Two women-directed films that played at the Toronto International Film Festival have found US distributors.
TIFF 2014 was host to two films that rhymed with “Emma Bovary” — Sophie Barthes’ straightforward adaptation of Flaubert’s novel starring Mia Wasikowska and Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery, a satirical, modern-day take on the 19th-century masterpiece starring Gemma Arterton.
Gemma Bovery was acquired by Music Box in the US and Soda Pictures in the UK. Some have conjectured the film might be France’s submission for the 2015 Best Foreign Language Oscar race. Fontaine is the French director behind Coco Before Chanel and Adore.
Meanwhile, IFC bought the rights to Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club a few days before its world premiere in Toronto. The Laura Wade-penned play-turned-film focuses on an ultra-exclusive male society at already tony Oxford University, where the future leaders of the world learn to be unrepentant assholes — and learn that they might get away with murder with the right connections.
Scherfig is also the director of Italian for Beginners, An Education, and One Day.
