Clara Linhart’s latest project is hoping to get global distribution…
Figa Films has acquired the international sales rights to Os Sapos (Frogs) by the Brazilian filmmaker.
Linhart’s previous film Domingo, co-directed with Fellipe Barbosa, premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival in Venice Days.
The Brazilian production centers on a woman, in her late thirties, invited to an old friends’ get together at a country house. She arrives to find there is no get together and is left instead to spend her weekend with two couples in partial crisis.
In her statement about the film director Linhart says, ‘I want the spectators to recognize themselves in these characters or in the situations they experience. I want people to both laugh and cringe because they can relate. I want to use the camera as a microscope capable of visualizing looks, gestures, and whispers that denote desires, fears, and insecurities.”
Paula is played by Thalita Carauta, who put in an award-winning turn in Narcos director Fernando Coimbra’s searing feature debut A Wolf At The Door, a Horizontes Latinos winner at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Her character carries the audience with her as what could have been an idyllic getaway thrusts demands on her to be an agony aunt, diffuse tension, thwart advances of friendship and more.
‘I am not interested in portraying women as victims and men as monsters, but in identifying complementary neuroses that are common to so many couples,’ says Linhardt.
These goals from the director are complimented by a screenplay from Renata Mizrahi.
FiGa and Linhardt will no doubt be encouraged by jury and audience wins at the pix-in-post strand of the 26th Festival Audiovisual do Mercosul. It’s a festival that has brought success previously, with her first feature, La Manuela, winning the best doc prize there in 2017.
Sandro Fiorin, co-founder of FiGa Films told Variety: “We have admired Clara’s work for a long time and it’s a privilege to collaborate with her and the team in Brazil. Her film, though comedic at moments, feels like a pressure chamber in an idyllic paradise – leaving us totally breathless.”
Produced by Linhardt and Fellipe Barbosa’s label Gamarosa Filmes, Os Sapos received support from Brazil’s main federal government production fund, the Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual. Additional co-production credits go to Canal Brasil and Telecine.
