Cannes: Pyramide Kicks Off Sales on Colombian Camera d’Or Winner ‘Land and Shade’ (EXCLUSIVE)
France’s Pyramide has initiated early sales on Colombian Cesar Acevedo’s “Land and Shade,” Cannes 2015 Camera d’Or and Critics’ Week winner, closing Italy with Claudia Bedogni’s Satine Pictures and Latin America with Elba McAllister’s Cineplex. Pyramide will distribute “Land and Shade” in France.
Lead produced by Diana Bustamante’s Burning Blue, “Land and Shade” also won two prizes at Cannes Critics’ Week: the France 4 Visionary Award and Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers SACD Prize.
Pyramide head Eric Lagesse signaled that the Camera d’Or has raised large interest among distributors. Pyramide is now in discussions with multiple other territories. Some further deals on track to close this forthcoming week, Lagesse added.
Acevedo’s debut, “Land and Shade” is a slice-of-life peasant family drama set on a blighted sugarcane plantation, often in flames as part of the sugarcane harvest and shrouded in ash, to which a man, estranged from his family for many years, returns to rescue his ailing son. But his former wife, now the family matriarch, refuses to leave her land.
Shot in often composed sequence shots, the chronicle of the victims of progress and big agriculture was co-produced by Thierry Lenouvel’s CineSud Promotion, Europe’s most frequent co-producer with Colombia, as well as Giancarlo Nasi at Chile’s Rampante Cine, one of Chile’s up-and-coming producers, Frans Van Gasel at the Netherlands’ Topaki Films and Juliana Vicente at Brazil’s Preta Porte Filmes. Colombian film agency Proimagenes, Ibero-American fund Ibermedia, the Rotterdam’s Fest Huber Bals fund, Dutch NL Film Fund and Spain’s Fundacion Carolina backed “Land and Shade” with funding and development support.
“Like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ or ‘The Good Earth,’ Acevedo’s narrative rebels against the romantic tradition, underscoring domestic struggle with the hardship of agricultural subsistence,” Peter Debruge wrote in Variety.
Related stories
Get more from Variety and Variety411: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
