Outsider Pictures Takes Searing Flávia Neves Feature ‘Fogaréu’ for North America (EXCLUSIVE)
L.A.-based Outsider Pictures, a U.S. distribution hub for emerging Spanish-language cinema, has secured North American rights to 2020 Ventana Sur Primer Corte title “Fogaréu,” the debut feature from burgeoning Brazilian director Flávia Neves.
The deal, brokered between Outsider (“Blanquita”) and France’s MPM Premium New Visions arm (“The Pink Cloud”), follows the film’s world premiere at Berlinale’s Panorama in 2022, where it snagged the third place Audience Award.
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“Fogaréu” was a selection at the Neufchâtel International Film Festival and further competed at the Guadalajara Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival and the Mons Love International Festival, where it won the 400 Coups Competition Prize.”
“We’re happy to work with Outsider Pictures again, they’re a great supporter, carrying Latin American voices into North American homes,” Quentin Worthington, head of sales and acquisitions at MPM Premium, told Variety.“
“Infusing fantasy and thriller elements while creating a strong critique of conservative practices inherited from Brazil’s colonial past, ‘Fogaréu’ draws comparison to ‘Bacurau’in many ways, but with a distinctly feminist touch and personal tone,” he added.
“Fogaréu” has also sold to HBO Central and Eastern Europe. Brazilian subscription service Canal Brasil previously pounced on the film for the territory, while London-headquartered Spafax Media, whose clients include Air Canada, Delta, Emirates and The Lufthansa Group, acquired the project for airlines.
Inspired by true accounts, the film takes off as protagonist Fernanda, played by Bárbara Colen (“Verdict”), dives headlong into a hero’s journey after her mother dies and she sets out to spread the ashes while settling up her inheritance, a portion of rural property that rests parallel to indigenous land.
A menacing and incendiary opening scene unfolds as she wades against a tide of torch-welding and festooned masses, mid-celebration ritual, to visit her well-off extended family in Goiás, where her uncle is mayor.
Arriving at their home, the air’s thick with tension. Fernanda stands in contrast to her relations, exuding a breezy, bohemian warmth that clashes with the faux-pleasantries and anxious, rules-bound personas surrounding her.
Upon meeting two women with disabilities that her relatives claim to have adopted, Fernanda suspects that a portion of her heritage was skewed. Digging further, she unearths alarming truths about her family and a community complicit in turning a blind eye to the open atrocities of the town’s powerful bourgeois grandees, who have sacrificed themselves – or so they claim – leading their community.
“Fogaréu” captures a world buried in plain sight, boosting the voices of the tortured and the outcast in a knockout debut that challenges ingrained misogyny, deep-seated prejudice, and still-standing colonial power structures that facilitate indigenous land grabs while honoring the struggles of generational trauma that ripple through bloodlines like a plague.
Through the plot’s mystical underpinnings, a bittersweet justice prevails. Aside from Fernanda, those yielding the highest power are those society has overlooked, Joana (Vilminha Chaves), the film’s playful sage, and whimsical street magician Ezequiel (Timothy Wilson), who serves as the narrative’s darkly mischievous puppeteer.
With an uninhibited and creative moxie, Neves joins an exemplary band of young, female auteurs creating nuanced and homespun national cinema alongside fellow rising filmmakers Carolina Markowicz (“Charcoal”), Caru Alves de Souza (“My Name Is Baghdad”) and Flora Dias (“Wind Road”).
“The plot is inspired by the story of my mother who, from childhood, worked in conditions similar to slave labor for a rich landowner. For this reason, ‘Fogaréu’ starts from a point of view quite new in Brazilian cinema: That of the oppressed over the oppressor,” the director relayed in a statement.
“Fogaréu” is a French-Brazilian co-production backed by the CNC’s Aide Aux Cinemas Du Monde, produced out of France by Blue Monday, producer of “Jeune Femme,” winner of the Cannes Festival’s 2017 Camera d’Or for best first feature, and in Brazil by Vania Catani at Bananeira Filmes (“Zama,” “Medusa”), double International Emmy winner MyMama Entertainment (“Odilon, defendant of himself”) and Caliandra Filmes.
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