Wide takes ‘Alone’, ‘Us’ – Thwaites to star in ‘Office Uprising’

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LOS ANGELES, Feb 4, (RTRS): Paris-based sales-production-distribution house Wide Management has taken world sales rights to a bouquet of Berlin-selected titles – led by “You’ll Never Be Alone,” “Before the Streets,” Nakom” and “One of Us” – as the Wide-sold “Vanity” and ‘Our Loved Ones’ screen at Goteborg.

Playing Panorama, Forum and Generation and the Perspektive Deutsch Kino sidebars, Wide’s Berlin spread of five titles includes three feature debuts, confirming the French shingle’s commitment to discover new talent.

Playing Berlin’s Panorma, and the first feature of Chilean composer-turned director Alex Anwandter, “Alone” follows a gay teenage who gets beaten up by homophobic youths. Title “differs from other LGBT titles, by revolving on the relationship between a gay son and his father instead of a couple’s love story,” said Georgia Poivre, at Wide.

“Emotional and stylish,” “it highlights the tolerance of a father in a conservative country,” she added of the 5AM Producciones and Araucaria Cine coproduction. It plays at Berlin Panorama section.

A second Wide title world premiering in Panorama is U.S./Ghana co-production “Nakom,” co-directed by Kelly Daniela Norris (“Shadows of Blue”), and debutant T.W. Pittman, turning on a young, gifted medicine student forced to choose between tradition and ambition.

Culture

First-timer Chloe Leriche’s Wide-handled “Streets” plays at Berlin Generation showcase. Produced by Canada’s Les Films de l’Autre production, it turns on an unknown and secluded Canadian indigenous community in Quebec. With a documentary approach, “Streets” portrays the social conditions and culture of a community that have never been shown before on film. If “Nakom” is the first pic ever shot in Kusaal language, “Streets’”Atikamekw dialog is also a cinema first, per Wide sources.

Directed by first-timer Stephan Richter, “One of Us” is a coming-of-age drama produced by Austria’s Golden Girls Film. Based on a real story, it depicts a provincial middle class – instead of stereotyped delinquents – which commits an irredeemable act out of boredom. “We feel like the film is a snapshotof this new aimless generation,” Poivre said. “Us” nabbed the Max Ophuls best film prize in January and screens in Perspektive Deutsch Kino sidebar at Berlin.

“Wide always works with first-time directors, films with socio-cultural concerns, a totally different, edgy, art cinema. I haven’t changed my focus. And all over the world they always know that in my company they can find films that are a bit different, that are singular, for a niche market,” Loic Magneron said.

“We Are Never Alone,” also on Wide’s slate, world premiering in the Berlinale’s Forum section. Directed by Czech Petr Vaclav, a 1996 Silver Leopard winner with “Marian,” it turns on the friendship between a paranoid prison guard and his new neighbor, an unemployed hypochondriac supported by his wife. It’s a drama showing “how today, in the midst of a European social and political crisis, people struggle to find happiness in a hostile world where life can be only a source of frustrations,” Poivre explained.

Prior to the Berlin Fest, two Wide entries will compete at Swedens Goteborg Festival: Swiss Lionel Baier’s bittersweet comedy about euthanasia, “Vanity,” and weight-of-the-past drama turning on the emotional legacy of a family tragedy, Canadian Anne Emond’s sophomore outing, “Our Loved Ones.”

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London-based sales agency Film Republic has secured the international rights (excluding German-speaking Europe and France) to Patric Chiha’s feature documentary “Brothers of the Night,” which receives its world premiere in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival on Feb 16.

The film explores the world of a group of young Bulgarian Roma men, who moved to Vienna in search of adventure and freedom, but have ended up selling their bodies instead. They spend their nights servicing their customers, often lonely men living in public housing. There is a ray of comfort for this group in their feeling of togetherness, where they can be young and reckless.

The film, which is Chiha’s third feature, is produced by Vienna-based production outfit WILDart Film, headed by Ebba Sinzinger and Vincent Lucassen, whose credits include “Pianomania,” “Michael H.” and “The Forgotten Space.”

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In a pre-Berlin move, Australian actor Brenton Thwaites has signed on to star in the zombie action movie “Office Uprising,” Variety has learned.

The Exchange is launching sales at the Berlin Film Festival.

Thwaites’ credits include “Blue Lagoon: The Awakening,” “Maleficent,” “Oculus” and “The Giver.” He will be seen next in “Gods of Egypt” opposite Gerard Butler and in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man Tell No Tales” as Henry Turner, the son of Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner character.

Steven C. Miller (“Marauders”) is directing from a script written by Ian Shorr and Peter Gamble. The film is produced by Giulia Prenna (“The Evil Gene”) and William Clevinger.

“Office Uprising” is set inside one of the world’s leading arms manufacturers where a substance is slipped into the employees’ drinks by the board of directors that supposedly makes them work more efficiently. Due to a slacker within the company, though, they are fed the wrong formula and start turning into homicidal maniacs — leaving the slacker needing to step up his game to rescue himself and his friends from the growing zombie plague inside the company compound.

“Fans of the growing zombie genre craze are going to love ‘Office Uprising,’” said the Exchange’s Brian O’Shea. “We are truly excited to have cast Brenton Thwaites, a sensational, versatile young leading man who will hit the comedic notes and sell the action.”

Thwaites first came to prominence in the Fox8 teen drama series “Slide.”

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