The Match Factory has acquired international sales rights on U.S. cinematographer and filmmaker Sean Price Williams’s feature directorial debut The Sweet East ahead of its world premiere in Directors’ Fortnight in May.
Written by the film critic and programmer Nick Pinkerton, the movie is described as a picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States undertaken by Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina who gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C.
Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a fractured fairy tale travelogue into America, where she is granted access to a variety of the strange factions that proliferate the present-day unreality of contemporary life.
Williams’s credits as a cinematographer include Owen Kline’s Funny Pages (2022), Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021), Michael Almereyda’s Tesla (2020), Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell (2018) and the Safdies’ Good Time (2017).
The film is among three U.S. indie titles to have made it into the selection of Cannes parallel section Directors’ Fortnight which unveiled its line-up on Tuesday.
“The Sweet East is nothing quite like we have seen lately. Sean Price Williams’s unmatched style is written all over his unique debut film – we can’t wait to share this with the world”, said The Match Factory’s Head of Acquisitions and Sales Thania Dimitrakopoulou.
The cast features Talia Ryder (Do Revenge, Never Rarely Sometimes Always), Simon Rex (Red Rocket), Earl Cave (The School of Good and Evil), Jacob Elordi (Euphoria, Deep Water), Jeremy O Harris (Emily in Paris), Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), Rish Shah (Do Revenge).
The film is produced by Marathon Films and Base 12, which together with The Match Factory will handle sales for North America.
The Sweet East completes the line-up of The Match Factory’s 2023 in Cannes, which features four Competition titles Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, Fallen Leaves by Aki Kaurismäki, La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher and Kidnapped by Marco Bellocchio.
