A week ahead of its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir has been sold by The Match Factory to France (Le Pacte), the UK (Curzon Artificial Eye) and Germany (Pandora Filmverleih).

'We are very excited about the fact that this unique animated documentary has already found strong partners in Europe,' said Michael Weber, The Match Factory's managing director, about the three deals on this co-production between Bridgit Folman Film Gang, Les Films d'Ici and Razor Film.

Meanwhile, the Cologne-based sales agent has included a second Rommel Film production - Othmar Schmiderer's documentary Back To Africa - to its Cannes lineup in addition to Andreas Dresen's Cloud 9 (Wolke 9), which has been invited to screen in Un Certain Regard.

Schmiderer's story of the lives of five artists from Andre Heller's successful circus show Afrika! Afrika! was the opening film at this year's Diagonale festival in Graz and was released theatrically in Austria by Poool Filmverleih on April 25.

Back To Africa was one of the first feature documentaries to be awarded support from the newly created German Federal Film Fund (DFFF) at the beginning of last year.

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