Kino Lorber has landed North American rights to two docs making a mark on the festival circuit, award-winners “Costa Brava, Lebanon” and “Framing Agnes.” Press releases confirmed the news.
The winner of the ETPAC Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the BFI London Film Festival, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” made its world premiere at Venice Film Festival. The dark comedy follows a family who escapes the toxic pollution and social unrest of Beirut by heading to their idyllic mountain home — only to discover that the government has begun construction on a garbage landfill right outside their fence. The film marks Mounia Akl’s directorial debut. A theatrical release is being planned for July 15.
“’Costa Brava, Lebanon’ captures the joys and frustrations of a close-knit family with an intimacy that feels startlingly natural, and sets it against a sharply drawn backdrop of environmental protest and pollution. Though it is her first feature film, Mounia Akl’s gift with actors is evident in the sensitively realized performances she elicits from her cast, which includes fellow actress and award-winning filmmaker Nadine Labaki. We couldn’t be more thrilled to bring Mounia’s debut to North American audiences,” said Kino Lorber SVP Wendy Lidell.
“For me ‘Costa Brava, Lebanon’ is a story that talks about the big conflict Lebanese people are in today and have been in too often: Do you remain in the place that has broken your heart and try to change it from within? Or do you run for your life and build your joy outside of it? Fight or flight? It is also about the realization that if there’s a wound that you have — in my case, Lebanon — that you feel nothing can heal, the only chance you have at healing, and maybe moving on, is by looking at it in the eye,” Akl told us. “To me, it feels like the source of this pain cannot be excluded from the healing process. If not, it will follow you everywhere and you can’t escape from it.”
“Framing Agnes” debuted at Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the Sundance NEXT Innovator Award and NEXT Audience Award. The hybrid film “explores the lived experiences of trans people past and present through reenactments of transcripts from a UCLA gender study conducted in the 1960s,” per its synopsis. Considered a figurehead of trans history, Agnes was the “pioneering, pseudonymized, transgender woman who participated in [the study].”
“’Framing Agnes’ takes a novel and fascinating approach to exploring how trans people past and present are perceived and represented,” Lidell commented. “By combining tropes of dramatic and documentary filmmaking, [director] Chase [Joynt] enables the audience to see the trans community through fresh eyes, and in their own words. We believe it will make a huge contribution to the ongoing conversation around trans rights and look forward to sharing it far and wide.”
