Toei has acquired Japanese rights to Leslie Shampaine and Pip Gilmour’s completed Billy Elliot-style US doc Call Me Dancer, from Switzerland’s First Hand Films. The sales outfit is now talking to buyers about the remaining rights, including North America, at IDFA this week.
The film follows a teen with a passion to dance who struggles against the disapproval of his family. It was made with support from ZDF/ARTE, yes Docu and EBS. North American rights are still available.
First Hand Film has also added international rights to 10 films from Dutch portmanteau project The Ten Commandments, a series of 10 documentaries of varying lengths exploring how the Ten Commandments are interpreted by contemporary society.
The project is being produced by Doxy Films with EOdocs.
One of the 10 films, Festus Toll’s You Shall Not Covet - The Story Of Ne Kuko, is a world premiere this week in IDFA’s International Competition for Shorts. The film looks at Pan-African activist Mwazulu Diyabanza who visits the Afrika Museum in the Dutch village of Berg en Dal and leaves with an exhibition object he says was stolen from Congo during the colonial era.
The other directors involved in the series are Marc Schmidt, Dylan Werkman, Sergej Kreso, Bibi Fadlalla, Geertjan Lassche, Jan Willem den Book, Jaap van Heusden, Jos de Putter, and Raluca Lupașcu.
At IDFA, First Hand is representing both a Palestinian doc and an Israeli/Palestinian one. The former is Mohamed Jabaly’s Life Is Beautiful, about the experiences of the Palestinian director in 2014, when the borders of his homeland of Gaza were closed for an unspecified period while he was on an exchange project in Norway. The Norwegian government would not accept his Palestinian passport, leaving him stateless.
Meanwhile, the Israeli/Palestinian title is the 2003 classic, Arna’s Children by Juliano Mer Khamis, and Danniel Danniel, that is receiving a special screening.
On the local distribution front, First Hand is about to launch Polish director Hanka Nobis’s debut feature Polish Prayers in Swiss cinemas. Nobis won best director at the Zurich Film Awards last week.
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