Kino Lorber Acquires All US Rights to Guy Maddin’s THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Kino Lorber has announced the acquisition of all US rights to Guy Maddin’s (My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music in the World) THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015), following the film’s world premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM was produced by Phi Films, Buffalo Gal Pictures and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), with the participation of Telefilm Canada and with the financial investment of Manitoba Film & Music and SODEC.

“I feel fantastic about Richard Lorber and his team handling THE FORBIDDEN ROOM,” wrote director Guy Maddin. “When we first met, before he saw the movie, I felt that rare pleasure of tastes synching up every second moment, but immediately after the screening we connected with wondrous electrified crackles! It was like we were giddily letting this film finish each other’s sentences for us! Our movie instantly galvanized a shared experience. It’s only right, and extremely thrilling, that THE FORBIDDEN ROOM marry up with Kino Lorber!”

Co-directed by Maddin’s long-time collaborator Evan Johnson, the film stars Mathieu Amalric, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Louis Negin, and Maria de Medeiros, all playing a cavalcade of misfits, thieves and lovers in an exhilarating world of cinematic treasures.

Kino Lorber is planning a fall theatrical release for the film, along with key festival engagements throughout the country. A digital and home media release will follow. The deal was negotiated between Kino Lorber CEO Richard Lorber and Charlotte Mickie, President of Mongrel International.

Allegedly made from scenes pulled from legendary lost films, THE FORBIDDEN ROOM is “a masterful, operatic delight of strangeness” (Nicholas Bell, IonCinema) that plays like a glorious meeting between Italo Calvino, Sergei Eisenstein and a perverted six year-old child.  This trip “through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, into the twilight zone …” (Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter) is also a culmination of Guy Maddin’s body of work and an unhinged resurrection of cinema’s glorious past.

“It’s such a delight to have Richard Lorber on board, as the captain of the US release of THE FORBIDDEN ROOM.  Kino Lorber has the right profile and unique skills to deliver this film to a delirious audience,” wrote Charlotte Mickie. “We are all deeply impressed by their recent work on A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Goodbye to Language 3D.”

“Guy Maddin has outdone himself with THE FORBIDDEN ROOM,” wrote Richard Lorber. “Every frame here is a work of art, and his genius vision of our cinematic past is both an epic culmination of his interest in silent cinema as well as an aesthetic explosion of joy, desire and beauty.”

Honoring classic cinema while electrocuting it with energy, this Russian nesting doll of a film begins (after a prologue on how to take a bath) with the crew of a doomed submarine chewing flapjacks in a desperate attempt to breathe the oxygen within.

Suddenly (and impossibly), a lost woodsman wanders into their company and tells his tale of escaping from a fearsome clan of cave dwellers. From here, Maddin takes us high into the air, around the world, and into dreamscapes, spinning tales of amnesia, captivity, deception and murder, skeleton women and vampire bananas.

Teaser: https://vimeo.com/user4895266/review/117400724/efd27dabb7