Los Angeles-based Shoreline Entertainment has bulked up its Cannes sales slate with the acquisition of worldwide rights to Pierre Laffargue’s French genre title Black.

The film premiered in the Midnight programme at SXSW and stars hip-hop artist MC Jean Gab’1 as the title character, a Senegalese bank-robber from France who is about to go straight until he is offered one last job he cannot refuse.

Zootrope will release the film theatrically in France this summer and Canal+ has French TV rights.

Black is the latest in Shoreline’s growing library of foreign films. It recently acquired La Nana, the Sebastian Silva’s Sundance World Cinema Dramatic grand jury prize winner, from Chile-Mexico, and Estonia’s 2009 foreign language Oscar submission I Was Here.

Shoreline chief executive Morris Ruskin said: “Being in the international marketplace day in and day out, we often come across strong, commercially viable films from around the world which deserve to get broad distribution and it has been and will continue to be a pleasure to see how we can help these films reach a greater worldwide audience.”

Shoreline’s director of acquisitions Brandon Paine, acquisitions associate Ben Kelly and Sam Eigen, director of worldwide distribution, negotiated the deal with the film’s producer, Lauranne Bourrachot.

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