Arts Alliance acquires Sundance darling 'The Eyes of My Mother'

PanARMENIAN.Net - Arts Alliance Distribution has bought U.K. rights to U.S. horror movie "The Eyes of My Mother", Nicolas Pesce's debut film, which premiered to critical acclaim at Sundance in January. The film will be the first release under Park Circus' new Future Classics label, Variety said.

Park Circus is well-known for its distribution of classic studio titles. But in recent years, Arts Alliance CEO Nick Varley said, Park Circus has increasingly been asked to handle studio festival acquisitions, which led to the distributor looking at the possibility of occasionally putting out an independent release on its own.

"'The Eyes of My Mother' is visually stunning, and we decided to pick it up," Varley told Variety. He said the new label is not intended to be a new independent film distributor in Britain but is a "sub-brand" intended to differentiate new acquisitions from the classic titles that form Park Circus' core business.

"We are not in the business of acquiring lots of first-run independent films," says Varley. "We'll use [the Future Classics label] two to three times a year to put out some new films from new filmmakers that we feel are marketable to an audience. We want to present them as the next generation of classics."

"The Eyes of My Mother" tells the story of a young woman, unfazed by death from an early age, whose desire to connect with the world around her takes a distinctly dark form.

The film, which Variety called an "impressive, highly original horror fable" and "the stuff of very beautiful nightmares," receives its U.K. premiere during the BFI London Film Festival in October. Future Classics will release it theatrically in Britain in early 2017.