Sundance Selects Has Busy Cannes Buying Season

Sundance Selects has had a busy buying season at the Cannes Film Festival. The company, a specialty arm of IFC Films, has acquired some of the Festival’s most notable titles. Its latest pickup is SOMEONE IN LOVE by Iranian director and former Palme d’Or winner Abbas Kiarostami. The film, which made its world premiere in competition last week at the Cannes Film Festival, is an homage to classic Japanese films of the 1950s  and 1960s that emphasized humanistic stories and minute detail in a hypnotic observational style…..clearly an influence for the director in his own oeuvre. Starring Rin Takanashi, Tadashi Okuno and Ryo Kase, the new film explores the sudden relationship of a young woman and old man in Tokyo. Sundance Selects has also acquired the domestic rights to Ken Loach’s rare comic farce THE ANGELS’ SHARE. The film chronicles Robbie, a Scottish youth trying to avoid prison, who sneaks into a maternity hospital to visit his girlfriend and newborn son. This marks the fourth time Loach and Sundance Selects have worked together. One of those projects, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, won the Palme d’Or and was the most successful of Loach’s films at the U.S. domestic box office. Earlier in the Festival, IFC Films/Sundance Selects acquired another Cannes title, the adaptation of the Jack Kerouac beat novel ON THE ROAD, directed by Walter Salles, and was represented at the Festival with previous acquisitions BEYOND THE HILLS by Romanian New Wave auteur Cristian Mungiu, American indie title GIMME THE LOOT by Adam Leon, the Stanley Kubrick documentary ROOM 237 by Rodney Ascher and the buddy comedy SIGHTSEERS by Ben Wheatley.

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