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EXCLUSIVE: Cinema Guild has picked up North American distribution rights to Fire Of Wind, the latest feature from Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus.
Fire Of Wind debuted at last year’s Locarno Film Festival and had its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The film was produced by Mateus and Pedro Costa of Clarão Companhia, in collaboration with Fabrice Aragno of Casa Azul Films and Richard Copans of Les Films d’Ici. Cinema Guild will release the film in theaters in 2025.
Set in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus was raised, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion. The synopsis reads: It’s harvest time and there’s discontent in the fields. Soraia, a young girl, cuts herself. Blood mixes with wine. A black bull is on the loose and the laborers must scramble for shelter up in the oak trees. As the specter of the beast looms below, they share bread and wine, memories and dreams, the history of the landscape, and struggles past and present. We enter a long night, where nature also speaks. The fiery wind that brings the heatwave, is burning.
The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with Clarão Companhia.
“Mateus is a rare filmmaker, one whose deep sense of form, language, gesture, and poetry is inseparable from her political commitment to the working class of her home region,” McCarry said in a statement. “Her first feature heralds an essential vision in contemporary film. We are very proud to be releasing it in the cinema.”
Cinema Guild’s other upcoming releases include Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, Shinji Somai’s Love Hotel, Hong Sangsoo’s By the Stream and What Does That Nature Say to You, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the films of João César Monteiro. Recent past releases include Hong Sangsoo’s A Traveler’s Needs and Somai’s Moving.
