Austria-based sales company has acquired world sales rights on two Berlinale Panorama titles: Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up At Night, and Pham Ngoc Lan’s Cu Li Never Cries.
Both films were in the Panorama selection that was announced earlier today.
Rising Up At Night is Congolese director Makengo’s debut feature, and a continuation of his short Up At Night, which won the IDFA award for best short in 2019. The documentary shows the residents of Kinshasa, Congo struggle for access to light after the city is plunged into darkness.
The film is produced by Rosa Spaliviero for Belgium’s Twenty Nine Studio & Production, with Dada Kahindo for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Mutoto Productions.
Makengo participated in the Berlinale Talents platform in 2020. “I want to tell the story of this unfinished city, embedded in the demographic ferment of the twenty-first century, where the construction of the state and national identity remains a kind of dream, a utopia,” said the filmmaker. “What is the beauty in all this? It’s about self-enlightenment.”
Vietnamese director Pham’s debut feature Cu Li Never Cries follows a woman clinging onto her past after inheriting a pygmy slow loris from her estranged husband; as her niece and partner prepare for marriage and ponder their future together.
Nghiem Quynh Trang produced the film for Cadence Studio with Tran Thi Bich Ngoc for An Nam Productions, both of Vietnam.
“Like my own aunt, the protagonist of this film was part of the labour force exported to East Germany in the 1980s, making her a Cu Li (“unskilled native labourer in colonised countries” in Vietnamese),” said Pham. “Mrs. Nguyen and my aunt’s stories are too sad and familiar but cloaked in the fog of time and woven in the complications of personal memories, historical and political contexts.”
The two titles join a Square Eyes slate that also includes Klara Tasovska’s previously announced Panorama entry I’m Not Everything I Want To Be.
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