Cologne-based sales outfit New Docs has taken world rights to Atirkül In The Land of Real Men, a film receiving its international premiere in IDFA’s Luminous section later this week.
Directed by Janyl Jusupjan, the French-Czech-Kyrgyz-produced documentary looks at Buzkashi, a highly popular horseback sport in Kyrgyzstan. The goal is to steal a dead goat from the rival team of riders without being knocked out of the saddle. The film’s main protagonist is Atirkül, a woman bored with her husband being away from home all the time, who gets involved in horse trading and is thereby exposed to the sport.
“It’s a simple but very empowering story about a woman who ventures into a field completely unknown to her and that is also a very male-dominated. I think we can identify with this type of woman. The film is also very beautifully shot,” said Luisa Schwamborn of New Docs.
All rights are available excluding Czech Republic and Kyrgyzstan. The film, which also screened at Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, is produced by Christian Lelong for Cinedoc Films and Elvira Jamankulova for Chagaldak Productions and co-produced by Alice Tabery of Cinepoint.
New Docs is also pushing on with sales on a number of other titles at IDFA’s Docs for Sale, among them Masha Novikova’s Russia vs Lawyers, a feature doc looking at the plight of human rights lawyers struggling for justice in an increasingly suffocating dictatorship in Putin’s Russia.
Also on the IDFA slate is Lonely Oaks by Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff. This tells the story of how film student Steffen Meyn was killed in a tragic accident during violent clashes between environmental activists and police at Hambach Forest in Germany,
Meanwhile, the company is continuing sales on Charly W. Feldman’s Long Distance Swimmer which tells the story of Syrian refugees Sara Mardini and her sister Yusra. Both brilliant swimmers, they pulled a boat carrying other refugees toward the Greek coast thereby saving the passengers’ lives.
The sisters’ story was dramatised in Netflix/Working Title movie The Swimmers directed by Sally El Hosaini but Feldman’s doc concentrates on Sara’s nightmarish experiences at the hands of the Greek legal system as a result of her work as an activist trying to rescue other migrants.
“These are films that already have had a festival career, but we are also bringing newer titles to the market, of course,” Schwamborn said, citing such docs as Petra Kelly - ACT NOW, directed by Doris Metz and produced by Bildersturm Filmproduktion, about Petra Kelly, a star of the early environmental and Green political movements in the 1980s; Pol Pot Dancing, about a star dancer at the Cambodian royal court who discovers the foster son she raised is the dictator Pol Pot, and Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s Dancing Pina, exploring the legacy of legendary choreographer Pina Bausch.
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