Olivier Tournaud: Celebs Rumors

EXCLUSIVE: Cinephil has come aboard to represent worldwide sales rights to Polish director Maciek Hamela’s In The Rearview, which will make its debut in the Cannes Film Festival next week as part of the ACID (Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema) program. 

Tara Karajica Cinephil has sold Valerie Kontakos’ documentary “Queen of the Deuce,” which charts the rise of Chelly Wilson, the queen of the porn industry in 1970s New York, to several key territories. The film premiered at Doc NYC and is now playing in the International Competition at the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival. Greece’s ERT, Canada’s Doc Channel, Switzerland’s Radio Télévision Suisse and Israel’s Channel 8 came on board at the funding stage. It has now been acquired by Spanish streamer FilmIn, Swedish broadcaster UR, and U.S. theatrical distributor Greenwich Entertainment. The film follows Wilson from pre-World War II Greece to New York, where she rose to become a major figure on the porn circuit in Times Square from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. She is shown to be a trailblazing, taboo-breaking entrepreneur and an unconventional matriarch. It is presented as an empowering story of survival, as well as an alternative take on cultural history at a time of the rise of feminism, the sexual revolution and the emergence of the gay liberation movement.

EXCLUSIVE: Giant Pictures today announced it has acquired U.S. theatrical and VOD rights to the Oscar-nominated documentary feature A House Made of Splinters, a film that until very recently lacked any American distribution. 

Ed Meza @edmezavar “Becoming an Astronaut,” an ambitious documentary that will focus on four new astronauts who will be announced by the European Space Agency (ESA) this November, has won the Focal Audience & Market Strategies pitching event at the Zurich Film Festival. Organized by Focal, the Lausanne-based foundation for film and audiovisual media training, Audience & Market Strategies is a three-part training program that helps producers promote their projects at an early stage. This year’s event showcased eight Swiss projects in various states of development. The program culminated with the pitching event, in which the producers presented their projects to sales company representatives, industry experts and an international jury comprising Stephen Kelliher of Bankside Films, Netflix’s Lars Wiebe, Olivier Tournaud of Cinephil, Sven Wälti, head of film at Swiss pubcaster SRG SSR, and Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose.

Naman Ramachandran Tel Aviv-based sales company Cinephil has acquired worldwide sales rights for documentary feature “A Story of Bones,” which is in competition at the ongoing Tribeca Festival. Directed by Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere and produced by Yvonne Isimeme Ibazebo, the documentary follows Annina Van Neel, who, as the chief environmental officer for Saint Helena’s troubled $360 million airport project, learned of the island’s most terrible atrocity – an unmarked mass burial ground of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans in Rupert’s Valley, one of the most significant traces of the transatlantic slave trade still on earth.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentTel-Aviv-based Cinephil, the sales company behind triple-Oscar nominated “Flee,” has snapped up world rights, excluding U.S., to Italian director Nicolò Bassetti’s transgender-themed doc “Into My Name,” which is executive-produced by Elliot Page.UTA Independent Film Group will be handling North American rights. The buzzy doc, which world-premieres at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama Documentary section, stems from Bassetti’s personal experience with the gender transition of his child, Matteo.“Into My Name” provides an intimate look at the universal challenges of gender transition by observing a tight-knit group of trans friends in the central Italian city of Bologna. Cinephil managing director Olivier Tournaud in a statement said that he was “immediately taken” by Bassetti’s “sensitive and relatable exploration of the many facets of gender and even more so the love letter from a father to his son.”“Into My Name is timely and spotlights voices that need to be heard; this is exactly the kind of film Cinephil is proud to represent,” Tournaud noted.Bassetti underlined that for him the doc “is a deeply personal project, both as a parent of a transgender son and as a director who has always explored individual paths that show our shared humanity.” “I trust that together with a strong partner such as Cinephil, we can add to the awareness and understanding of trans issues with international audiences,” the director said.The doc’s characters, Nico, Leo, Andrea and Raff — whose ages span from their mid-20s to mid-30s — come from different parts of Italy, and started their gender transition from a female to a male identity at different times in their lives.

Following the departure of Cinephil founder Philippa Kowarsky, who joined the BBC as Storyville Commissioning Editor last week, the Tel Aviv-based sales outfit is joining forces with fellow sales company WestEnd Films to form a joint venture.