Prague-based sales company Filmotor has picked up international rights to US filmmaker Chris Gude’s Morichales ahead of its world premiere in DOK Leipzig’s Documentary Film International Competition this week.
Filmed over the course of 13 years, Morichales accompanies a fictional explorer as he describes his observations about gold mining in Venezuela and travels along the Orinoco River, from remote jungle mines to industrial zones, with his focus staying on the workers and their environment.
The film’s title refers to the Moriche palm tree which can be found throughout the Amazon and Orinoco Basins, with the thousands of red, fleshy fruits hanging from its trunks earning it the moniker of ‘Tree of Life’.
US filmmaker Gude has had a connection with South America going back almost 20 years: in 2006, he went to Medellin in Colombia to work at a refugee shelter for internally displaced persons, striking up a friendship with actor Jorge Gaviria, who then became the body and voice of his first two films Mambo Cool (2013) and Mariana (2017) and is now serving as the narrator for Morichales.
Mambo Cool was set in the underworld of small-time drug traffickers in Medellin, while Mariana followed gasoline and whiskey smugglers operating on the La Guajira borderland peninsula between Colombia and Venezuela.
Morichales marks Gude’s second collaboration with producer Felipe Guerrero and his company Mutokino after working together on Mariana.
Local distribution in Colombia will be handled by Fuego Inextinguible Cine whose line-up focuses on auteur and experimental cinema. The company is looking to generate alliances with local scientific institutions and museums and work on an exhibition of original works by the artists who collaborated on the film and include important figures in Colombian art.
Founded in 2017, Michaela Cajkova’s Filmotor’s has recently handled international sales for such films as Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavel Pecarcik’s docudrama Photophobia, the Slovak entry for the 2023 Oscars, and Narges Kalhor’s Shahid, which won the Caligari Film Prize and CICAE Arthouse Award when it premiered in Berlinale’s Forum last February.
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