‘Flow’ Producer Sacrebleu Productions’ Upcoming Feature ‘The Bird Kingdom’ Acquired by Lucky Number (EXCLUSIVE)
Upstart French sales outfit Lucky Number has picked up global sales rights to director Wesley Rodrigues’ “The Bird Kingdom,” backed by French “Flow” producer Sacrebleu Productions and Brazil’s Lupa Filmes. UFO Distribution will distribute the anti-violence fable in France.
Set in a fantasy version of the Brazilian Sert?o, an arid wasteland where men can shapeshift into birds of prey, protagonist Assum Preto is taken as a child by Carcara, an outlaw who aspires to be a local legend.
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“I’m a producer, but I am mostly an artistic producer. I think I have a good nose to find good projects, and I guess I also have a strong nose to find good partners,” Sacrebleu producer Ron Dyens told Variety of his film’s new sales agent. “And we had a very strong first feeling when I told Olivier [Barbier, Lucky Number co-founder] the references I had in mind for ‘Kingdom.’ A lot of them were actually projects he’d worked on before.”
Launched last year by former mk2 films acquisition and sales agents Barbier and Ola Byszuk and ex-Orange Studio exec Lenny Porte, Lucky Number is making its EFM debut this year, where it is also repping Thierry Machado’s Greenland-set dog-sledding adventure “Pipaluk” and Annemarie Jacir’s “Palestine 36,” starring Jeremy Irons.
Of his company’s recent pickup, Barbier explained, “It’s so rare to find a film like [‘The Bird Kingdom’]. When we judge a project, whether it be fiction, documentary, animation or whatever, we take a story-driven approach. With the help of Ron, I discovered a script that is brilliant, which is a mix of traditional folklore but also so modern in what it’s saying about our world, about how violence can be seen as a solution. This film is very much about the limit of violence.”
Both Barbier and Dyens were insistent that “The Bird Kingdom” will get a theatrical releases in as many markets as possible. “I promise you that not only is this film theatrical quality, but it will bring to audiences something they’ve never seen before,” Barbier insisted.
Alongside its success in animated feature films, Sacrebleu Productions has recently expanded into animated series, notably with “The Chimera Brigade,” directed by Louis Letterier and Antoine Charreyron, a high-end series adapted from the best-selling graphic novel by Serge Lehman and Fabrice Colin, and drawn by Gess. The Steampunk series, which drew tremendous buzz at last year’s Cartoon Forum, begs the question: “What if Marie Curie had created the first superheroes by experimenting with radium on the battlefields of World War I?”
Mirroring our society and its tribulations, the series will be “Fast X” and “Lupin” Louis Leterrier’s first animated series. Described as “a pulp alternate-history tale mixing European superheroes in a 1938 Paris transformed by Marie Curie’s radium, as the world sits on the brink of World War II,” it will follow a young soldier who joins the Chimera Brigade and a journalist who appears to be the only ones who can prevent history from taking a dramatic turn.
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