06/05/2016 - The French sales agent will be pinning its hopes on Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen in Un Certain Regard and on Cambodia’s Davy Chou in the Critics’ Week

Following an extremely profitable European Film Market, Paris-based sales agent Les Films du Losange (headed by Margaret Ménégoz) will take a bow at the Film Market of the 69th Cannes Film Festival (11-22 May 2016) with a line-up of eight titles, including two fiction feature debuts that will have their world premieres in the Official Selection and in the Critics’ Week, respectively.

Bérénice Vincent’s team is selling The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Juho Kuosmanen
film profile] by Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, which has been selected straight into Un Certain Regard. The young filmmaker is thus continuing his remarkable rise to stardom on the Croisette, where he won third prize in the Cinéfondation competition for movies from film schools with Roadmarkers in 2008, before going on to snag first prize in 2010 with Painting Sellers. The lead character in his feature debut, which was filmed in black and white, is a Finnish boxer about to battle it out for the title of featherweight world champion. It’s 1962, the whole country is ready to celebrate his win, and fame and fortune are within his grasp. But Olli Mäki, who must lose some weight and focus on his fight, has just one problem: he has fallen in love with Raija...

Another title standing out on the slate is Diamond Island [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Franco-Cambodian director Davy Chou, which will be unveiled in competition in the Critics’ Week. In his fiction feature debut, after he made the documentary Le Sommeil d'Or [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2012 Berlinale Forum), the director depicts the misfortunes of an 18-year-old man who leaves his village to go off and work on the building sites of a luxury complex, and who then discovers the exciting world of Cambodia’s young upper classes... Les Films du Losange will also take care of the movie’s distribution in French theatres. 

The pre-sales that had kicked off at Berlin for Happy End by Austria’s Michael Haneke (set to be shot this summer, starring Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant in a plot revolving around a middle-class European family) will carry on at the Film Market, as will those for two titles in post-production: The Apple of My Eye [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Axelle Ropert (read the article) and Daydreams by Caroline Deruas (a Thelma Films production shot at the Villa Medici in Rome, toplined by Clotilde Hesme). Lastly, Les Films du Losange will be topping off sales for Things to Come [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Mia Hansen-Løve
film profile] by Mia Hansen-Løve, The Son of Joseph [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Eugène Green and Prejudice [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Antoine Cuypers
film profile] by Antoine Cuypers at Cannes.

(Translated from French)