China’s Rediance boards Cannes-bound documentary ‘Imago’

EXCLUSIVE: Rediance has acquired Chechen director Déni Oumar Pitsaev’s hybrid documentary Imago, ahead of its world premiere at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, further enhancing the international slate of the China-based sales agent.

Filmed in Georgia last summer, it marks the first-ever feature-length Chechen film, shedding lightweight on a community that has almost never been represented in cinema.

Chechnya-born Pitsaev also grew up in Kazakhstan and Russia before arriving in Paris as a refugee aged 17. He is now one of very few Chechen filmmakers.

The project came about when he inherited land in Pankisi, Georgia, a valley at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains. It is an isolated region neither he nor his mother knows, only inhabited by distant descendants of his Chechen clan. Nevertheless, he plans to make a home there. His father, who abandoned him during the second Chechen war, arrives from Russia to support him build his house according to ancestral traditions.

“The film has a dimension that is both burlesque and dramatic,” said French producer Alexandra Mélot of Triptyque Films, who has been working on the project for five years. “Déni is the image, the main character of the story, a figure between Woody Allen and Buster Keaton, light and determined.”

Co-producers are Need Productions from Belgium, Arte Cinéma and RTBF. Editor is Laurent Sénéchal, who was editor on Palme d’Or-winner Anatomy Of A Fall, for which won a Cesar and European Film Award as well as being Oscar-nominated.