Indie Sales has hopped aboard Across The Sea, French-Moroccan director Saïd Hamich Benlarbi’s second feature that will premiere as a special screening at Cannes’ Critics’ Week.
Moroccan TV star Ayoub Gretaa stars in the Marseille-set 1990s melodrama as Nour, an undocumented immigrant from Morocco with big dreams whose life turns upside down when he meets a charismatic police officer and his wife and a love triangle unfolds.
Anna Mouglalis and Grégoire Colin co-star in the decade-spanning film that follows Nour as he grows older, explores love and seeks a better life amidst the backdrop of the Rai music-focused party scene in the cabarets of Marseille.
Across The Sea is produced by Sophie Penson of France’s Barney Production in co-production with the director’s Morocco-based Mont Fleuri Production and Belgium’s Tarantula. The Jokers Film will release the film in France.
Benlarbi’s short The Departure was nominated for a French César award and he is also a producer on films from Faouzi Bensaïdi, Philippe Faucon, Leyla Bouzid and Nabil Ayouch. He tells Screen the film is “a fresco, the story of a decade that begins in 1990 and ends on the eve of a new millennium” whose lead character “undergoes the irreversible experience of exile, which I want to approach in an intimate and political way.”
Deragne, acquisitions & sales executive at Indie Sales, said: “Nour travels through a decade and many formative relationships, mapping a journey that we believe will speak to the many who have left their homes, and have had to make new ones.”
Indie Sales’ Cannes slate also include a market premiere of Blandine Lenoir’s family portrait Juliette In Spring, plus Teddy Lussi-Modeste’s education thriller The Good Teacher, and Sasha Nathwan’s Berlinale Generation Crystal Bear-winning Last Swim.
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