Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights to “The Eight Mountains,” a drama by Belgian filmmakers Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch that won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The companies, which teamed up to release Cannes and Oscar-winning “Drive My Car” last year, plan to release the film in theaters later this year.
Based on Paolo Cognetti’s novel, ‘The Eight Mountains’ was written and directed by van Groeningen and Vandermeersch, whose ‘The Broken Circle Breakdown’ was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (now Best International Feature Film ) in 2013. Van Groeningen co-wrote and directed this film, and Vandermeersh collaborated on the screenplay. This is her first film as a director.
The film spans three decades and stars Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi as two men whose childhood encounters turn into a lifelong friendship, largely in the Italian Alpine village of Aosta. It is van Groeningen’s first film in Italian, a language he and Vandermeersh learned specifically to make the film. His previous films are in Flemish, Dutch and English (2018 “Beautiful Boy”).
“We admire Sideshow/Janus Films for their exquisite taste and talent for bringing the world’s most special films to a wide audience,” van Groeningen and Vandermeersch said in a statement announcing the acquisition. “We believe we have found the perfect home for our film and know this story will breathe air into the lives of people around the world.”
For their part, the distributors’ statement called “The Eight Mountains” “a radical and deeply moving film about friendship filled with heart and featuring terrific performances from Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi” and added, “We are thrilled to collaborate with Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch, Mario Giannani and Lorenzo Gangarossa to bring this special film to North America.
The deal was brokered by CAA Media Finance and Vision Distribution on behalf of the filmmakers.
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