Partners Sideshow Pictures and Janus Films open All We Imagine As Light on Friday and will follow the playbook for Drive My Car, the indie distributor’s first film that began a slow rollout about this time in 2021, collecting awards, nice grosses and finishing with an International Picture Oscar win amid a flurry of nominations. Payal Kapadia’s film, among the best reviewed of the year, was snubbed by India for an Oscar selection. Its distributor has something to say about that and is campaigning for other key categories.
Also this weekend, comedy A Real Pain with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin from Searchlight Pictures hits 900-plus screens in a major expansion. Sony Pictures Classics’ Saorsie Ronan starrer The Outrun, which opened in early October and was down to 19 screens, is jumping back to 200 by popular demand, which is nice to hear.
Gkids debuts Ghost Cat Anzu on 300-plus screens. The animated film premiered at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, see Deadline review. Gkids also co-produced. Yellow Veil Pictures’ sci-fi comedy Dream Team produced by Jane Schoenbrun opens at the Metrograph. Abramorama is out with Hello, Love, Again, a sequel to the 2019 Filipino hit.
Magnolia launches documentary The World According to Allee Willis in limited release. The Bibi Files hits Los Angeles and Watermelon Pictures debuts Mohamed Jabaly’s Life Is Beautiful: A Letter to Gaza at New York City’s DCTV Firehouse.
Back to All We Imagine As Light: Writer-director Kapadia’s debut narrative feature is the first Indian film in 30 years to play in competition in Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix. It sits at 100% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes (72 reviews) with a Metacritic score of 94. Sideshow/Janus acquired the pic shortly before its Croisette premiere.
Opens limited in NY and LA and will roll out slowly thereafter Presales are strong with Kapadia doing Q&As on both coasts.
It follows two women, nurses and roommates Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha), living and working in Mumbai’s urban sprawl. See Deadline review. It had a French producer and has done over $1 million in box office since its October 4 release there. It was Oscar shortlisted in France, which ultimately selected Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez. India submitted comedy Laapataa Ladies.
Jonathan Sehring, the longtime head of IFC Films who launched Sideshow with partners in 2021, has been a vocal critic of the International Feature nominating process; namely, it’s the only Oscar category not determined by Academy members. Hopefuls in this group are selected for consideration by a committee in each country. There are a number of reasons why it’s structured like that — with no input from the broader artistic community — and it’s partly political, people say.
There was a minor uproar when France did not select Anatomy of a Fall this year, and when India snubbed RRR in 2023. India has a history of selecting films that aren’t Oscar friendly, also overlooking Monsoon Wedding, The Lunch Box and The Disciple.
Each country gets one submission only. Germany submitted The Seed of the Sacred Fig from Iranian dissident director Mohammad Rasoulo, which was certainly not going to be Iran’s choice. Iran selected In the Arms of the Tree.
Sehring (and he’s not alone) says let Academy members chose, not committees.
“The Academy is doing a disservice to its members,” said Sehring, noting that 30% of membership is outside the U.S. “They treat them like, you can’t make the right decision. Or international films are sort of second class.
“It is frustrating that they don’t let Academy voters vote for the best international films … Every year they say, oh, we’ll take it under consideration, and nothing seems to change,” he said. “Every international filmmaker I talked to, they just say, yeah, it makes no sense.”
All We Consider As Light is a female-centric story that isn’t necessarily in line with the vision of the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2015, Kapadia was among dozens of students arrested for protesting the regime’s choice of a new head of Film and Television Institute of India, where she was studying.
Janus’ other films so far – it’s done about a dozen – are Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. It has Venice Silver Bear winner Vermiglio from Italy out next month, and its first English-language film, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, coming next year.
“We’re choosing movies we love and we feel should be seen on the big screen and on as many screens as possible,” Sehring says. “I’m a firm believer in theatrical, especially with an international film, because otherwise … it’s next to impossible to find great foreign language films anywhere.”
Moderate release: In Ghost Cat Anzu by Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita, a headstrong girl moves to rural Japan with her grandfather, a monk, and forms an unlikely friendship with an unpredictable supernatural cat guardian. Based on the manga of the same name by Takashi Imashiro.
Limited release: Magnolia’s The World According to Allee Willis by Alexis Spraic follows the award-winning songwriter and artist (best known for writing the Friends theme song and Earth Wind & Fire’s “September”), who began chronicling her life starting in 1950s Detroit. Premiered at SXSW.
Dream Team, an absurdist homage to ’90s basic cable TV thrillers, follows the episodic escapades of two hot West Coast INTERPOL agents who uncover an international, interspecies mystery. This is the third outing by filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (L For Leisure, Two Plains & A Fancy). It debuted at 2024’s International Film Festival Rotterdam and stars Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai.
Life Is Beautiful: A Letter to Gaza follows Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly over seven years, detailing his separation from his family in Gaza, his support system and challenges as a stateless person in Norway, and the making of his debut documentary Ambulance.
The Bibi Files directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Bloom, Alex Gibney, Raviv Drucker, Kara Elverson and David Rahtz opens in LA for a qualifying run. It’s an exposé — based on leaked police interrogation footage and new interviews with key Israeli figures — on the corruption cases that resulted in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being indicted on charges of breach of trust, bribery and fraud in 2019. Screened at the Toronto Film Festival after an Israeli court blocked Netanyahu’s attempt to block it.