MADRID – In the run-up to the Cannes Film Market, where it will host 10 market screenings, Media Luna New Films has acquired world sales rights to Martin Tuta’s thriller “Talion,” drama “I Was There” and docudrama “The Duel of Wine.”
The new pick-ups boost Media Luna’s Latin American or Latino Cannes slate to a total of five movies. An ethics-questioning thriller “Talion” turns on a masked avenger dubbed “Mirubin” who abducts and tortures pedophiles, and it doesn’t matter if one is the city’s mayor. But this is a personal war that makes “Mirubin” a criminal, for some of the public at least.
A journalist, Amira, attempts to uncover the avenger’s true identity. That could be more because she’s needs a hot scoop to reboot her career than because of a sense of justice. Pic’s core theme is not pedophilia, nor its victims, but the lack of communication in families: 80% of abusers are family members, Tuta, a seasoned TV director, told Chile’s La Tercera.
A co-production between Mexico’s Addiction House, JVJ Productions and Wing and a Prayer Productions in the U.S. and Hungary’s Umbrella, “I Was There” stars James A. Lee as a New York firefighter racked by survivor’s guilt at surviving the collapse of the World Trade Center. Years later, a journalist to confront the truth that he ran away from the building out of fear. Miami U alum Jorge Valdes-Iga (“You Can’t Kill Stephen King”) directs his third feature from an original idea by Lee.
From Argentine Nicolas Carreras, who helmed 2011 docudrama “The Ways of Wine,” “The Duel of Wine” once more stars real-life celeb sommelier Charlie Arturaola in a comedy. Here, having lost his reputation after starring in “Ways” as a wine-taster who loses his palette, he makes a bid to return to the big time at a 200-bottle The Great Wine Duel, a kind of World Cup for wine tasters.
At the Marché du Film, Media Luna will also screen Luis Zorraquin’s “Guarani,” winner of the European Vision Award at Ventana Sur’s Primer Corte pix-in-post showcase, curated by Georges Goldenstern. “Guarani” turns on questions of identity and tradition, charting a journey between Paraguay and Buenos Aires taken by a traditionalist Guarani fisherman, and his modern granddaughter. Beginning as a slice-of-life drama, it develops the charm of a relationship drama as the old stick-in-the-mud gradually accepts that there are other ways of living life.
Driving into Chilean cinema, which won seven awards no less at February’s Berlin Festival, Media Luna will also screen Sergio Castro San Martin’s “The Mud Woman,” starring Catalina Saavedra, a Sundance Festival best actress winner for “The Maid,” as a seasonal worker forced to confront her unresolved past.
