EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based sales outfit Celluloid Dreams has taken on international sales rights to Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann’s documentary Wax & Gold ahead of the film’s world premiere as a special presentation at next month’s Berlinale.
The film is set in Ethiopia, where Beckermann stays in the Hilton Addis Ababa hotel, which was opened in the 1960s by Emperor Haile Selassie; it serves as a vantage point to explore the country’s past and present, including often neglected chapters of its history, like Italy’s colonial ambitions.
The film blends archival footage with Beckermann’s own on-the-ground encounters around the hotel grounds and perspective as a European visitor, and juxtaposes scenes of the venue’s opulence with the harsh realities of the underdeveloped surrounding city.
Wax & Gold is produced by Beckermann for her Austria-based production company Ruth Beckermann Filmproduktion in co-production with Carlo S. Hintermann and Gerardo Panichi for Italy’s Citrullo International and RAI Cinema.
Beckermann is a Berlin regular whose Favoriten opened the Encounters section in 2024 and who won the prize for best film in the same section in 2022 for Mutenbacher in addition to a best documentary win in 2018 for The Waldheim Waltz.
Celluloid Dreams’ head of sales Saliha Guemraoui said that Beckermann “interrogates the political history of a nation by uncovering its contradictions and anomalies, using them to question the narratives that shape our understanding of the present”.
“The film’s dialogue between imperial archives and contemporary life reveals how power continues to structure reality,” she added.
Celluloid Dreams quietly re-emerged in the international sales game at last year’s EFM after a long pause following the death of the company’s founder, pioneering sales agent Hengameh Panahi, in 2023, and will be at the market with a full slate of new titles.
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