Altered Innocence has picked up North American rights to Bertrand Mandico‘s gory, transgressive fantasy movie “Conann,” which had its world premiere in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight and will soon be making its way to Locarno Film Festival. Kinology is handling world sales.
The film will tour at film festivals throughout the fall and be released theatrically next year.
Following different iterations of the ruthless Connan the Barbarian, the film also stars Elina Löwensohn in canine prosthetics as Rainer, Conann’s spiritual guide.
In the film, guardian of the underworld, Cerberus, still has a muzzle, but here he is called Rainer, and has the breasts and the voice of a woman, wears a studded black leather jacket, and a flash camera fit for the paparazzi. Talking to us from the great beyond, he details the successive reincarnations of Conann the Barbarian, a bloodthirsty Amazon from ancient times.
“A visceral and impulsive queer illusionist, Bertrand Mandico casts his magic lantern on an imaginary pre-history, as well as some new little shops of horrors, rendered simultaneously in color and black-and-white,” according to a statement.
The deal was negotiated between Frank Jaffe from Altered Innocence and Grégoire Melin from Kinology.
This is the third feature film Altered Innocence has released by Mandico following “The Wild Boys” and “After Blue (Dirty Paradise).”
Jaffe commented: “We believe [Mandico] to be a true visionary taking poetic aesthetics, queer theory, and a deep cinematic knowledge and weaving them all together with transgression in spades. We’re incredibly excited for North American audiences to get to know Conann and Rainer and go on this bloody and fantastic adventure with the two of them.”
Melin added: “We’re thrilled to be teaming up again with Frank’s Altered Innocence on Mandico’s unique body of work and especially ‘Conann,’ his most ambitious and mature work to date.”
