Cinema Guild Buys Cannes Competition Title ‘In Front of Your Face’ for U.S.

Jessica Kiang Hong Sangsoo characters have a habit of — you might even say a genius for — diffidence in the face of profundity.

Emiliano De Pablos Sales agency Heretic has picked-up worldwide sales rights to “The Sacred Spirit,” Spaniard Chema García Ibarra’s feature debut, which world premieres in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival.Its teaser trailer is launching exclusively in Variety.García Ibarra’s awaited feature debut, “Sacred Spirit” blends local detail and dystopian surrealism, following José Manuel and the other members of a Spanish Ufology association -UFO-Levante- who meet weekly to

EXCLUSIVE: Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up North American rights to Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s first fiction feature film The Tale Of King Crab.

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Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterContinuing its victory lap around the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, indie studio NEON has acquired the North American distribution rights to “A Chiara.”The Jonas Carpignano film won the top prize in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight section. It is a companion film to his 2017 “A Ciambra,” for which he took the same award that year.

Not even a global pandemic could stop prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, but his latest film deals with ideas and tensions that echo questions and perspectives brought to the surface by this global health crisis. Playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes, “In Front of Your Face” only slowly reveals its hand.

Sony Pictures Classics said Thursday that it has acquired North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Middle East rights to Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6, the Finnish film that just had its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The deal was struck with Totem Films.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentMubi, the London-based streamer and theatrical distributor, has acquired North America, U.K. and more territories on Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, The Sacred Bonds,” a highlight of the Cannes Film Festival competition.The powerful Chadian abortion drama has received unanimous critical praise and is being talked about as a potential Palme d’Or winner at the midpoint of the festival.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAsghar Farhadi, an Oscar winner for “A Separation” and “The Salesman,” is in Cannes with “A Hero,” the Iranian auteur’s fourth film to world premiere in the festival’s competition after “The Past,” “The Salesman” and Spanish-language “Everybody Knows.”“A Hero,” which sees Farhadi returning to filmmaking in Iran, is about a man named Rahim who is in prison because of an unpaid debt.

EXCLUSIVE: Growing South Korean streaming service Watcha is having a busy Cannes, landing local rights to three buzz titles here in the festival.

Christopher Vourlias Three years after his musical drama “Leto” bowed on the Croisette, Kirill Serebrennikov returns to Cannes’ main competition with “Petrov’s Flu,” a deadpan, hallucinatory romp through a post-Soviet Russia in the grips of a mysterious flu epidemic. The acclaimed director spoke to Variety about living with fear and making the most out of solitude.How did you get involved with “Petrov’s Flu”? I was hired to write the script.

Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie will be busy in Cannes with two films world premiering in Competition. It’s not a new phenomenon for onscreen talent to be supporting various movies, but Lie stands out as likely the only professional actor who will be heading to the Palais while taking time off from his other job as a full-time physician: the doctor has lately been working with the Covid-19 vaccination program in Oslo, and has for years straddled both callings.

Christopher Vourlias Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun returns to the sun-scrubbed Sahel region of West Africa for his latest feature, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which competes for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.Set on the outskirts of the capital city of N’Djamena, “Lingui” is the story of a single mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), whose already fragile world threatens to collapse when she learns that her daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio Brahim), is pregnant — a

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorLeading arthouse sales company The Match Factory has pre-sold Austrian director and screenwriter Sebastian Meise’s second feature “Great Freedom,” which plays in Un Certain Regard at Cannes on Thursday, to Paname Distribution in France.

Israeli writer/director Nadav Lapid has been on the international radar for quite some time, 2011’s “Policeman” made international waves, and 2014’s ‘The Kindergarten Teacher” was so well regarded, Hollywood, Netflix, and Maggie Gyllenhaal made a remake in 2018. But things started to really take off for Lapid after “Synonyms” won the Golden Bear award at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2019 and introduced most of the world to breakout star Tom Mercier.

The 2021 Cannes Film Festival is kicking off!

When we talk about fast, prolific filmmakers that are able to get a film made in a short amount of time and never sit around and let years go by without a new feature, we often talk about Steven Soderbergh, for example. However, you could argue that no one is as prolific or as fast as filmmaker Hong Sang-soo.

The first decade of Nadav Lapid’s career has been a rapid ascension to the top.