'Tenement'

Source: Reel Suspects

‘Tenement’

Paris-based Reel Suspects has boarded international sales for Cambodian-Japanese psychological horror thriller Tenement ahead of the film’s world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Big Screen competition.

The first feature from Cambodian writer-directors Inrasothythep Neth and Sokyou Chea follows a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist who travels to Cambodia on a quest to find herself after her mother’s death, but instead finds a family she has never known and an old tenement building full of dark secrets.

The genre-bending psychological thriller drama blends supernatural and human psychology with a story about family and identity. The film uses minimal immersive sound, designed and mixed in Dolby Atmos.

Reel Suspects’ founding head Matteo Lovadina called the film “a Rosemary’s Baby meets Midsommar with Junji Ito kind of experience” and a “unique cinematic gem.”

Shot in Cambodia and Japan, Tenement is produced by Cambodian Distributor Westec Media Ltd in co-production with Cambodia’s Kongchak Pictures and Spanic Films in Japan, with the support of the Japan Foundation Asia Center in Cambodia.

Kongchak is notably behind recent titles including White Building that premiered in Venice in 2021, Locarno 2019 Premiere Young Love and The Prey that world premiered at Busan in 2019.

Reel Suspects will kick off sales for the film at EFM. Also on its current slate are Takeshi Kushida’s Japanese horror My Mother’s Eyes, Finnish dark comedy The Redeemers and Orcun Behram’s Turkish horror The Funeral, repped by XYZ for North America.

IFFR will run from January 25 to February 4, 2024.