In Development
THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE
Written and Directed by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. Her first feature film “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” has received support from San Francisco Film Society's Rainin Grant for the screenwriting phase, from Creative Capital, and was a 2020 finalist at Biennale College Cinema, the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious film lab.
THE BALLAD OF SUZANNE CÉSAIRE: Aimé and Suzanne Césaire play a central role in a small group of artists and students who seek to resist the degradation of Black Martiniquais at the hands of the Vichy army. When André Breton and the surrealists arrive as refugees to the island and seek out the Césaires, Breton, Aimé and Suzanne begin a mutual and triangular infatuation that blazes through them all, jolting Aimé and Suzanne from their depression.
See the full lookbook here.
Story by Volker Weidermann. Produced by Johannes Rexin and Mike S Ryan.
“Summer Before The Dark” is full of fine humor and comic elements, a film about love and creativity, the characters being the “burnt poets”, more relevant today than ever, deprived of their home, their language, and their hope. Today in Europe, we have to again face reactionary nationalist movements in many countries.
Our film will focus on Keun Irmgard: born in Berlin, a Cologne girl from Braunsfeld, her books were burnt, and she was banned from writing. Undeterred, she sued for compensation and professional recognition. After her father ransomed her from a Gestapo prison, she fled to exile when Hitler invaded the Rhineland...
The result, Keun’s sharp observation, “After Midnight,” authentically reported from her own experience after 1933, is a merciless account of how authoritarian society destroys human relationships.
We want to create a strong film, a film that respects the dark moments of the individual fates in the novel as well as the dramatic conditions of creativity in exile yet never denies the sometimes absurd lightness of existence.
- Johannes Rexin
See the full lookbook here.
Written and Directed by A.D. Calvo, a follow up to the Shudder-exlusive hit SWEET SWEET LONELY GIRL.
Starring Emily Meade, Dylan Gelula, Erin Wilhelmi, and Robert Longstreet.
HERE COMES THE NIGHT: an androgynous punk rocker battles her demons, while caring for a blind woman in a house full of monsters of its own.
See the full lookbook here.
Written & Directed by Nicholas Greene. Starring David Harewood & Finn Wittrock.
"In adapting Othello for the screen, Iago becomes an NYPD surveillance specialist lost in a lonely world of technology – someone who watches and listens to other peoples’ lives, while living out his own alternate reality. In contrast, his commanding officer Othello is a former child soldier who has worked his way up from destitute immigrant to police captain, the living embodiment of the American dream."
Read the full director's statement & see the full lookbook here.
Directed by Benjamin A. Eisner
Starring Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving
HERE ON FOOLISH GRASS: Amid angst-ridden 1960s America, world-famous author and monk Thomas Merton meets aspiring feminist cartoonist Elizabeth, who propels Merton's monastic vows into question and sets her sights on New York City.