Rich Spirit has acquired North American rights to Ramzi Bashour’s debut feature “Hot Water.” A theatrical release is being planned for later this year.
The film, which stars Lubna Azabal, Daniel Zolghadri and Dale Dickey, is described as “a mother-son road dramedy that explores ideas about family, home and belonging through a diasporic lens,” according to the official synopsis. It recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it played in the U.S. Dramatic Competition and received warm reviews. (Our own review called it a “winning road-trip dramedy from writer-director Ramzi Bashour … a film of deceptive complexity.”)
The film will next play at First Look, the Museum of Moving Image’s annual festival for “adventurous new cinema,” in April in New York City.
In “Hot Water,” writer-director Bashour “tells the finely observed story of a Lebanese mother and her American son on an odyssey across the United States. Lubna Azabal stars as Layal, a tightly wound Arabic professor whose troubled teenage son Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri) is expelled from high school, prompting her to escort him from Indiana to California to live with his estranged father,” per the logline.
“I’m excited to join the slate at Rich Spirit and work with such a spirited team as we bring ‘Hot Water’ into cinemas,” Bashour said in a Monday statement. “Their steadfast belief in this very personal film and commitment to getting it on marquees means so much to me. I’m grateful we first got to share our movie at Sundance and now look forward to having audiences all across North America experience it on the big screen.”
“Hot Water” was produced by Jesse Hope, Max Walker-Silverman and Josh Peters. Executive producers are Robina Riccitiello, Jawad Ahsan, Arsala Ahsan, Sakurako Fisher, Jan McAdoo, Jack McAdoo, Philipp Engelhorn, Dave Liu, Nicole Jordan-Webber, Will Levinger, Kyle Owens, Ethan Lazar, Austen Rydell, Ben Stillman, Steve Beckman, Tegan Acton, Emma Pompetti and Adam Wyatt Tate.
