‘Sirens’: Oscilloscope Lands North American Rights To Wild Rock Doc About Female Beirut Thrash Metal Band

Peter White
·2 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Sirens, a rock doc about Beirut all-female thrash metal band Slave to Sirens, will get a theatrical run after Oscilloscope Laboratories bought the North American rights.

The company, which was founded by Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, will give the film that premiered at Sundance in January an exclusive theatrical run before launching it on digital platforms.

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Directed by Rita Baghdadi, who shot and produced the film along with producing partner Camila Hall, the film explores the lives and music of Slave to Sirens, a band made up of five young metalheads whose burgeoning fame is set against the backdrop of the Lebanese revolution.

Its members wrestle with friendship, sexuality, and destruction as their music serves as a refuge to Beirut’s youth culture. At the band’s core are its two founding members, Lilas Mayassi and Shery Bechara, whose complicated relationship and subsequent tense fallout threatens the very fabric of the band. An even greater looming threat, however, is Lebanon’s criminalization of homosexuality, as well as the wholly devastating effects of their country’s political regime. Despite their obvious challenges, the members of Slave to Sirens persist in trying to create a revolution of their own: living their truth.

The doc is produced by Baghdadi’s Endless Eye, Lady & Bird and Maya Rudolph and Natasha Lyonne’s Animal Pictures in association with XTR. It is produced by Rita Baghdadi and Camilla Hall, co-produced by Tatiana el Dahdah, Jeremiah Hammerling and Jennifer Tiexiera, and executive produced by Animal Pictures’ Danielle Renfrew Behrens, Lyonne, and Rudolph, as well as former Netflix VP of Original Content Cindy Holland, Dave Pell, John Boccardo, Derek Esplin, Kathryn Everett, and Bryn Mooser.

CAA Media Finance brokered the deal on behalf of the filmmakers.

It marks the latest rock doc for Oscilloscope, which distributed Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio’s May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers.

Baghdadi said, “I’m so excited to work with O-Scope in North America. I’ve admired their punk-rock spirit for years and I know they’ll be a meaningful partner on Sirens.”

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