont’s Cannes-winning title Close as its official submission to the International Oscar race this year.

Venice Film Festival. Set in England in 1988 as Margaret Thatcher’s government is set to pass the anti-LGBT Section 28 law, “Blue Jean” stars Rosy McEwen as Jean, a gym teacher who must now live a double life.

Ben Croll Acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop marks her narrative debut with “Saint Omer,” a pulled-from-the-headlines legal drama that won the Grand Jury Prize and the award for best debut feature at the Venice Film Festival. High profile slots in Toronto, New York, and London are to come — making the French title one of the real breakouts of this fall season. The wrenching film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a young novelist covering the trial of an immigrant mother accused of infanticide. With major elements never in doubt – the accused, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), admits to the act, though she still pleads not guilty – the Venice winner turns around more intimate, philosophical, and unsettling questions.

On the inhospitable shores of Berck-sur-Mer, France, where the sounds of the tide mingle with a woman’s breathless running, is where Alice Diop’s narrative-feature debut “Saint Omer” begins.

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Tilda Swinton is gracing the red carpet at the 2022 Venice Film Festival!

Jessica Kiang In 2016, in the courtroom of Saint-Omer, a small, untouristed town off a D-road between Calais and Lille, the trial took place of a young Senegalese Frenchwoman accused of murdering her baby: an act so utterly antithetical to accepted ideas of motherhood and womanhood that it is inescapably considered the “worst of all possible crimes.” The woman, a PhD student with a reported genius IQ and a flair for flamboyantly intellectual French, confessed but claimed sorcery as the real culprit. It’s the kind of true story that presents an obvious opportunity for a sensitive social drama given to sober, sorrowfully objective observations about the perilous, tumbling vortex of class, gender, ethnic and cultural issues in which it plays out. “Saint Omer,” the deceptively austere, extraordinarily multifaceted fiction debut from documentarian Alice Diop, is not that film. 

Loneliness, postpartum-depression, motherhood, and isolation are at the core of Alice Diop’s feature film premiering at Venice, Saint Omer. Written by Diop and Marie N’Diaye, the movie stars Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanga. The film sends a message about the pressures of being a single parent and how women connect through trauma.