Kani Releasing Acquires North America Rights To ‘Desert Of Namibia’

EXCLUSIVE: Kani Releasing has acquired North American rights to Yoko Yamanaka’s Desert Of Namibia from Japan’s Happinet Phantom Studios Corp. 

The youth drama, starring well-liked newcomer Yuumi Kawai (Look Again, Plan 75), premiered in Administrators Fortnight at this 12 months’s Cannes movie competition, the place it gained the FIPRESCI prize, and is scheduled to display screen on the inaugural Administrators’ Fortnight Prolonged in Los Angeles this weekend. 

Yamanaka’s second function following 2018 award-winning drama Amiko, the movie is a few disaffected 21-year-old working in a magnificence salon, the place the expectations positioned on girls her age are troublesome to disregard. 

Bored together with her boyfriend, she begins a brand new relationship that shortly change into unstable and prompts her to take a number of steps contained in the desert of her feelings. Daichi Kaneko (It’s A Summer season Movie) and Kanichiro Sato (Kubi) additionally star. 

Kani Releasing is planning a spring 2025 theatrical launch for the movie. 

Administrators’ Fortnight Prolonged is happening in Los Angeles in The Culver Theater this weekend (November 1-3). The worldwide extension to the Cannes parallel choice has additionally been to Recife in Brazil (October 15-20), New York (October 25-27) and can subsequent head to Tokyo, the place it’s going to happen on the Human Belief Shibuya (December 6-19). 

Yamanaka was simply 19 years previous when Amiko gained the Viewers Award at Japan’s Pia Movie Pageant and went on to display screen at Berlin and several other different movie festivals. Her different works embrace contributions to the anthology movie twenty first Century Woman (2021), and quick movies Born Pisces (2020) and See You On The Different Facet (2022). 

“Yamanaka is without doubt one of the most uncompromising and thrilling filmmakers working at present, dedicated to a stubbornly private body-of-work that examines and upends tropes about womanhood within the Japanese context,” stated Kani Releasing co-founder and creative director Ariel Esteban Cayer. “Two options in, she has already crafted a novel oeuvre of scalding, confrontational honesty.”

The Cannes FIPRESCI jury praised the movie for its “intrepid exploration of up to date shades of neurodivergence, captured by photographs that ceaselessly probe the space between its central characters as they navigate the areas of twenty first century Japan.”