Sideshow & Janus Movies Take ‘EO’ To The Theater – Deadline

“The donkey is cute, however this isn’t a Disney film,” stated Jonathan Sehring, the previous IFC Movies head whose younger distribution outlet Sideshow, with Janus Movies, presents Jerzy Skolimowski’s Cannes Jury Prize successful EO at two NYC theaters this weekend. “We launched Sideshow for nice motion pictures that might in any other case get neglected to offer them one of the best launch that they’ll probably get,” he informed Deadline.

EO hits the massive display a 12 months after the companions opened Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Automotive, tenderly main the three hour-long Japanese movie a couple of bereft theater director overseeing a manufacturing of Uncle Vanya by way of a embellished awards season growth that garnered 4 Oscar nominations, a win for Greatest Worldwide Characteristic and a few stable field workplace coin.

“It’s not one thing we invented. It was a really conventional platform launch for, what we hoped after we acquired it, could be a critically acclaimed movie. We didn’t know what the response could be. You by no means know,” he stated.

EO opinions thus far have been nothing wanting phenomenal. Deadline’s Cannes evaluate right here.

Skolimowski might be in NYC for choose screenings and Q&As. EO heads to 4 theaters in LA Dec. 2 earlier than increasing to 12-15 markets thereafter. Bookings are literally up from Drive My Automotive. Regardless of a crowded arthouse market, extra theaters are open this 12 months than final. And Poland’s Oscar submission is a “vibrant, recent and totally different movie than something you will see,” stated Sehring.

EO is a imaginative and prescient of recent Europe seen by way of the eyes of a donkey on a stoic journey by way of a world the place catastrophe and despair alternate with sudden bliss. It’s offered by Skopia Movie and Jeremy Thomas. Screenplay by Ewa Piaskowska and Skolimowski. EO stars Sandra Drzymalska, Isabelle Huppert, Lorenzo Zurzolo and Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, but it surely’s a movie with comparatively little dialogue. The donkey is the star.

Sehring stated he’s thrilled to be working with the 84-year-old director and remembers being blown away at his first Cannes Movie Competition in 1982 at a screening of Skolinowski’s Moonlighting with Jeremy Irons.

The exec began Sideshow two years in the past with Jonathan Turell and Peter Becker, companions in Janus Movies. Turell can also be CEO and Becker president of The Criterion Assortment, a separate firm that shares a management workforce and incessantly works in live performance with Janus. Drive My Automotive was their first venture.

Sideshow has additionally been working with Submarine on HBO Movies’ All That Breathes, winner of the Cannes and Sundance World Cinema prime documentary awards.

Its slate contains No Bears from imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi with a launch deliberate for Dec. 23; The Eight Mountains by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, which shared the Cannes Jury prize with EO; and Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s Tori And Lokita.