EXCLUSIVE: Picture is the debut feature from Vincent Mariette after award-winning short Les Lezards. 

Paris-based Bac Films has taken on international sales of Vincent Mariette’s debut feature comedy Sadness Club (Tristesse Club) starring Laurent Lafitte, Ludivine Sagnier and Vincent Macaigne.

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The picture, made with support of France’s National Cinema Centre and the Rhone-Alps region, will be distributed in France by Haut et Court.

Mariette’s Les Lezards won a raft of awards including the short film prize at Colcoa this year.

Lafitte and Macaigne star as two brothers who join a girl (Sagnier) claiming to be their long lost sister in a search for their father who has gone missing from the family home.

Theatre actor Lafitte recently co-starred with Omar Sy in On the Other Side of the Tracks, and rising actor Macaigne can be seen in three parallel section films this year: La Bataille de Solferino, La Fille du 14 Juillet and 2 Autumns, 3 Winters.

The picture is one of the first features from Amaury Ovise and Jean-Christophe Reymond’s Paris-based Kazak Productions, which up until now has focused mainly on shorts including Eduardo Williams’ Que Je Tombe Tout Le Temps which screens in Directors’ Fortnight this week.

“Kazak is one of one hottest young production companies around,” commented Sousa. “It has produced some 30 shorts, many of them award-wining, and is now branching into features.”

Ovise and Reymond both studied production at France’s famous Femis cinema school and are now producing many of the filmmakers they met there.

“Our is plan is to accompany these filmmakers from shorts into feature filmmaking,” commented Ovise.

Other projects on Kazak’s slate include Virgil Vernier’s Mercuriales about three life-bruised twenty-year-olds living in a tower block on the edge of Paris, which is in post-production.

The company is also developing Clement Cogitore Le Front du Wakhan about French soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. Co-written with Thomas Bidegain, the picture was selected for both the Torino Film Lab and the residential Villa Medicis programme in Rome.