EXCLUSIVE: In Memento Films project directed by Jim Mickle, Keough and Garner to play two sisters forced into cannibalism by father as part of family tradition
Riley Keough, Julia Garner, Bill Sage and Wyatt Russell have joined the cast of Jim Mickle’s We Are What We, Paris-based Memento Films International (MFI), which is producing and handling world sales on the film, has announced.
MFI describes Mickle’s We Are What We Are as a “re-imagination” of Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s Somo Lo Que Hay about a family of cannibals in Mexico City.
Mickle, best known for his cult vampire picture Stake Land, which won Toronto’s Midnight Madness sidebar in 2010, has transposed the story to a poor part of the Catskills region in New York State.
Using the clandestine cannibal premise of Grau’s film as a jumping off point, Keough and Garner will play a pair of sisters who are secluded from mainstream society.
Following the untimely death of their mother, their father, played by Sage, forces them to perform a depraved ritual, carried out by their ancestors for generations. Russell will play a young deputy who is in love with Keough’s character.
Principal photography will begin in the Catskills on May 29, and will extend to the first week of July. The film will be delivered in January 2013.
MFI first rolled the project out at Berlin’s EFM where it was picked up by E1 for the UK, Canada, France, Scandinavia and South Africa. Koch Media acquired the film for Germany.
Keough, granddaughter of the late Elvis Presley, has recently hit the big screen opposite Juno Temple in Bradley Rust Gray’s lesbian werewolf picture Jack and Diane which premiered at Tribeca last week.
The increasingly in demand actress she will next be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, Nick Cassavetes’ Yellow, and Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss of the Damned.
Garner recently picked up rave reviews for her performance as a naïve Morman girl in Rebecca Thomas’ Electrik Children, a Berlinale hit. She will next be seen in Stephan Chobsky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and is on the set of StudioCanal’s The Last Exorcism 2.
Martha Marcy May Malene producer Andrew D. Corkin, film industry veteran Jack Turner, MFI’s Nicholas Shumaker and Bolivian director/producer Rodrigo Bellot (Sexual Dependency) are producing.
MFI chief Emilie Georges and international sales head Tanja Meissner are executive producing alongside Mo Noorali and Linda Moran of Belladonna Productions, who previously produced Mickle’s other films, and Brett Fitzgerald. MFI’s Nicholas Kaiser has a co-producer credit.
New York and Los Angeles-based Three Point Capital and HSBC provided additional funding.
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