15/05/2005

The new sales company Lumina Films with offices in London and Madrid, has attracted a lot of interest from international buyers with the Brazilian arthouse film Lower City shown at a private screening before tomorrow’s official premiere at Un Certain Regard.
The debut film by Sergio Machado is produced by VideoFilmes, Walter Salles and his brother‘s production company behind Central Station. The musical film is about friends who fall in love wit the same woman. Samantha Horley, Head of sales told Cineuropa that "the little film beautifully shot was well received by international buyers, but we are going to wait for the word of mouth to build over the next few days to start taking offers. It’s a luxury to wait, but Latin America is under the spotlight these days, and we are lucky enough to work with two of Brazil’s best production companies, Walter Salles VideoFilmes and Donald Ranvaud’s Buena Onda who was associate producer on Lower City."

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Lumina Films backed by London’s International Film Collective, a privately-owned international media group, is also handling the Spanish CGI animated film A Midsummer Dream [+see also:
trailer
film profile] with an English voice casting including Miranda Ridchardson and Rhys Ifans. The feature animated film inspired by Shakespeare’s classic has been pre-sold to Scanbox for Scandinavia and will be released next June by Buena Vista in Spain with a 250 print run. The film is produced by Dygra Films, Manolo Gomez’s 17 years old animation company creator of The Living Forest, the first fully CGI animated feature film produced in Europe.

Lumina Films is also launching in Cannes its new thriller label ‘Panick Attack’ with two English language films in the $3-$5M range in pre-production stage: Haunted House to be shot in Canada and Snapper Killer in the UK. "The thrillers will be smart well written films like Memento or Dirty Pretty Things", said Horley.