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New Wave Films has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia.

New Wave will release the film theatrically in the territory in spring 2025, having acquired it from Les Films du Losange.

The ninth feature from French filmmaker Guiraudie, Misericordia mixes melodrama, crime and dark comedy, in the story of a man who returns to his native town for a funeral where a mysterious disappearance, a threatening neighbour, long-simmering desires and a strange priest all take prominence.

Felix Kysyl, Catherine Frot and Jean-Baptiste Duran all star. The film debuted in Cannes Premiere at Cannes Film Festival in May, going on to Telluride,...

The 2024 edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as Seminci, wrapped on Saturday (October 26), giving its top award, the Golden Spike, to Misericordia by Alain Guiraudie.

Misericordia tells the story of a man who returns to his hometown for the funeral of his former boss, the village baker, and decides to stay for a few days with the man’s widow, getting involved in a series of unexpected events.

Guiraudie also won the best screenplay award.

The members of the Valladolid jury, Greek director Sofía Exarchou; Spanish actress Aida Folch; American critic Devika Girish; Spanish filmmaker Luis López Carrasco...

We’ve had more than our fair share of riffs on Pasolini’s “Teorema” as of late, from Bruce Labruce’s explicit and unwatchable remake this year to Emerald Fennell’s Tik Tok-ified (and unwatchable) retooling from the year before. Some more directly indebted to Pasolini’s transgressive blueprint than others, these reinterpretations all share an affinity for a strangely (sometimes inexplicably) alluring central figure who seduces his way into a small, elite circle. But everybody knows that the French can never be excluded in a game of horny wits, so “Misericordia” has entered the fray with its own particular spin on the material—one that, in practice, is far more intriguing (and chaste?) than any of those other desperate plays at shock value.

Where most films taking inspiration from “Teorema” bring the subject into an unattainable class that they can only infiltrate from below the belt, Alain Guiraudie...

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]

The post “I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Fans of Alain Guiraudie’s work may take the opening sequence of Misericordia as a sign that they’re in familiar terrain. A view from behind the windshield of a car winding its way through back roads to a small hillside village, it announces the premiere chronicler of lust and violence in the French countryside’s return to the milieu in which he made his name.

Indeed, Misericordia finds Guiraudie revisiting old standbys—a linking of queer desire and mortality, a distanced but lighthearted absurdism, and a refusal to get moralistic about transgressive behavior—under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.

The driver in that opening sequence is Jérémie (Felix Kysyl), a baker returning to Saint-Martial, the provincial village of his youth, for the funeral of his mentor. Jérémie is put up by the baker’s widow,...

Exclusive: Pulsar Content has acquired world sales rights for Joséphine Japy’s upcoming feature The Wonderers following a family navigating the severe disability of the youngest daughter.

Produced by Cowboys Films, the feature marks Japy’s first time in the director’s chair.

The actress was recently seen in Netflix’s BAFTA-winning fictionalized Bernard Tapie biopic Class Act, with previous credits including On The Wandering Paths, Love At Second Sight, Breathe, as well as Claude François biopic My Way, early on in her career.

Set against the backdrop of a summer on the French riviera, the drama revolves around the Roussier family and its fragile equilibrium shaped by the uncertain diagnosis of its youngest daughter, 13-year-old Bertille, who suffers from a severe disability.

Her parents and 17-year-old older sister Marion live in constant fear of losing her. Disconnected from typical teenage dreams, Marion seeks escape in a relationship with an older boy.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia has scored multiple deals in key territories following its world premiere in Cannes and ahead of upcoming stops at Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals.

Les Films du Losange has sold the film to Movies Inspired in Italy, Praesens in Switzerland, Zeta Filmes in Brazil, Salzgeber in Germany, Lat-e for Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay, Pilot Film for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Velvet Spoon in Poland, Imagine Film for Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Bio Paradis in Iceland, Interior Xiii in Colombia, Panda Lichtspiele in Austria, and BookMyShow in India. Sideshow and Janus Films have snagged North American rights.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia has scored multiple deals in key territories following its world premiere in Cannes and ahead of upcoming stops at Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals.

Les Films du Losange has sold the film to Movies Inspired in Italy, Praesens in Switzerland, Zeta Filmes in Brazil, Salzgeber in Germany, Lat-e for Argentina, Mexico and Uruguay, Pilot Film for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Velvet Spoon in Poland, Imagine Film for Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Bio Paradis in Iceland, Interior Xiii in Colombia, Panda Lichtspiele in Austria, and BookMyShow in India. Sideshow and Janus Films have snagged North American rights.

Misericordia.In Misericordia (2024), the newest film by Alain Guiraudie, a beautiful stranger, Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), journeys back to his hometown to mourn the death of his former mentor, a master baker with whom he was in love. The deceased also happens to be the father of his childhood best friend (Jean-Baptiste Durand), now a baldheaded brute irrationally threatened by Jérémie’s extended sojourn, specifically the company he keeps with his newly widowed mother (Catherine Frot). Guiraudie unfolds an uncanny comic thriller, deceptively subtle in its sensuous subversions of noir templates, against the dewy autumnal backdrop of Saint-Martial, a mountainous commune in the countryside region of Occitanie, where he was raised. With its lonely gravel roads and vast wildernesses, Occitanie’s lush swaths of emptiness, suited for solitary wandering, give each banal moment of human contact a paranoid, dubiously suggestive charge. The region is a recurring setting across much of Guiraudie’s work,...

Marking a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie gives the Cannes Premiere section one of its darkly sparkling standouts with the unsettlingly offbeat “Misericordia.” In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse genre dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And while it may initially appear to be straightforward — and while it thankfully avoids the wild tonal swings of muddy tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and rather baffling terrorism sex-farce “Nobody’s Hero” (2022) — nobody could ever accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of playing it straight.

From the start, there’s something off. The prologue is a driving sequence, shot from the point of view of the unseen driver, through the narrowing country roads of hilly southwestern France. There is nothing overtly odd going on, even the landscape is banal, shot in hazy earth tones by Claire Mathon’s clever,...

In a career spanning four decades and eight features, Alain Guiraudie has cemented himself as one of our most astute chroniclers of desire. If there’s any leitmotif to his libidinous body of work, that’s not homosexuality (prevalent as same-sex encounters might be across his films) but a force that transcends all manner of labels and categories. His is a cinema of liberty: of vast, enchanted spaces and solitary wanderers who wrestle with their passions, and in acting them out, change the way they carry themselves into the world. Desire becomes an exercise in self-sovereignty, a way of reasserting one’s independence––a rebirth. It is often said that cinema is an inescapably scopophilic realm, where the act of looking is itself a source of pleasure, but Guiraudie has a way of making that dynamic feel egalitarian, as thrilling for those watching as it is for those being watched.

Cannes is over, the prizes have been given out at Saturday’s awards ceremony., and buyers have gone home, but the deals haven’t stopped. Some of the buzziest titles ahead of the festival are still are awaiting buyers. This year’s market hasn’t been weighed down by the writers or actors strikes in the same way as last year, meaning companies like A24, Neon, Apple, and more have jumped in on exciting packages of possibly future contenders, while art house, specialized distributors like Sideshow and Janus Films, Mubi, and Metrograph have been especially active.

Below we’re tracking everything that gets acquired throughout the festival and beyond.

Films Acquired After the Festival “Gazer”

Section: Director’s Fortnight

Director: Ryan J. Sloan

Buyer: Metrograph Pictures

Date Acquired: May 29

Cast: Ariella Mastroianni

Buzz: As IndieWire exclusively reported, Metrograph went big on this neo-noir thriller with a unique concept from a...

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights to Alain Guiraudie’s queer crime thriller “Misericordia,” starring Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. The film was a selection of the Cannes Premiere section at this year’s festival.

The film follows Jérémie (Kysyl), a man returning to his hometown for the funeral of his former employer. After a mysterious disappearance, a priest and a townsperson make Jérémie’s short stay take an unexpected turn.

Guiraudie wrote and directed the film, produced by Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema. Janus Films and Sideshow are planning a theatrical release.

The deal was negotiated by Alice Lesort for Les Films du Losange on behalf of the filmmakers with Sideshow and Janus Films. The film is a CG Cinéma, Scala Films, Arte France Cinéma, Andergraun Films and Rosa Filmes co-production with the participation of Arte France, Ocs and Les Films du Losange.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights to Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, which screened this week at Cannes in the Premiere sidebar section.

Janus and Sideshow, which negotiated the deal with Les Films du Losange, are planning a theatrical release for the film.

Written and directed by Guiraudie, the film stars Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. CG Cinéma, Scala Films, Arte France Cinéma, Andergraun Films and Rosa Filmes co-produced with the participation of Arte France, Ocs and Les Films du Losange. Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema served as producer.

Misericordia centres...

Revisiting the murder mysteries of his award-winning 2013 feature, Stranger by the Lake, but with a more darkly comic tone found in much of his other work, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, Misericordia (Miséricorde), plays like two films at once: The first is a sinister, small-town homicide story in the vein of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a man shows up to wreak havoc on the seemingly innocent. The second is a twisted variation on Pasolini’s Teorema, in which a family is torn apart by a visitor’s pervasive sexuality and refusal to leave them alone.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France,...

Alain Guiraudie is back at Cannes with a bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire, “Miséricorde.” Remember, the French writer/director is the filmmaker behind the 2013 perverse gay classic “Stranger by the Lake,” a simmering and sinister cruising tale about how our drives toward death and sex are of the same flesh. “Miséricorde,” debuting in the Cannes Premiere section, is a decidedly lighter-on-its-feet (in all senses of the idiom) story of a lonely and faithless man’s obsession with his dead former boss, who’s also the father of the childhood best friend he maybe once loved.

When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial, a provincial village nestled in a wood in Southern France, he immediately bonds with his former boss’ widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Is it romantic obsession, or projecting a mother figure upon her? Or is Jérémie really in love with her dead husband, and...

Les Films du Losange has taken international sales rights to French filmmaker and Cannes regular Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, set to world premiere at Cannes Film Festival’s in the non-competitive Premiere section.

The film, from prolific producer Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema, is described as a tense rural drama set in an oppressive French village where inhabitants struggle to hide their most intimate secrets and shameful sins.

Guiraudie returns to Cannes after premiering Staying Vertical in Competition in 2016, Stranger By The Lake in Un Certain Regard in 2013, The King Of Scape in Directors’ Fortnight in 2009 and No Rest For The Brave,...

Amidst the potential 2024 majors––Jia Zhangke, Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Paul Schrader, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa but a handful––we should invest as much hope in a new film from Alain Guiraudie. Late last year we reported on his feature Miséricorde (Mercy in English), and this week CG Cinéma’s Romain Blondeau announced the commencement of shooting with Claire Mathon (his Dp on Staying Vertical and Stranger By the Lake) in tow.

Miséricorde is said to follow a noir-like plot concerning Jérémie, a 30-year-old who returns to his native Saint-Martial for a friend’s funeral. While there “he must contend with rumors and suspicion, until he commits an irreparable act and finds himself at the centre of a police investigation.” Knowing Guiraudie’s unflinching visions of violence and sexuality (not least in his superb novel Now the Night Begins), I am already girding my loins. Catherine Frot, Felix Kysyl,...

Just weeks before Alain Guiraudie is set to begin production on his seventh feature film, we learn (via the lesinrocks folks) that the cast of Miséricorde is comprised of veteran actress Catherine Frot along with Felix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. Guiraudie will be reteaming with cinematographer Claire Mathon for a third time – they previously paired on Stranger by the Lake and Staying Vertical. Mathon was most recently on the set for Pablo Agüero’s Saint-Ex. Sold by the Les Films du Losange folks, with production beginning in next month we figure that a Cannes showing is not in the cards with a Locarno or Venice premiere more probable.…...

"I don't feel I have to be everyone." Cohen Media Group has released the full, official Us trailer for Michel Hazanavicius' somewhat controversial film Godard Mon Amour, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year with the title Le Redoutable. The film focuses on famous French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, and his time in the 60s when he made La Chinoise with young Polish actress Anne Wiazemsky. He fell madly in love with her, the two eventually married, but the events of May 1968 shook Godard and things started to get a bit unstable. Louis Garrel plays Godard, and Stacy Martin plays Wiazemsky, with a cast including Bérénice Bejo, Micha Lescot, Grégory Gadebois, and Félix Kysyl. This film is more of an homage to Godard, than a profile of the director, but it's honest and accurate. And it's a surprisingly good film, that examines the challenges of an intellectual filmmaker in an ever-changing society.