Summit Entertainment has lost little time concluding the first international sales on Miguel Arteta's Chuck & Buck, striking deals with theatrical distributors from Germany, France and South Africa within days of securing the international sales rights to the digital video feature at last week's Sundance Film Festival.

Highlight Communications will now release the micro-budget film in Germany, while in South Africa it will go out through Anant Singh's Distant Horizon. In France, Chuck & Buck's buyer is Jean Labadie's Bac Films which teamed up with Yves Chevalier's CCI in acquiring the picture during last week's Sundance festival. The same French pairing bought The Blair Witch Project, also from Summit, at the same event last year. Arteta's film will probably be released through Labadie's arthouse division, Mars Films, rather than through his Bac Distribution operation that was created recently as a partnership with Le Studio Canal Plus.

The three foreign deals were sealed almost immediately after Summit snared Chuck & Buck by linking forces with domestic distributor Artisan Entertainment in a pre-emptive Sundance co-acquisition worth between $1m and $1.5m to the film's producers.

Artisan already enjoys a three-year output deal with Highlight and recently sold five upcoming productions to Bac; nonetheless, Summit's Patrick Wachsberger says he is not obliged to work with any of Artisan's aligned distributors in selling Chuck & Buck since Summit bought international rights autonomously from Artisan.In the case of The Blair Witch Project, Artisan bought worldwide rights and then enlisted Summit, in which it owns a 5% stake, to sell international rights.

Summit's autonomy means that in the UK and Spain, Chuck & Buck could still be acquired by distributors other than Alliance Atlantis and Lauren (both of which have ongoing relationships with Artisan).

Chuck And Buck is the comic story of a child-like 27 year-old who moves to Los Angeles after his mother's death to rekindle a childhood friendship. It stars Mike White along with American Pie film-makers Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.