Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s critically praised debut dramatic feature Butterfly Vision has racked up a number of eyecatching sales through Wild Bunch International.
The film, a harrowing drama about a woman returning home from the Ukrainian frontline who discovers she is pregnant, is screening in Sarajevo’s In Focus Programme this week following its world premiere in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in May.
Deals confirmed by Wild Bunch’s head of international sales Eva Diederix include France through Nour Films (releasing October 12) and the UK through MUBI.
Gaga has picked up the film for Japan, while Butterfly Vision will be released in Turkey through Bir, the Middle East (Teleview) and Indonesia (Falcon). Wild Bunch is also working on a US deal for the film.
Distribution in Ukraine itself will be handled by Arthouse Traffic which will release the film later this year.
Butterfly Vision director Nakonechnyi is next combining forces with a group of leading Ukrainian filmmakers to make an ambitious feature documentary, The Days I Would Like To Forget [working title], about events in the country since the start of the war.
“It [the documentary] is going to be a document and a reflection on this period of our history which will capture the transformation our society is going through now,” Nakonechnyi told Screen.
The other filmmakers involved are Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith and Simon Mozgovyi. The project is being made through production outfit Tabor.
Initial support has come from a Documenting Ukraine grant from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). The filmmakers are applying to the FilmBOOST scholarship programme and exploring other potential financing sources in Poland and Slovakia. There are also looking to Ukrainian Film Academy, which is providing development grants supported by Netflix.
The film will incorporate elements from Nakonechnyi’s previously announced Those Who Fill The Void With War, the project he has been working on about the plight of animals in Ukraine’s zoos since the war started.
Tabor has other projects on the boil including Maria Stoianova’s new feature documentary Fragments Of Ice, produced by Nakonechnyi, which has been participating in Cinelink’s Industry Days in Sarajevo. The director is the daughter of a renowned Soviet-era skater. Through his VHS archives from the ’80s and ’90s, she tells the story of Ukrainian society in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The project, now in post-production, was chosen for a film residency in Sarajevo.
Also on Tabor’s slate, Mariia Ponomarova’s Nice Ladies, about “senior cheerleaders” from Eastern Ukraine, has resumed shooting but now with Dutch co-producers Tessel Jonkers and Rogier Kramer of Dutch Mountain Film taking the leading role. The film was suspended earlier this year, after the Russian invasion, but filming has been taking place recently at the European cheerleading championships, held in Riga last month.
One of the cheerleader protagonists is now living in the Netherlands and the story of her exile is part of the documentary.
Another Tabor project, Eugene Jung’s Pirated Future, a co-production between South Korea and Ukraine, is continuing to shoot, albeit outside Ukraine. “They can decide what to do with the Ukrainian part later,” Nakonechnyi said.
No comments yet