SUNDANCE ACQUISITIONS

Fox Searchlight Pictures and Miramax Films announced yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival that they have aligned with one another to create an unprecedented joint acquisitions agreement for the worldwide distribution rights to Garden State, the directorial debut feature from Zach Braff (television’s “Scrubs”), who also wrote the screenplay and stars in the film along with Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and a strong ensemble cast. (Variety reported that the companies paid $5 million for the film.) Miramax and Fox Searchlight will share equally in the film’s worldwide revenues, and the two companies are currently discussing which entity will distribute in which territory worldwide, based on their respective resources and desires. The film is produced by Camelot Pictures’ partners Gary Gilbert and Dan Halsted, along with Pamela Abdy and Richard Klubeck. The film was executive produced by Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher.

The film is a romantic comedy about a guy who returns to his hometown for the first time in ten years to attend the funeral of his clinically depressed mother, a journey of self-discovery that reconnects him with the world he left behind and gives him a chance to find love in an unexpected place.

Other Sundance acquistions include Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, based on Ernesto Che Guevara’s autobiographical book The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America, in which a young Che describes his race around South America on a Norton 500 motorbike (nicknamed “The Mighty One”) with a best buddy, Alberto Granado, in 1952, making sweeping generalizations along the way on everything from the political underpinnings of Chile to the civility of the police in Peru. Focus Features reportedly paid between $3 and $4 million dollars for the film, which stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna and was executive produced by Robert Redford.

Sony Pictures Classics picked up Stacey Peralta’s Riding Giants, about American surf culture and the advent of big-wave surfing, which opened the festival to great acclaim. Sony released Peralta’s skateboarding doc Dogtown and Z Boys in 2001.

Napoleon Dynamite, the first feature from Jared Hess, who studied film at Brigham Young University, stars Jon Heder as Napoleon, a young man who spends his days drawing magical beasts, working on his computer hacking skills to impress the chicks, and begrudgingly feeding his grandma’s pet llama, Tina. The film is an extension of Hess’s short film Peluca, based on his experiences growing up in rural Idaho, which also featured Heder in the title role. Napoleon was bought by Fox Searchlight for $3 million following its debut in the Sundance Dramatic Competition.

And finally, Lions Gate Films has reportedly acquired worldwide rights for $2.5 million to Open Water, Chris Kentis’s film about a scuba-diving couple who find themselves stranded in a shark-infested ocean. The film, which premiered at the 2003 Hamptons International Film Festival, opened Sundance’s American Spectrum section.