27/08/2012 - Pierre Menahem is selling a Romanian film and a Turkish-German co-production that have both been selected for the Critics’s Week in Venice

On its one-year anniversary, MPM Film (a production company started up in 2007 by Marie-Pierre Macia and Juliette Lepoutre)’s international sales department directed by Pierre Menahem continues to explore new talents. Two feature debuts selected for the Critics’ Week at the 69th Venice Film Festival (from August 29 to September 8) stand out in its line-up: Romanian director Paul Negoescu’s A Month in Thailand [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paul Negoescu
film profile] (photo) and Ali Aydin’s Turkish-German co-production Mold [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Küf).

According to Pierre Menahem, A Month in Thailand "is a very generational and accessible film about the romantic wanderings of a young man in his thirties who decides to leave his girlfriend on December 31, then starts a long night of partying and encounters. This film, about the difficulty to choose and commit, is also an x-ray of a thriving town (Bucarest), and it brings fresh air and energy to a new Romanian wave often considered to be austere.”

"It’s certainly the film with the youngest technical and artistic crew in the whole of post-Soviet Romania’s history,” says the film’s producer Ada Solomon (Hi Film).

The film’s director Paul Negoescu was previously noted for his short films (notably Derby and Renovation), selected in over 270 festivals, including Cannes and Berlin.

Mold tells the brutal, moving story of a father looking for his son who went missing several years earlier and was probably murdered by the government for rebelling against it. Director Ali Aydin spent seven years writing its script, strongly inspired by Dostoïevski and in the vein of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

According to Pierre Menahem, "Rarely in a first film do you find such rigor, such maturity, and such elegance. We are not the only ones to have been seduced as Sacher, Nanni Moretti and Luigi Musini’s distribution company, have just bought the rights for Italy."

After Venice, MPM Film will be off to the Toronto Film Festival (from September 6 to 16), where sales will kick off for Jem Cohen’s Austrian-American co-production Museum Hours [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Produced by Patti Smith among others, the film is a cross between fiction and documentary. In it, a museum caretaker and an American in Vienna to visit a sick cousin meet and stroll through the city. The film received the CICAE’s Art Cinema Award in Locarno, and will be screened in Toronto in the Contemporary World Cinema section.

William Vega’s La Sirga [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] will also be at the Canadian festival, in the Discovery programme. This co-production brings together Colombia, France, and Mexico. It was discovered at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and MPM Film has already sold it for the United States (Film Movement), France (Zootrope), and Greece (Ama Films).

(Translated from French)