EXCLUSIVE: Cannes Camera d’Or winning director Vimukthi Jayasundara’s latest film Spying Stars has been acquired by Bangkok-based sales agent Diversion, ahead of its world premiere in Busan’s inaugural Competition section.
The Sri Lankan filmmaker made the feature debut with The Forsaken Land, which won the Camera d’Or in 2005. His subsequent films – Between Two Worlds, Chatrak and Dark In The White Light – have played at Cannes, Venice, Locarno and Toronto.
Spying Stars will premiere in Busan’s newly established Competition section, vying for the top Busan Award and other prizes. The film focuses on a scientist who travels to a foreign land to fulfil her father’s last wish – to scatter his ashes in a river once familiar to him. However, she is held captive in a remote hotel due to a pandemic caused by a machine-dominant world. When a mysterious star starts following her, she seeks refuge with a mother and her transgender daughter.
“I chose to construct a disease of the future that finds its origins in technology to narrate a film of loss and mourning, an existential common experience of all mankind of today and in future,” said director Jayasundara. “It is a liberation film that is spiritual in nature. It asks one question: in a time of pervasive voyeurism and technological control, how do we retain our humanity?”
Leading the cast is rising Indian actress Indira Tiwari, best known internationally for her supporting role in Gangubai Kathiawadi, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2022.
It is a production of France’s House on Fire and India’s Eleenanora Image, with Bombay Berlin Film Productions as co-producer. It received support from the Hubert Bals Fund, Aide aux cinémas du monde and Visions Sud Est.
Mai Meksawan from Diversion closed the deal with lead producer Vincent Wang from House on Fire.
Also on Diversion’s autumn slate is Siyou Tan’s Singapore coming-of-age drama Amoeba, which will world premiere in the Discovery strand of Toronto, and Bangladeshi director Mahde Hasan’s Sand City, which scooped the Proxima grand prize at Karlovy Vary. Both films have also been selected to play at Busan.
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