MUBI Acquires Sundance Doc ‘Free Chol Soo Lee’ About a Social Justice Movement

Lewis Lee told Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio how she first became aware of the disproportionate numbers of preventable deaths of Black mothers and babies.“Way back in 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked me to be the spokesperson for their infant mortality awareness raising campaign called ‘A Healthy Baby Begins With You,’” she said.

Angelique Jackson Filmmakers Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Sundance award-winning documentary “Aftershock” has been acquired by Disney’s Onyx Collective and ABC News.News of the joint acquisition comes after the feature won the U.S. Documentary special jury award for impact for change at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, where it made its debut as an official selection last month.

Naman Ramachandran Protagonist Pictures has closed multiple deals for several key territories on Sundance selection and Berlin Film Festival competition title “Call Jane.”Territories sold include DCM for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Umbrella Entertainment for Australia and New Zealand, Mis.label for Scandinavia, Eagle for Italy, Shaw for Singapore and Empire for South Africa.Directed by Phyllis Nagy, the Oscar nominated writer of “Carol,” the film stars Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Mara and Chris Messina. The film follows Joy (Banks), a traditional 1960s housewife who unexpectedly falls pregnant and finds the Janes, an underground abortion movement led by Virginia (Weaver).

Anna Marie de la Fuente It’s a new dawn for Chile’s audiovisual industry. When Gabriel Boric, Chile’s youngest (at 35) and most left-leaning president since Salvador Allende, was elected in December, his pledge to more than double the state’s contribution to the arts was greeted with great fanfare.  After all, Chile’s prodigious film output this past decade has been remarkable despite the scant public support it has received. “If everything we have achieved in the last 10 years was done with so little money, imagine what we can achieve with an increase in audiovisual funding!” says Constanza Arena, executive director of Chile’s film promotion org, CinemaChile.In recent years, Chile has triumphed at the Oscars, starting when Pablo Larraín’s “No” was nominated for international feature in 2012, and culminating in an Oscar win for Sebastian Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman” in 2017.

EXCLUSIVE: Screen Media has acquired North American rights to the horror film The Accursed, from director Kevin Lewis (Willy’s Wonderland), which stars Mena Suvari (American Beauty), Sarah Grey (Power Rangers), Meg Foster (They Live) and Alexis Knapp (Pitch Perfect). The Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment company has slated the title, which is currently in post-production, for a theatrical day-and-date release this fall.

Anna Marie de la Fuente It’s a new dawn for Chile’s audiovisual industry. When Gabriel Boric, Chile’s youngest (at 35) and most left-leaning president since Salvador Allende, was elected in December, his pledge to more than double the state’s contribution to the arts was greeted with great fanfare.After all, Chile’s prodigious film output this past decade has been remarkable despite the scant public support it has received.“If everything we have achieved in the last 10 years was done with so little money, imagine what we can achieve with an increase in audiovisual funding!” says Constanza Arena, executive director of Chile’s film promotion org, CinemaChile.In recent years, Chile has triumphed at the Oscars, starting when Pablo Larraín’s “No” was nominated for international feature in 2012, and culminating in an Oscar win for Sebastian Lelio’s “A Fantastic Woman” in 2017.

EXCLUSIVE: Abbey Lee (The Neon Demon, Lovecraft Country) and Christopher Abbott (Black Bear, Catch-22) are attached to lead Fear is the Rider, a chase thriller from BAFTA-nominated director John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary, The Forgiven) that The Exchange is introducing to international buyers at the 2022 virtual EFM.

Guy Lodge Film CriticReconstruction in documentary filmmaking is an eternally divisive technique: What some deem vivid and immediate, others find distancing and artificial, cloaking and blurring reality in the language of fiction cinema. Yet what if the reconstructions don’t just feature the documentary’s real-life subjects, but are expressly conceived and realized by them — not recreating reality so much as their lingering, haunted memories thereof? That’s a different proposition entirely, as is “Procession,” a risky, wrenching film in which celebrated docmaker Robert Greene frequently surrenders the directorial reins to his subjects and collaborators: six middle-aged, middle-American men living with the trauma of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic Church priests and clergymen.

EXCLUSIVE: Cinedigm has acquired North American rights to Coast, a coming-of-age drama starring Fatima Ptacek (Dora the Explorer), stand-up comedian Cristela Alonzo (Cristela), Academy Award winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter) and Ciara Bravo (Cherry), with plans to release it day-and-date in theaters and on VOD on April 8. VMI Worldwide, which is handling international sales and distribution, will rep the film at the Berlin Film Festival when it kicks off on February 10.

In 1973, at the age of 23, Korean immigrant Chol Soo Lee was arrested. An outsider within San Francisco’s Chinatown, Lee was charged with first-degree murder after being accused of shooting a Chinese gang member in the back at point-blank range.

The deals keep coming at the 2022 Virtual Sundance Film Festival. MUBI closed the docu Free Chol Soo Lee, including North America, and Warner Bros is negotiating a near $7 million WW rights deal for the Tig Notaro/Stephanie Allynne film Am I Ok? to place the film on HBO Max. The Lauren Pomerantz-scripted film stars Dakota Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno, Jermaine Fowler, Molly Gordon, June Diane Raphael, and Sean Hayes.

Wyatte Grantham-Philips editor“Free Chol Soo Lee” has been acquired by global distributor, streamer and production company MUBI.The documentary, which premiered last week at the Sundance Film Festival, will come to U.S. theaters in 2022, with release plans in other territories (Latin America, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Turkey, the U.K.

Angelique Jackson Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to the Sundance award-winning documentary “Descendant,” by filmmaker Margaret Brown (“The Order of Myths,” “Be Here to Love Me: Townes Van Zandt,” “The Great Invisible”). Higher Ground, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s production company, will present the Participant feature alongside Netflix later this year.The film follows members of Africatown, a small community in Alabama, as they share their personal stories and community history as descendants of the Clotilda, the last known ship carrying enslaved Africans to the United States.

including here at TheWrap), but has drawn fire on social media for the fact that the film calls the men “terrorists,” and because the filmmaker herself is not Muslim. One typical tweet by writer Jude Chehab of Turkish news website TRT World says: “When I, a practising Muslim woman say [the film’] is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying it’s not.”Smaker, who spent five years making the film, told TheWrap that the movie challenges assumptions about people Americans regard as terrorists, while also offering a never-before-seen perspective into the men who embraced the ideology of groups like al Qaeda.

IFC Films and Shudder have taken North American rights to Andrew Semans’ psychological thriller Resurrection starring Rebecca Hall, Tim Roth, Grace Kaufman and Michael Esper.

Julian Alvarez might already have realised he will not be given any special treatment as he prepares to sign for Manchester City during the January transfer window.

poisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday. Called “Navalny,” it’s a no-holds-barred indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and insists that Navalny’s close brush with death was the result of a secret state-run operation to assassinate him.“As I became more and more famous guy, I was totally sure that my life became safer and safer because I am kind of famous guy — and it will be problematic for them just to kill me,” Navalny, 45, says in the film. “I was very wrong.” The doc, heading to HBO Max, was added at the last minute to the Sundance slate just as Putin had stationed more than 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border.

Lisa Kennedy Every now and again, a documentary filmmaker finds a bona fide star to pin the meaning of her film on, a figure so compelling she leaves a comet trail of thoughts and feelings after the movie’s end. Isabel Castro’s “Mija” boasts two: music manager Doris Muñoz and singer Jacks Haupt. Make that three, including the writer-director herself.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterSundance Film Festival has revealed a mystery movie on its 2022 lineup.“Navalny,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has been a late addition to the festival’s agenda. The film will debut on Jan. 25 at 6 p.m.

It’s not all that often that Lee Daniels directs a film. Before the release of 2020’s “The United States vs.