Mk2 Films has taken on international sales rights for French drama Enzo directed by Robin Campillo, who stepped in to direct the feature after his friend and the film’s co-writer Laurent Cantet died unexpectedly in April of last year.
Anatomy Of A Fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani of Les Films de Pierre produces the film shot in and set in La Ciotat in the south of France. It follows a 16-year-old boy who defies his bourgeois family’s expectations by starting a masonry apprenticeship where he meets a charismatic Ukrainian colleague who shakes up his world. Newcomers Eloy Pohu and Maksym Slivinskyi star opposite Elodie Bouchez and Pierfrancesco Favino.
“Blending the urgency of Campillo’s 120 BPM and the sunlit tenderness of Call Me By Your Name, Enzo is a powerful exploration of identity, desire and class,” mk2 Films’ managing director Fionnuala Jamison told Screen.
The film is co-produced by Italy’s Lucky Red, which also handles local distribution, and Belgium’s Les Films du Fleuve. French co-producers are Page 114, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinéma and Ami Paris. Now in post-production, Ad Vitam will release the film in France in 2025.
Also new to mk2 Films’ slate is Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, an in-depth look at Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking 1985 documentary about the Holocaust. The first-ever look at the making of Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long epic features unseen excerpts from the 230 hours of footage he shot for Shoah and is told entirely through the director’s own words.
Estelle Fialon for Les Films du Poisson produces with Dominique Lanzmann for Les Films Aleph. Mk2 Films holds worldwide rights to Shoah among six of Lanzmann’s films and will commemorate the centenary of the filmmaker’s birth in 2025.
Mk2 Films is also launching pre-sales for Zaven Najjar’s animated feature Allah Is Not Obliged, about a ten-year-old child soldier on an odyssey through West Africa to find his remaining family. The film is an adaptation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s prize-winning novel of the same name and the voice cast includes young Ivorian rapper SK07, Thomas N’Gigol and Annabelle Lengronne.
Sébastien Onomo’s Special Touch Studios produces and Bac Films is handling French distribution.
Rounding out new titles on mk2 Films’ 2025 slate is Hafsia Herzi’s Paris-set adaptation of Fatima Daas’ novel La Petite Dernière, about the daughter of Algerian immigrants balancing family and faith with her ambitions and attraction to women. It is produced by June Films’ Julie Billy and Naomi Denamur in co-production with Arte France Cinéma and Vanessa Ciszewski of Germany’s Katuh Studio, and will be released in France by Ad Vitam.
The French sales powerhouse will market premiere Karim Moussaoui’s The Vanishing, from Anatomy Of A Fall producer David Thion’s Les Films Pelléas, at the Paris Rendez-Vous following its world premiere at Marrakech International Film Festival in December.
The company is also heading to Sundance with two world premieres: Vladimir de Fontenay’s Norway-set father-son survival thriller Sukkwan Island starring Swann Arlaud and Woody Norman and Dylan Southern’s The Thing With Feathers starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
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