Yellow Veil Pictures has acquired all North American rights to Gaspar Noé’s new meta movie “Lux Aeterna.” The studio is planning a theatrical release for the film this spring. “Lux Aeterna” made its world premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and was later selected for the Tribeca Film Festival prior to its cancellation due to the pandemic.
“Lux Aeterna” unfolds backstage at a French film production and is stylistically daring, in the manner of many of Noé’s movies. It’s shot documentary style and frequently deploys split-screens to follow two characters at once. In a metafictional twist, Charlotte Gainsbourg, acting as herself, plays the film’s — and the film-within-a-film’s — leading role of an actress taking on the role of a witch burned at the stake while French actress Beatrice Dalle, playing a version of herself as well, assumes the on-screen role of director. Slowly the set descends into aggressive chaos, which is a register that is well known to Noé.
The film was a favorite with certain critics. IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, for instance, suggested that the movie was a perfecting melding of subject matter and maker, writing “This snippet of a movie implies that art thrives on chaos, and that Noé wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Actress and model Abbey Lee (“The Neon Demon”), Karl Glusman (“Love”), Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull (“Climax”), Félix Maritaud (“Knife + Heart”), and Clara Deshayes also appear as interpretations of themselves.
Noé, the auteur behind such challenging and boldly provocative works as the LSD trip of a flick “Climax” and the psychedelic melodrama “Enter The Void,” wrote the film in addition to directing it. It was produced by Anthony Vaccarello for legendary French fashion label Saint Laurent, Gary Farkas, Clément Lepoutre, and Olivier Muller for Vixens, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Noé.
“This is pure, unfiltered Noé; prepare yourself for the spectacle event of the year,” said Yellow Veil Pictures Co-Founder Joe Yanick.
The deal was negotiated by Yellow Veil Pictures Co-Founders Hugues Barbier, Justin Timms, and Joe Yanick, with Wild Bunch International’s Eva Diederix.
Yellow Veil Pictures has previously distributed the likes of Frida Kempff’s Sundance hit “Knocking” and “The Long Walk” from director Mattie Do, which screened at Venice and TIFF.
