01/06/2016 - The distributor has today released Magnus von Horn’s The Here After while having also acquired Gabriele Mainetti’s They Call Me Jeeg

Known mainly for producing documentaries by Ioanis Nuget (Spartacus & Cassandra [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and Abbas Fahdel (Homeland: Iraq Year Zero), new Parisian distributor Nour Films had a landmark day today, releasing Swedish director Magnus von Horn’s The Here After [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Magnus von Horn
film profile], a revelation at the 2015 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, and announcing the acquisition of Gabriele Mainetti’s Italian sensation They Call Me Jeeg [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
interview: Gabriele Mainetti
film profile]. We sat down with the firm's founder and director, Patrick Sibourd. 

“The Here After is the work of an emerging director, who will probably go on to be a cinema great. When we discovered the film, we were completely unaware that he had studied in Lodz and shot on 35 mm film. His attention to detail drew us in straight away, as did his storytelling style and his approach to the subject of adolescent crime, a topic to which he devoted two shorts as well as his first feature, without them seeming like the same film at all! Now, it’s just about having our desire to get his name out there being realised in the film theatres. We will be releasing 28 copies of the movie, six of which will be in Paris with the support of our solid partnerships with Télérama, Le Monde, France Culture, Cine+ as well as Studio Ciné Live.

“Our aim is to follow young directors on their journey, supporting them, and to distribute films that we love, with emotions we wish to share with a cinema that is open to questions and gives meaning to the world we live in – one in which everything is all too often confusion and over-simplification.” 

At the recent Cannes Film Market, Nour Films acquired the rights to the French distribution of Gabriele Mainetti’s They Call Me Jeeg, a feature-film debut that took Italy by storm this year, achieving success both at the box office (earning €4.76 million worth of receipts with 736,000 admissions, and still being screened following a 13-week exhibition period courtesy of Lucky Red) and at the Academy of Italian Cinema’s awards ceremony, winning seven David di Donatello Awards (those for Best New Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing and Best Producer – given to the director, who also produced the film). “At Cannes, we were interested in a different film before Rai Com started to sing Jeeg’s praises. We went to see it, and upon leaving the theatre, we found ourselves thoroughly delighted,” Sibourd said. “It was like the feeling a teenager gets when they want to see a well-made action film, only to discover a hybrid offering that marvellously mixes genre cinema, super-hero films and mafia films together with characteristic Italian flair. The movie has the audacity of an auteur film and real commercial potential. We will probably be releasing it next January or February, unless, of course, a window opens up during December’s schedule of releases. We will be distributing it as widely as possible, with a French version as well.”

Another title in Nour Films’ line-up is Alexander Kuznetsov’s documentary Liberation, The User’s Guide [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which looks at four young women, who were all normal children before being stripped of all their civil rights and placed in a psychiatric asylum in Siberia at the age of 18, and who the asylum’s director is trying to free.

(Translated from French)