CAA has signed award-winning filmmaker Ben Sharrock.
Sharrock is a budding indie director whose second feature, “Limbo,” was named by critics as the hidden gem of this year’s coronavirus-hit Cannes Film Festival selection.
This is U.K.-based Sharrock’s first U.S. agency, though he continues to be represented abroad by Harriet Pennington Leigh of Lark.
Sharrock wrote and directed “Limbo,” also serving as co-producer with his partner Irune Gurtubai. The film takes an absurdist look at the modern refugee experience through the eyes of four Middle Eastern refugees relocated to a remote island in Scotland.
The project has earned praise for avoiding themes of sorrow and upheaval while still confronting uncomfortable truths about the experience, and how it shapes identity. The film was brought to the Cannes virtual market and remains for sale from Protagonist Pictures.
Sharrock’s debut film “Pikadero” won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Zurich Film Festival and the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the 2016 Edinburgh Film Festival.
Sharrock completed post-production for “Limbo” a week before the coronavirus lockdown this spring, he said recently, delivering the film slowly before he discovered the film had been selected by Cannes.
“I shaved my head and immersed myself in the great outdoors with ’Red Dead Redemption 2’. Then the Cannes news came around it was huge. Yes, bittersweet, but Cannes has always been the dream,” the director told Screen Daily.