Luxbox Closes Sales on Venice Film ‘Sole’ to U.S., France (EXCLUSIVE)

Leo Barraclough

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Fiorella Moretti and Hedi Zardi’s Paris-based sales agency Luxbox has closed several territory deals on Carlos Sironi’s “Sole,” which screened in Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section and Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery sidebar. The film just won the audience award at Pingyao Intl. Film Festival in China and a Special Jury Mention for the lead actors at Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal.

The film, which will be released in Italy this week by Officina Ubu, has been picked up in France by Damien Megherbi and Justin Pechberty’s Les Valseurs. In the U.S., the film has been acquired by 1844 Entertainment, which previously enjoyed success with Luxbox’s “The Heiresses” and “Rojo.”

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Luxbox also sealed deals on “Sole” with Fabula in Turkey and Cine Colombia in Colombia. Further deals will be announced soon.

In “Sole,” Sandra Drzymalska and Claudio Segaluscio star as a couple who pose as parents to be, when in reality the woman is acting as the surrogate for a businessman and his wife. Variety’s reviewer wrote: “Sironi’s film effectively blends the warm-blooded emotional stakes of classic Italian melodrama with the cooler, more rigorous language of new Eastern European cinema.”

Luxbox also revealed it has added Sharunas Bartas’ “In the Dusk” to its slate. The film explores the definition of good and evil in post World War II Lithuania as we follow the young Unté, a member of an anti-Soviet resistance group. Luxbox previously represented Bartas’ films “Peace to Us in Our Dreams” and “Frost.”

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