Ant!pode adds raft of titles

New films by animator Garry Bardin and Anna Melikyan are among the titles added by fledgling Russian sales agent Ant!pode Sales & Distribution to its EFM lineup.

Anton Mazurov and his sales team will be taking presales on Bardin’s animation trilogy Three Strains ­ Rondo, Exodus, Elegia, which is currently in postproduction and will be premiered at international festivals later in the year; Melikyan’s third feature The Star coming after her award-winning Mermaid (Rusalka) which was the Panorama opening film in 2008; and Alexey Fedorchenko’s The Angels of the Revolution, a romantic drama set in the Russian avant-garde period.

In addition, international distribution is being handled on venerated documentary film-maker Maria Razbezhkina’s latest project The Optical Axis (Opticheskaya Os), which had its world premiere at DOK Leipzig last October, and six feature documentaries by students from the Maria Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film & Theatre.

Also acquired is Ukrainian Victoria Trifomenko’s Brothers. The Final Confession, based on Swedish bestseller writer Torgny Lindgren’s novel Hummelhonung, which was shot by Pronto Film on location in the Carpathian Mountains and studios in Kiev.

At the EFM, Ant!pode will have market screenings of the Golden Eagle-winning The Geographer Drunk His Globe Away, The Birmingham Ornament II, and Oksana Bychkova’s Another Year, the winner of the Big Screen Award in Rotterdam’s Spectrum competition last week.