Sue Brooks' 2009 comedy Subdivision will be pitched to digital platforms from around the world next month, its first exposure outside Australia/New Zealand.
Tine Klint's LevelK has acquired the international rights and will start selling the film at the Cannes International Film Festival market, packaged with a batch of titles from diverse countries and marketed on her new comedy label, Komedy.
Among the other initial offerings are Danish writer/director/actress Hella Joof's Almost Perfect, Danish director Rasmus Heide's All For One, All for Two, Take The Trash and The Christmas Party, Finnish director Mikko Kuparinen's Body Fat Index of Love and Swedish helmer Staffan Lindberg's Once Upon a Time in Phuket, plus titles from Bulgaria, Canada and Brazil.
Almost Perfect, which features Joof as a woman who gives up on trying to find a suitable guy and decides to become pregnant with a specially selected sperm donor, won the special jury award for best performance at the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival held in New York last week.
Subdivision producer, Freshwater Pictures' Trish Lake, tells SBS Film, “The little Aussie battler film has been a slow burn with a very long-roll out in Australia/New Zealand with Disney and Freshwater. I had offers from a lot of sales agents but didn't find the right one until I met with Tine. We hope it will have a long life with LevelK, who really appreciate our Aussie, and specifically our Queensland, humour. Tine is very excited about the potential for Video-On-Demand sales.”
The film stars Gary Sweet as veteran house builder Digger Kelly, whose hot-tempered son Jack (Ashley Bradnam) quits the business to set up his own company. Steve Bisley plays Digger's developer mate Harry and Brooke Satchwell is Tiffany, a contract administrator who forms a relationship with Jack.
“We are targeting digital distribution and TV,” Klint tells SBS Film. “We are selling one of the comedies now for theatrical distribution, so this is a possibility but not a focus. We can sell as a package using the new brand, but also each title individually.”
She's talking to producers of other Australian comedies to add to the Komedy banner. The label will have a strong presence across social media platforms with short videos from actors and directors and inviting audiences to interact and spark debate over how they define the concept of comedy. Bradnam, who co-hosts a daily radio show on Brisbane's Nova, is recording a video to promote the film on social media sites in advance of the Cannes launch.
LevelK is among the most active international sales agents in this territory, representing producer Robert Connolly's omnibus film The Turning, Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket and Stephen Lance's My Mistress.
Lake's next project is Rest Home, a psychological drama starring Melissa George and Roy Dupuis, from Australian-born, Mexican-based writer-director Michael Rowe. Canadian Dupuis will play a security guard who's married with two kids and is hooked on painkillers and anti-depressants. His life unravels when he catches his wife (George) with her lover.
It's a Canadian-Australian co-production between Serge Noël's Possibles Média and Lake's Freshwater Pictures. Lake says the plan is to shoot in Montreal late this year, with post production in Australia. Quebec's SODEC fund is an investor, Pyramide International is handling international sales and Rialto will distribute in Australia/New Zealand.
