Screen Media Get Plenty of Real Estate with ‘3 Backyards’

With a preem at Sundance and follow up fests such as ND/NF and Deauville, Eric Mendelsohn’s 3 Backyards has had a difficult time finding a distributor willing to partner on a project that may lack in star power, but might be working with a different curriculum. Screen Media have nabbed the rights to the drama will plans of setting it up with a release next year.

Written by Eric Mendelsohn this is the story of three residents of the same suburban town over the course of one seemingly perfect autumn day. Seen through a prism of sunlight and glittering leaves, the film peers deep into the private lives of its characters as they embark on journeys that fracture the delicate normalcy of the day. A businessman (Elias Koteas) with marital troubles gets “lost” on a business trip without ever leaving town. A little girl (Rachel Resheff) steals her mother’s jewelry in the morning and finds herself entangled in a web of frightening, adult implications by late afternoon. A well-meaning housewife (Edie Falco) offers her celebrity neighbor (Embeth Davidtz) a lift and the trip detours into unsettling territory for both of them. By day’s end, the familiar geography of the suburban landscape has dissolved into a dreamscape where identities are created, lost, and ultimately reclaimed.

IndieWIRE points out an interesting factoid that I had overlooked: Mendelsohn became the first person to be awarded the Directing Prize twice (having received the same prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival for “Judy Berlin”).