Eudaimonia
Pride Pictures
Avi Federgreen is launching a new LGBTQ2S+ movie distribution label, Pride Pictures, for North America at the European Film Market in Berlin.
The queer cinema releasing outfit, with Kirk Cooper hired as head of acquisitions, will kick off with two titles – Inari Niemi’s Light Light Light from Finland and Dylan Rhys Howard’s Canadian indie Eudaimonia.
Unveiling Pride Pictures in Berlin follows Federgreen, a veteran Canadian film producer and distributor, launching an international sales arm for his indie banner, Indiecan Entertainment, based in Toronto.
Pride Pictures will aim to bring queer cinema to North American audiences with no language or regional barriers. The company’s launch comes as representation for LGBTQ+ communities is increasing, but the challenge of getting indie queer films into theaters and onto streaming platforms grows.
“There’s a lot of wonderful films made by amazing queer filmmakers from around the world that never get seen by North American audiences other than in festivals, and I’m excited to help some of these films find the audiences they deserve. I really feel that we need to bring light to these amazing films by amazing filmmakers that are underrepresented in the filmmaking community,” Federgreen said in a statement.
Cooper will head up acquisitions at Pride Pictures after serving as director of programming at Durham Film Festival for five years, a producer on the documentary feature and Mexican-Canadian co-production El Gran Salto and working as a festival manager at genre film distributor Raven Banner Entertainment.
“Given the climate that we are in, films can play an important role in education as well as entertaining many,” Cooper added in his own statement.
The Finnish feature Light Light Light from director Inari Niemi, being introduced to international buyers at EFM by Intramovies, is set in the spring of 1986 when, amid the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, Mimi, a young woman, in a small Finnish village fills the life of 15-year-old Mariia with radiating light. Twenty years later, Mariia returns home to take care of her sick mother and memories of that meaningful summer start to surface.
Rhys Howard’s Eudaimonia stars Alexandra Dawkins as Prudence, a young artist with telepathic abilities searching for connection and meaning in a world of her own eccentric design.
Pride Pictures plans a summer 2024 release for Light, Light, Light and Eudaimonia.