VENICE 2026 Venice Production Bridge
It's three of a kind for Paradise City Sales at Venice
- The French sales agent will be pinning its hopes on My Notes on Mars in Giornate degli Autori, The Echo Chamber in competition and Falling House in Orizzonti
After Cannes, where it represented three titles across all of the selections (Titanic Ocean by Konstantina Kotzamani, A Girl's Story by Judith Godrèche and The Station by Sara Ishaq), and Locarno, where it handled sales for Love Lessons by Martin Provost (shown on the Piazza Grande), French sales agent Paradise City Sales, headed by Émilie Georges, will keep up the momentum at the 83rd Venice Film Festival (2-12 September), where it will be flaunting three very strong assets.
The line-up features a contender for the Golden Lion: the Italian-Belgian production The Echo Chamber by Italian filmmaker Andrea Pallaoro (starring Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon).
In Giornate degli Autori, Alexandre Moreau’s team will be selling My Notes on Mars, the third feature by Hungarian director Lili Horvát, who broke through with The Wednesday Child (Best Film in Karlovy Vary’s East of the West competition) and was a standout in the same Venice sidebar in 2020 with Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. Her new, English-language, film is toplined by Canada's Mackenzie Davis (Tully, Terminator: Dark Fate, the mini-series Station Eleven), English actor Rupert Friend (The Phoenician Scheme, At Eternity’s Gate and the series Homeland, BIFA-nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Starred Up) and Hungarian thesp Atanáz Babinchak. Written by the director, the script follows Margot, a brilliant young scientist with a troubled marriage, who disappears while hiking with her husband, Sam. Weeks later, she miraculously reappears on the day of her own memorial service. She remembers nothing about her life - except her Mars research, which she is desperate to find and destroy. Clearly, she is not the same as she was before, yet Sam accepts Margot’s return as a second chance at their relationship. My Notes on Mars was produced by Dóra Csernátony and the director for Hungarian company Poste Restante, and was co-produced by Paradise City (Émilie Georges and Naima Abed), Austrian outfit Amour Fou (Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu and Bady Minck), Bosnian firm Obala Art Centar (Mirsad Purivatra and Jovan Marjanovic), Montenegrin outfit Parangal Film (Maja Kecojevic), German company Komplizen Film (Janine Jackowski, Jonas Dornbach and Maren Ade) and US outfit AmorFortuna (Evan Moore), with the support of the National Film Institute of Hungary, the Austrian Film Institute, TRT Cinema, the Film Centre of Montenegro, ZDF/Arte and Fondacija za kinematografiju.
On the Lido, Paradise City Sales will also be selling Falling House by Iranian director Mohsen Gharaei , which will have its world premiere in Orizzonti. This Iranian-US-German production was staged by Seven Springs Pictures, RaeFilm Studios and 3SIX9 Studios, with co-producers Basis Berlin Filmproduktion and Zentropa Germany. The story centres on a longtime prison guard suspended for an unforgiveable mistake, who suddenly discovers his eldest daughter plans to emigrate to become a model. Determined to stop her, he does everything in his power to prevent her from leaving home.
(Translated from French)
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
