CANNES — Loic Magneron’s Paris-based Wide, a production-distribution boutique, has acquired international sales rights to “Il Signor Diavalo,” the latest -and 40th – feature from Italian horror icon Papi Avati,
Avati is best known for 1976’s “The House with Laughing Windows” and 1983’s “Zeder” which crowned him as a master of Italian giallo horror-thriller cinema.
Starring Gabriel Lo Giudice and Alessandro Haber, produced by Duea Films and Rai Cinema, and framed as a tribute to horror classics from the ‘70s and ‘80s, “Il Signor Daivalo” adapts Avati’s own novel. Set in 1950s Italy, it turns on a 14-year-old boy, Carlo, who kills Emilio, a special needs ward of the local priest. “Il Signor Diavalo” asks why. It receives a Cannes Film Market screening on Sunday.
A well-known sales agent, Wide has moved into production. It is bringing two own productions onto the Cannes market: “Negative Numbers,” which receives a private market screening, and the upcoming “Blast.”
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Wide’s first international co-production, with Magnet Films, Wide, 39 Film, and Alief, “Negative Numbers,” a prison-rugby drama, marks the feature debut of Georgia’s Uta.
Fully produced by Wide and billed as an “electrifying thriller” “with an amazing cast and credits” and lensed by Luc Besson cinematographer Thierry Arbogast, Vanya Peirani-Vignes’ “Blast” turns on a young mother, a bomb disposal expert, trapped in her car with her young children in a Parisian parking lot – with a tank mine under the vehicle.
CREDIT: Mégane Sondag
