UK Film council funding doubles the number of screens showing Cannes award-winning film - A Prophet
A Prophet, the powerful award-winning crime thriller from acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard, will be showing at more than double the number of screens (increasing from 35 to 75) when it is released this Friday, thanks to Lottery distribution funding from the UK Film Council. This funding will also aid the film's publicity and advertising.
LONDON – 20 January 2010
A Prophet, the powerful award-winning crime thriller from acclaimed French director Jacques Audiard, will be showing at more than double the number of screens (increasing from 35 to 75) when it is released this Friday, thanks to Lottery distribution funding from the UK Film Council. This funding will also aid the film's publicity and advertising.
UK distributor Optimum Releasing received £150,000 to boost the distribution of A Prophet, which follows the story of 19-year-old petty criminal Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim). Sentenced to six years in a brutal French prison, Malik soon realises he has to learn the ropes if he is to survive, and finds himself having to carry out a series of brutal missions to prove his allegiance to the leader of the prison's Corsican gang. With his confidence and power growing, Malik begins to develop his own plans, placing him on a collision course with his gang boss.
Winner of last year's prestigious Cannes Grand Jury prize and applauded by critics worldwide, A Prophet has since gone on to win a number of awards and nominations, including the Times BFI London Film Festival award for Best Film and Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the 2010 Golden Globes. A Prophet is nominated for Best Film Not in the English Language at the BAFTA awards on 21 February, and is an official French entry for this year's Oscars®.
A number of smaller awards of £5,000 were also made to widen the distribution of the following films:
- Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey's Mugabe and the White African, winner of the British Independent Film Award for Best Documentary, which follows the attempt by a white Zimbabwean farmer to take President Robert Mugabe to an international court on charges of racism and human rights abuse. (Dogwoof)
- Robert Kenner's award-winning documentary Food, Inc, which examines relationships between business and government in relation to the food we eat and how modern developments in food production pose risks to our health and environment. (Dogwoof)
- The Oscar® Nominated Short Films 2010, a selection of the ten animated and live action short films nominated for this year's Academy Awards in March. (Shorts International)
- So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain, a Korean childhood drama about seven-year-old Jin and her younger sister Bin who, when their mother goes off in search of their estranged father, are left in the care of their emotionally distant alcoholic aunt in Seoul. (Soda Pictures)
- Under the Mud, an upbeat micro-budget comedy-drama about family life on a Liverpool estate. Under the Mud is a unique collaboration between a group of teenage writers, directed by Of Time and the City producer Sol Papadopoulos, and co-funded for production by the UK Film Council. (Hurricane Films)
- Michel Hazanavicius's OSS 11: Lost in Rio, the sequel to 2006's French box office smash OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, which continues the story of France's most inept secret agent, Hubert Bonisseur De La Bath. (ICA Films)
- Martin Koolhoven's Winter in Wartime, a Dutch coming-of-age drama set in the final days of WWII. A teenage boy rebels against his father, the town mayor, by becoming involved with the underground resistance movement after discovering an escaped pilot from a crashed British fighter plane. (Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment)
- Andrey Khrzhanovskiy's A Room and a Half, a unique journey through the earlier life of Nobel Prize winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. (Yume Pictures)
In addition:
- Terracotta Distribution received £4,900 for Korean director Yang Ik-joon's Breathless, a crime drama about a violent gangland enforcer who tries to return to mainstream society.
- The BFI received £4,850 for the re-release of Yasujiro Ozu's classic comedy Late Autumn (Akibiyori 1960) about a widow who tries to marry off her daughter with the help of her late husband's three friends. The BFI also received £4,260 for Max Ophüls's Letter from an Unknown Woman, the classic Hollywood 1940's melodrama starring Louis Jourdan and Joan Fontaine.
- Artificial Eye received £4,770 for the Gerardo Naranjo'sMexican drama I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a Explotar), about the 15-year-old son of a respected yet corrupt Guanajuato politician who runs away with a girl from school.
A Prophet | £150,000 |
A Room and a Half | £5,000 |
Food, Inc | £5,000 |
Mugabe and the White African | £5,000 |
OSS 11: Lost in Rio | £5,000 |
The Oscar® Nominated Short Films 2010 | £5,000 |
Treeless Mountain | £5,000 |
Under the Mud | £5,000 |
Winter in Wartime | £5,000 |
Breathless | £4,900 |
Late Autumn (Akibiyori 1960) | £4,850 |
I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a Explotar) | £4,770 |
Letter from an Unknown Woman | £4,260 |
For details of where to see any of these films, visit www.findanyfilm.com. A list of the UK Film Council's National Lottery awards can be found on our website at www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk.
For more information contact:
Tara Milne
UK Film Council press office
020 7861 7901 / tara.milne@ukfilmcouncil.org.uk
Notes to Editors
UK FILM COUNCIL
The UK Film Council is the Government-backed lead agency for film in the UK, supporting the UK film industry, celebrating UK film culture and nurturing UK film talent at home and abroad. Since its creation in 2000 the UK Film Council has backed more than 900 films, shorts and features, which have won over 300 awards and entertained more than 200 million people around the world. Its support develops new filmmakers, funds exciting new British films and gets a wider choice of films to audiences throughout the UK. It also invests in training British talent, promoting Britain as an international filmmaking location and raising the profile of British films abroad. In addition, it funds the British Film Institute.
The Prints & Advertising Fund
The UK is one of the most expensive countries in the world in which to release films, and this can lead to limited choice for cinema-goers. While blockbusters such as Harry Potter are often released in the UK with more than 1,000 film prints, the average number of prints for a foreign language specialist film is under ten.
The UK Film Council has created a single fund, the UK Film Council's Prints and Advertising Support Fund, also known as the P&A Fund, with an annual budget of £4 million. This fund also offers support to more commercially focused 'British' films that nevertheless remain difficult to market.
This fund is not intended to substitute pre-existing investment but rather is seeking to add value to the investment already being made by distributors in each film.
The fund aims to benefit audiences by:
- widening access in terms of the range of films available;
- widening opportunities to view such films across the UK; and
- widening audience awareness of the range of films potentially available.
