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Acquisitions – Foreign Films

Kino Lorber Get Behind the Wheel of Panahi’s Taxi

IndieWIRE reports that Kino Lorber has acquired the North American rights to Jafar Panahi’s latest film, the third film (2011’s This Is Not a Film and 2013’s Closed Curtain) under his “house” arrest. Having just premiered at the Berlin Int. Film Festival, by the looks of the image above, Taxi walked away with the grand daddy prize of them all – landing both the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI prize. The film will be theatrically released in the fall, which means a showing at TIFF and/or NYFF are highly likely.

Gist: A yellow cab drives through the vibrant and colorful streets of Tehran, picking up a diverse group of passengers who each candidly express their opinions and worldview to the driver (Panahi).

Worth Noting: This is technically Kino Lorber’s second Panahi film release. They have the rights for This Is Not a Film – the film which saw the filmmaker under house arrest and was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake.

Do We Care?: If The Five Obstructions comically placed restrictions on the form, this put together trilogy have a more purposeful necessity. It played extremely well in Berlin, we look forward in catching up with this wink to Kiarostami’s Ten.

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).

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