EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based mk2 films has acquired international sales rights to Carlos Reygadas long-awaited new feature Heil Jupiter! ahead of its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in late September.
The radical filmmaker’s first feature since Our Time in 2018, Heil Jupiter! is billed as “a visionary cinematic experience and a nightmarish reflection” on the resistance of love and beauty in our times, no matter how deep the darkness.
The official synopsis reads: “Amidst crashing waves and monumental rocks on a distant coast, two young couples open up a realm of shifting realities. Unbeknownst to them, a mysterious entity watches from high above with Godlike judgment.
Between these spaces exists a world balanced on the edge of the modern and the primitive, the high-tech and the rural, the corporeal and the mythic. This dreamlike astonishment is a work of feral cinematic expression, splendid in its elemental pleasures, which exist in profound and challenging contrast to its depiction of authoritarian brutality.”
Watch on Deadline
First announced some eight years ago under the title of Wake of Umbra, Heil Jupiter! has been shot across Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, and Mexico.
Giving an update on the project at the Locarno Film Festival last year, Reygadas acknowledged the duration of the production had been long but said the process of making the film had been one of “deep investigation”.
Reygadas first broke through in 2002 with debut feature Japón, which garnered a Cannes Caméra d’Or Special Mention. He would go on to win the festival’s Jury Prize for Silent Light in 2007 followed by Best Director for Tenebras Lux in 2012. Our Time premiered in competition in Venice in 2018.
Heil Jupiter! is produced by Cristina Velasco for Paloma Negra Films and Carlos Reygadas for No Dream, in co-production with Madants (Poland), Rosa Films (Portugal), Snowglobe (Sweden), Fat City (U.S.), Felix Culpa (U.S.), Board Cadre (Switzerland), Staer (Norway) plus Marco Perego´s Leaf Entertainment (U.S.) and Duende (U.S.).
