Icarus Films has acquired Natalia Almada’s 2021 Sundance award winner Users and has additionally signed a deal to represent the Mexican filmmaker’s back catalogue.
Users will get an Academy-qualifying limited release in San Francisco on November 25 and is a cinematic meditation on technology and parenthood.
The film earned California-based Almada the Sundance documentary directing award, the same prize she won at the festival in 2009 for The General (El General), her account of the life of her great-grandfather and former Mexican president, General Plutarco Elías Calles.
Both the Users and library deals are exclusive for North America and non-exclusive internationally. The library deal covers Almada’s fiction debut Everything Else (Todo lo Demas), about the reawakening of a sixty-something bureaucrat, as well as The General (El General).
To The Other Side (Al Otro Lado) weaves Mexican corrido music into a drama set against the backdrop of drug trafficking and illegal migration in which a Mexican composer and fisherman dreams of a better life across the border in the United States. All Water Has A Perfect Memory is a documentary short about the drowning of Almada’s older sister.
The films join documentary The Night Watchman (El Velador), which Icarus previously acquired and focuses on the night watchman at a mausoleum containing the remains of some of Mexico’s most infamous drug lords.
Livia Bloom Ingram negotiated for Icarus Films alongside Josh Penn for the Department of Motion Pictures, and Isaac Hager for Focus Media Law Group. Almada signed on behalf of Altamura Pictures with Icarus president Jonathan Miller.
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