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Z365" or "Festival all year round" is the new strategic point of the Festival in which converge investigation, accompaniment and development of new talents (Ikusmira Berriak, Nest); training and cinematic knowledge transfer (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Zinemaldia + Plus, Filmmakers' dialogue); and investigation, disclosure and cinematic thought (Z70 project, Thought and Discussion and Research and publications).
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In one of the first deals to go down on a Competition title at the San Sebastián Festival – though it doesn’t look likely to be the last - Berlin’s M-Appeal has inked world sales outside Spain and Switzerland to The Double Steps. Steps is directed by Catalan Isaki Lacuesta. He helmed San Sebastián Competition entry The Damned, which merited a Fipresci Prize in 2009.
M-Appeal has also taken world rights to The Clay Diaries, Lacuesta’s documentary on Spanish painter Miquel Barcelo’s African paintings . Deal was sealed Thursday morning between Steps lead-producer Luisa Matienzo, at Barcelona’s Tusitala, and MAppeal head of acquisitions Anne Wiedlack. Written by Lacuesta and Isa Campo, the Mali-set, genre-shifting Steps mixes road movie and Western tropes with docu-portions and reflections on storytelling. Kicking off with a group of artists searching for a bunker painted by last century French artist-come-hermit Francois Augieras, it cuts to a boy who sets out for Mali’s City of Saints where he becomes a bandit. Pic also includes cutaways of Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo as he paints.
Steps is co-produced by Switzerland’s Bord Cadre Films. Avalon Distribution will release it in Spain. “We wanted a film which was as chameleonic as Augieras himself,” Lacuesta told Spain’s ABC, who also described Steps to Variety as starting off “as a film about soldiers, becomes a vampire pic, then a spaghetti Western.”
“M-Appeal is energetic and passionate just the right company for such as singular film as The Double Steps,” Matienzo said at San Sebastián. “We’re very excited to work with Isaki Lacuesta, who is part of a new wave of Spanish cinema with a very unique film language and narration,” Wiedlack told Variety.
On top of that, she added, “the artist Miquel Barcelo is taking part in the films, so we have two of the most interesting and upcoming of artists from Spain who, together, created two wonderful films!”
JOHN HOPEWELL, EMILO MAYORGA
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