EXCLUSIVE: Paradise City Sales, formerly known as Memento Films International, has taken on international sales rights to Portuguese director Ped
EXCLUSIVE: Paradise City Sales, formerly known as Memento Films International, has taken on international sales rights to Portuguese director Pedro Pinho’s politically charged Africa-set drama I Only Rest In The Storm, which is set to world premiere in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film explores neocolonialism, climate anxiety, and identity in a story about an environmental engineer who travels to a West African metropolis to work on a road project for an NGO. There, he becomes entangled in a relationship between a couple of the city’s inhabitants as the dynamics of the expat community unravel around them.
Sérgio Coragem, Cleo Diára and newcomer Jonathan Guilherme star. The producers are Portugal’s Uma Pedra no Sapato, known for Miguel Gomes’ Cannes’ 2024 best director prize-winning Grand Tour, and Terratreme Films.
Co-producers are France’s Still Moving, Brazil’s Bubbles Project and Romania’s deFilm.
Since rebranding in February, Paris and London-based Paradise City Sales has been led by Emilie Georges and Naima Abed. The company’s Cannes sales slate also includes Hailey Gates’ Sundance grand jury prize-winner Atropia, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s Berlin premiere Ancestral Visions Of The Future, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister and Haifaa Al-Mansour’s crime thriller Unidentified.
As Memento, Paradise City Sales previously handled Pinho’s The Nothing Factory which screened in Directors’ Fortnight in 2017, winning the Fipresci prize.
“I wanted to further develop the experiment initiated with The Nothing Factory by placing speech at the center of a collective wound – the neo-colonial border,” said Pinho. “The film drifts between bodies and power, between post-colonial infrastructures and desire, to capture the contradictions of a territory torn between domination and resistance. At its core, it is a story of encounters, disappearance, and uneven expectations – a search for escape routes, both intimate and political.”
Paradise City Sales described the film as “a visually stunning and intellectually rich odyssey that questions the complexity of the dynamics between the North and the South”.
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