Cinephil Nabs Worldwide Rights to Torstein Grude’s IDFA Player ‘Mogadishu Soldier’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Tel Aviv-based Cinephil has acquired worldwide rights to Torstein Grude’s “Mogadishu Soldier,” a documentary exec produced by Joshua Oppenheimer (“The Act of Killing,” “The Look of Silence”).
“Mogadishu Soldier,” which explores life in war-torn Somalia through the eyes of two Burundian soldiers, will compete this week at IDFA in Amsterdam.
Edited by Niels Pagh Andersen (“The Act of Killing”), the doc chronicles the fight against the jihadist militants of Al-Shabaab taking place in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia where two million people live.
Oppenheimer described the doc as an “urgent, haunting look at our secret wars, through the eyes of the men we use to fight them.”
“Mogadishu Soldier” was produced by Mørner Tveit and Grude at Piraya Film. Peter Engel at Wingman Media and Kaarle Aho at Making Movies co-produced.
Philippa Kowarsky, managing director of Cinephil, said “Mogadishu Soldier” was an “outstanding achievement combining true-to-life filming in places no outsider could get to, or would want to go, with the best that documentary films can offer.”
Tveit said he hoped the collaboration with Cinephil, a distributor with a track record in handling impactful documentary features, will give “new audiences an opportunity to see what the soldier’s life on the ground in Somalia is like, while they fight the militant Islamists in Al-Shabaab on our behalf.”
Cinephil will launch sales at IDFA’s confab, Docs for Sale.
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