EXCLUSIVE: Kani Releasing has acquired North American rights to Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert Of Namibia from Japan’s Happinet Phantom Studios Corp.
The youth drama, starring widespread newcomer Yuumi Kawai (Look Again, Plan 75), premiered in Administrators Fortnight at this 12 months’s Cannes movie competition, the place it gained the FIPRESCI prize, and is scheduled to display screen on the inaugural Administrators’ Fortnight Prolonged in Los Angeles this weekend.
Yamanaka’s second characteristic following 2018 award-winning drama Amiko, the movie is a couple of disaffected 21-year-old working in a magnificence salon, the place the expectations positioned on ladies her age are tough to disregard.
Bored together with her boyfriend, she begins a brand new relationship that rapidly grow to be risky and prompts her to take a couple of steps contained in the desert of her feelings. Daichi Kaneko (It’s A Summer season Movie) and Kanichiro Sato (Kubi) additionally star.
Kani Releasing is planning a spring 2025 theatrical launch for the movie.
Administrators’ Fortnight Prolonged is happening in Los Angeles in The Culver Theater this weekend (November 1-3). The worldwide extension to the Cannes parallel choice has additionally been to Recife in Brazil (October 15-20), New York (October 25-27) and can subsequent head to Tokyo, the place it can happen on the Human Belief Shibuya (December 6-19).
Yamanaka was simply 19 years previous when Amiko gained the Viewers Award at Japan’s Pia Movie Competition and went on to display screen at Berlin and several other different movie festivals. Her different works embody contributions to the anthology movie twenty first Century Woman (2021), and brief movies Born Pisces (2020) and See You On The Different Aspect (2022).
“Yamanaka is likely one of the most uncompromising and thrilling filmmakers working as we speak, dedicated to a stubbornly private body-of-work that examines and upends tropes about womanhood within the Japanese context,” mentioned Kani Releasing co-founder and inventive director Ariel Esteban Cayer. “Two options in, she has already crafted a singular oeuvre of scalding, confrontational honesty.”
The Cannes FIPRESCI jury praised the movie for its “intrepid exploration of latest shades of neurodivergence, captured by way of pictures that ceaselessly probe the space between its central characters as they navigate the areas of twenty first century Japan.”
