Distribution company Kino Lorber has announced today the acquisition of all US rights to Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button / El botón de nácar (pictured), the critically acclaimed follow up to Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light.
Winner of a Silver Bear for Best Script at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, The Pearl Button garnered rave reviews after its world premiere and will receive a national release via Kino Lorber during the fall of 2015 after key festival playdates. Theatrical rollout in over 50 markets along with educational distribution will be followed by digital release on all major platforms, coordinated with physical media sales.
This diptych with Nostalgia for the Light explores familiar themes within Patricio Guzmán’s oeuvre: memory, land, and Chiles’ historical past. But in this new work, he has created a uniquely spellbinding and fluid journey through Chile’s history using water as its thematic and aesthetic center.
Chile’s 2,670 miles of coastline, the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. It’s dazzling volcanoes, mountains and glaciers also echo historically the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and brutalized political prisoners. It’s the waters of this unending coastline that hold the secret of two mysterious buttons retrieved from its ocean floor.
Patricio Guzmán unravels meaning from these buttons as though attached to the present by threads of history; they become riveting metaphors for universal crimes against humanity. Breathtaking aerial shots of Chile’s southernmost Tierra del Fuego are juxtaposed with an investigation of state crimes by Chile’s military junta and rare interviews with the last descendants of its indigenous people. The result is a film that both illuminates and transcends Chile’s history with resonance for all humankind.
This deal was negotiated between Kino Lorber CEO Richard Lorber and Pyramide International’s Lucero Garzon, Head of sales and international acquisitions.
Richard Lorber commented: “Patricio Guzmán has accomplished the rare cinematic feat of revealing the universal in the particular. We are honored to bring to American audiences a work of profound poetic and political vision.”
