I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.”
Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!!
Today is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it.
Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’”
So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee!
Time Out London’s interview with Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas is full of good stuff, but like Ray Pride, I’m most interested in what he has to say about the formulation of the film’s almost incomprehensibly beautiful opening shot. It turns out that its inspiration was surprisingly mundane–just take one part OS X, add one part Icelandic art band, and stir:
I was listening to Sigur Rós before going to bed, the computer was in front of me, and the screensaver came on. I have this cosmic screensaver, a picture of stars moving out of the frame very, very slowly. I looked at that magnificent space landscape with the music of Sigur Rós playing and I thought the movie had to open like that.
After all the breathless sploogery over this scene (my own included), its actual ingredients are kind of a letdown, no?
In any case, as my romance with this movie continues unabated, I was happy to see Anne Thompson name it as a “strong contender” for an Oscar nom. Also, how did I miss the news (now a month old!) that Tartan is distributing the film in the US? (Maybe I was derelict in my feed reading duties that week; maybe one of you should have told me. But let’s not play the blame game, okay?) This should be good news, but with no US release date yet set (it opens in England on Friday), I have to guess they’re waiting for the Oscar nominations to decide how and when to push it out.
The members of AFTRA have 
