Curious has snapped up five titles at the Cannes film festival/market including A Touch of Sin, an expose of rampant corruption and exploitation in mainland China.
Director Jia Zhangke won the festival’s best screenplay award for his film based on the true stories of poor people driven to acts of desperation. Jia said the film, which was part-funded by the state-owned Shanghai Film Group, has been given official approval and will be shown uncut is his homeland.
Curious Distribution’s Sarah Noonan said the company also acquired Big Sur, writer-director Michael Polish’s adaptation of a Jack Kerouac novel, which recounts the authors three sojourns to the cabin in Big Sur owned by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, starring Kate Bosworth, Josh Lucas, Radha Mitchell and Jean-Marc Bar.
Also on its slate is Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s The Paradise Trilogy, comprising Love, the story of Teresa, an upper-class, middle-aged European woman who goes to Kenya’s beaches to seek out African boys selling sex to earn a living; Faith, which follows Teresa’s sister Maria as she goes through a devastating divorce and develops an attraction to Jesus; and Hope, which looks at Teresa’s 13-year-old daughter Melanie as she’s sent to a strict diet camp for overweight teenagers in the Austrian countryside, where she falls for a doctor 40 years her senior.
Curious Distribution will release Australian writer-director Kim Mordaunt’s Laos-set The Rocket on August 29 and Italian director Matteo Garrone’s Reality, the saga of a Neapolitan fishmonger who pulls off little scams with his wife and is urged to try out for Big Brother, on July 4.