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EXCLUSIVE: Mitzi Peirone, the Italian writer-director whose debut feature Braid premiered this year in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival, has signed with ICM Partners. The news comes the same day Blue Fox Entertainment acquired worldwide rights to the psychological thriller, which will now be aimed at an early 2019 theatrical release.
Blue Fox will also shop international rights to Braid at next months Toronto Film Festival.
Madeline Brewer (The Handmaids Tale), Imogen Waterhouse (Nocturnal Animals), Sarah Hay (Flesh and Blood) and Scott Cohen (The 10th Kingdom) star in the film, about a pair of drug dealers (Waterhouse and Hay) who seek refuge inside the mansion of their mentally unstable friend (Brewer). The three begin to engage in an elaborate and increasingly dangerous game of permanent make-believe.
Peirone is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and NYU SCPS in Screenwriting. Her first directorial short premiered at Art Basel 2015, and she began writing the Braid screenplay while working as a model.
Wandering Bards Logan Steinhardt and Arielle Elwes produced the film, which was funded by cryptocurrency, via blockchain-based tokens that promise a portion of the films future profits. Executive producers Dino Mark and Joseph Lubin, that latter of whom is from blockchain tech company ConsenSys, raised more than $1.7 million in two weeks with an Ethereum-based equity crowdsale, one of the first in the film biz.
Blue Foxs Todd Slater negotiated the movie acquisition with ICM Partners on behalf of the filmmakers.
“My team and I couldnt be happier to have found such an exciting home for our wild child of a movie — I am thrilled to know itll be experienced in all of its extreme, baroque bravado on the wide screen,” Peirone said. “Considering the expressionistic, almost Dadaist narrative structure of the movie, I am profoundly honored that Blue Fox pushed for a theatrical release — it speaks loudly of their desire and mission to break boundaries in storytelling, rewarding unconventional filmmaking, giving mainstream audiences a chance to experience something out of the ordinary and mind-opening.”
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