NEON Nabs North American Rights to Julia Ducournau’s ‘Alpha’

Award-winning studio NEON announced that it has acquired the North American rights to award-winning filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s (Titane, Raw) newest genre-defying film Alpha.

Golshifteh Farahani (The Patience Stone, Paterson) and Tahar Rahim (The Mauritanian, A Prophet) are set to star, with principal photography on the film commencing next fall. Producers are Jean des Forêts and Amelie Jacquis of Petit Film and Eric & Nicolas Altmayer of Mandarin & Compagnie, with Frakas Productions co-producing. Charades and FilmNation Entertainment are handling sales in the rest of the world during the Cannes Film Festival. 

The deal was negotiated by NEON’s President of Acquisitions & Production Jeff Deutchman with Charades’ Carole Baraton and FilmNation Entertainment’s CEO Glen Basner on behalf of the filmmakers. The deal marks NEON’s second collaboration with Ducournau following Titane, which the studio picked up ahead of its premiere in Cannes in 2021 and went on to win the Palme d’Or, following the studio’s 2019 win for Parasite (which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar) and preceding 2022’s Triangle of Sadness and 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall.

NEON recently acquired the worldwide rights to Osgood Perkins’ Keeper, starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence; in Cannes the company will also be premiering Anora In Competition, the highly-anticipated new film from Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket) starring Mikey Madison. NEON’s upcoming slate includes Pamela Adlon’s directorial debut, Babes, which premiered at this year’s SXSW and will open in theaters on May 17; Academy Award-nominee for Best Animated Feature Robot Dreams from Pablo Berger which comes to US theaters on May 31; Longlegs from Osgood Perkins, starring Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe, releasing in theaters July 12; and Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, starring Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens, in theaters August 2. 

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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