Berlin-based sales outfit Raspberry&Cream (R&C) is partnering with Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion to co-produce Like Cattle Towards Glow, which aims to achieve a new way of portraying sex on screen.

The film, which will begin shooting in Paris this summer with French film-maker Christophe Honoré as associate producer, is based on the first screenplay written by the US novelist Dennis Cooper together with the film’s director, French-American visual artist Zac Farley.

“The idea for the script [for] Like Cattle Towards Glow arose from the fact that violence is prominently featured in films whereas sex, a far less upsetting act, seems to be rather poorly represented,” Brüning said.

According to the producers, the film will comprise “a set of five original narratives that deviate from the norm by using explicit sex as a privileged means to access its participants’ emotions, vulnerabilities, feelings of alienation, and ennui regarding the objectification of their own and others’ bodies.”

Brüning and LaBruce

While Farley and Cooper’s film is R&C’s first co-production with Brüning, the sales label worked with him in the past, handling the international distribution for Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie, shown at the film festival in Locarno in 2010, and, most recently, LaBruce’s Pierrot Lunaire which had its world premiere in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded sidebar last February.

In addition, R&C’s sister company m-appeal was the sales agent for LaBruce’s 2008 film Otto; or, Up With Dead People.

Founder of the legendary ‘punk’ magazine and publishing house Little Caesar, Dennis Cooper has written nine novels as well as collections of short stories and poetry.

Paris-based Zac Farley has frequently colalborated with Cooper and is now working on a film project with the French theatre director Gisele Vienne and the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya.

m-appeal first made a foray into co-production last year by becoming a parter with Argentina’s Rizoma on Cuban director Carlos Machado Quintela’s Benjamín o el Planetario (Benjamín Or The Planetarium) which received €35,000 production funding from the Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund.

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