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If you’ve never known what it’s like to be the only hot person in a small town, Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” is here to show you just that, in all its darkly comic anguish.

The “Stranger by the Lake” director’s latest film, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival before touring Telluride, Toronto, and New York, will open in select theaters on March 21. IndieWire exclusively announces the film’s release from Sideshow and Janus Films here. “Misericordia” finds Guiraudie returning to the land of queer desire, though this time with Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) coming back to his hometown to mourn the death of his former boss. Whom he may have been in love with.

A national rollout will kickoff after the film opens at IFC Center and Film at Lincoln Center in New York and the Landmark’s Nuart Theatre.

While back in his hometown of Saint-Martial in rural France,...

The 2024 edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as Seminci, wrapped on Saturday (October 26), giving its top award, the Golden Spike, to Misericordia by Alain Guiraudie.

Misericordia tells the story of a man who returns to his hometown for the funeral of his former boss, the village baker, and decides to stay for a few days with the man’s widow, getting involved in a series of unexpected events.

Guiraudie also won the best screenplay award.

The members of the Valladolid jury, Greek director Sofía Exarchou; Spanish actress Aida Folch; American critic Devika Girish; Spanish filmmaker Luis López Carrasco...

Fans of Alain Guiraudie’s work may take the opening sequence of Misericordia as a sign that they’re in familiar terrain. A view from behind the windshield of a car winding its way through back roads to a small hillside village, it announces the premiere chronicler of lust and violence in the French countryside’s return to the milieu in which he made his name.

Indeed, Misericordia finds Guiraudie revisiting old standbys—a linking of queer desire and mortality, a distanced but lighthearted absurdism, and a refusal to get moralistic about transgressive behavior—under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.

The driver in that opening sequence is Jérémie (Felix Kysyl), a baker returning to Saint-Martial, the provincial village of his youth, for the funeral of his mentor. Jérémie is put up by the baker’s widow,...

Marking a welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific “Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie gives the Cannes Premiere section one of its darkly sparkling standouts with the unsettlingly offbeat “Misericordia.” In the director’s best work, Guiraudie’s trademark is to infuse genre dalliances with mordant wit and a deliciously peculiar, defiant queerness. And while it may initially appear to be straightforward — and while it thankfully avoids the wild tonal swings of muddy tragicomedy “Staying Vertical” (2016) and rather baffling terrorism sex-farce “Nobody’s Hero” (2022) — nobody could ever accuse this increasingly twisted psychodrama of playing it straight.

From the start, there’s something off. The prologue is a driving sequence, shot from the point of view of the unseen driver, through the narrowing country roads of hilly southwestern France. There is nothing overtly odd going on, even the landscape is banal, shot in hazy earth tones by Claire Mathon’s clever,...

In a career spanning four decades and eight features, Alain Guiraudie has cemented himself as one of our most astute chroniclers of desire. If there’s any leitmotif to his libidinous body of work, that’s not homosexuality (prevalent as same-sex encounters might be across his films) but a force that transcends all manner of labels and categories. His is a cinema of liberty: of vast, enchanted spaces and solitary wanderers who wrestle with their passions, and in acting them out, change the way they carry themselves into the world. Desire becomes an exercise in self-sovereignty, a way of reasserting one’s independence––a rebirth. It is often said that cinema is an inescapably scopophilic realm, where the act of looking is itself a source of pleasure, but Guiraudie has a way of making that dynamic feel egalitarian, as thrilling for those watching as it is for those being watched.

Cannes is over, the prizes have been given out at Saturday’s awards ceremony., and buyers have gone home, but the deals haven’t stopped. Some of the buzziest titles ahead of the festival are still are awaiting buyers. This year’s market hasn’t been weighed down by the writers or actors strikes in the same way as last year, meaning companies like A24, Neon, Apple, and more have jumped in on exciting packages of possibly future contenders, while art house, specialized distributors like Sideshow and Janus Films, Mubi, and Metrograph have been especially active.

Below we’re tracking everything that gets acquired throughout the festival and beyond.

Films Acquired After the Festival “Gazer”

Section: Director’s Fortnight

Director: Ryan J. Sloan

Buyer: Metrograph Pictures

Date Acquired: May 29

Cast: Ariella Mastroianni

Buzz: As IndieWire exclusively reported, Metrograph went big on this neo-noir thriller with a unique concept from a...

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights to Alain Guiraudie’s queer crime thriller “Misericordia,” starring Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. The film was a selection of the Cannes Premiere section at this year’s festival.

The film follows Jérémie (Kysyl), a man returning to his hometown for the funeral of his former employer. After a mysterious disappearance, a priest and a townsperson make Jérémie’s short stay take an unexpected turn.

Guiraudie wrote and directed the film, produced by Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema. Janus Films and Sideshow are planning a theatrical release.

The deal was negotiated by Alice Lesort for Les Films du Losange on behalf of the filmmakers with Sideshow and Janus Films. The film is a CG Cinéma, Scala Films, Arte France Cinéma, Andergraun Films and Rosa Filmes co-production with the participation of Arte France, Ocs and Les Films du Losange.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired the North American rights to Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, which screened this week at Cannes in the Premiere sidebar section.

Janus and Sideshow, which negotiated the deal with Les Films du Losange, are planning a theatrical release for the film.

Written and directed by Guiraudie, the film stars Félix Kysyl, Catherine Frot, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. CG Cinéma, Scala Films, Arte France Cinéma, Andergraun Films and Rosa Filmes co-produced with the participation of Arte France, Ocs and Les Films du Losange. Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema served as producer.

Misericordia centres...

Revisiting the murder mysteries of his award-winning 2013 feature, Stranger by the Lake, but with a more darkly comic tone found in much of his other work, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, Misericordia (Miséricorde), plays like two films at once: The first is a sinister, small-town homicide story in the vein of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a man shows up to wreak havoc on the seemingly innocent. The second is a twisted variation on Pasolini’s Teorema, in which a family is torn apart by a visitor’s pervasive sexuality and refusal to leave them alone.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France,...

Alain Guiraudie is back at Cannes with a bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire, “Miséricorde.” Remember, the French writer/director is the filmmaker behind the 2013 perverse gay classic “Stranger by the Lake,” a simmering and sinister cruising tale about how our drives toward death and sex are of the same flesh. “Miséricorde,” debuting in the Cannes Premiere section, is a decidedly lighter-on-its-feet (in all senses of the idiom) story of a lonely and faithless man’s obsession with his dead former boss, who’s also the father of the childhood best friend he maybe once loved.

When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial, a provincial village nestled in a wood in Southern France, he immediately bonds with his former boss’ widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Is it romantic obsession, or projecting a mother figure upon her? Or is Jérémie really in love with her dead husband, and...

Amidst the potential 2024 majors––Jia Zhangke, Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Paul Schrader, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa but a handful––we should invest as much hope in a new film from Alain Guiraudie. Late last year we reported on his feature Miséricorde (Mercy in English), and this week CG Cinéma’s Romain Blondeau announced the commencement of shooting with Claire Mathon (his Dp on Staying Vertical and Stranger By the Lake) in tow.

Miséricorde is said to follow a noir-like plot concerning Jérémie, a 30-year-old who returns to his native Saint-Martial for a friend’s funeral. While there “he must contend with rumors and suspicion, until he commits an irreparable act and finds himself at the centre of a police investigation.” Knowing Guiraudie’s unflinching visions of violence and sexuality (not least in his superb novel Now the Night Begins), I am already girding my loins. Catherine Frot, Felix Kysyl,...

Just weeks before Alain Guiraudie is set to begin production on his seventh feature film, we learn (via the lesinrocks folks) that the cast of Miséricorde is comprised of veteran actress Catherine Frot along with Felix Kysyl, Jean-Baptiste Durand, Jacques Develay and David Ayala. Guiraudie will be reteaming with cinematographer Claire Mathon for a third time – they previously paired on Stranger by the Lake and Staying Vertical. Mathon was most recently on the set for Pablo Agüero’s Saint-Ex. Sold by the Les Films du Losange folks, with production beginning in next month we figure that a Cannes showing is not in the cards with a Locarno or Venice premiere more probable.…...