Celluloid Dreams hasacquired international sales rights to Guy Maddin's upcoming Toronto title BrandUpon The Brain! The film will besold through Celluloid Nightmares, the company's genre label.

The silent feature willscreen at TIFF as a Special Presentation with live orchestral accompaniment aswell as on-stage foley artists, a narrator and a castrato. It is described as "equal parts childhood reminiscence, expressionist horrormovie, teen detective serial and Grand Guignol reverie".

Shot in Seattle, the filmwas produced by Amy Jacobson and Gregg Lachow of Seattle-based The FilmCompany, which specialises in backing artists as opposed to projects, providingbacking from concept through distribution. Maddin's long-time collaborator JodyShapiro served as executive producer along with Philip Wohlstetter and AJEpstein.

The plotsynopsis is more than usually Maddinesque in that one of the central charactersis Maddin as a young boy growing up in a lighthouse orphanage run by hisparents. When the parents of newly adopted children begin to complain aboutmysterious headwounds, two teenage detectives descend on the lighthouse"launching themselves into an investigation that spins wildly out of controland leads parents, teens and children alike into the darkest regions ofrevelation and repression ever traversed by an adolescent crime-solver."

The deal was brokered byCelluloid's Toronto-based vice-president Charlotte Mickie and Lachow.

In a statement, Mickie saidthe film was the perfect fit for Celluloid Nightmares' mandate "to find extraordinary scary movies by directors with anorignal and fresh take on genre cinema...All of Guy's movies are like surreal dreams, and this one is really amarvelous nightmare, very funny, and totally kinetic. It's a modern, silenthorror movie for the MTV generation."