Rezo Films International has acquired worldwide rights to Berlin competition film Desert Dream. The South Korean-Mongol co-production is from Chinese director Zhang Lu and is set in a small village on the border of China and Mongolia. As the village becomes more and more desolate, the film tells the story of a remaining trio who become unlikely friends.

The $1.5m film is produced by Korea's G21M, France's Arizona Films and Mongolia's Jiij Production. Zhang Lu's last film, Grain In Ear, screened in Cannes Critics Week 2005.

In other French sales company news, Pierre Menahem's sales outfit Scalpel will be handling three new films ahead of Berlin.

The first is competition entry In Memory Of Myself from Italy's Saverio Costanzo about a young man who experiences a mystical discovery inside a monastery. Costanzo won a Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2004 for his feature debut Private.

In the Panorama section, Scalpel is handling Eytan Fox's The Bubble, a look at the lives of a group of friends in contemporary Tel Aviv. And, finally, comedy Hotel Very Welcome by Germany's Sonja Heiss will run in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino sidebar. The film follows a band of five Westerners who backpack through India and Thailand.

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