EXCLUSIVE: Stranger Films Sales has acquired world rights excluding Romania and UK for Rachel Taparjan’s Something Familiar, ahead of its world premiere in the international competition at CPH:DOX next month.
Something Familiar follows a filmmaker helping a woman search for her birth mother. Through the search, the filmmaker is drawn into her own family history, uncovering a dark cloud that has long hung over its women.
It is produced by Monica Lazurean-Gorgan and Elena Martin for Romania’s Manifest Film, with Aleksandra Bilic for the UK’s My Accomplice, co-produced by Dermot O’Dempsey of Shudder Films.
The film has production support from the BFI Doc Society Fund and the Romanian Film Center; and received development support from Creative Media Europe. It won the Chicken & Egg Vision Award when presented as part of the Circle Docs-in-Progress showcase at Cannes Docs last year.
“We have followed Something Familiar for quite some time, and the completed film fully confirmed our belief in it,” said Tijana Djukic, head of sales and acquisitions at France-based Stranger Films Sales. “It is strikingly powerful and fearless in its honesty, emotionally exposed, and uncompromisingly authentic.”
The film is the feature directorial debut of Taparjan, who is based in North East England and is senior lecturer in social work at Teeside University. She has previously directed shorts which have played at festivals including Sheffield DocFest.
“In making an explicitly personal film, I have experienced the alchemical potential of self-authorship in the face of a traumatic past,” said Taparjan. “A way to reimagine adversity as adventure, a way to make something familiar feel brand new. A way of offering yourself a story you can bear to live with!”
Stranger Film Sales is in Berlin this week, handling Alisa Kovalenko’s Panorama title Traces.
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