EXCLUSIVE: Celluloid Dreams has taken international sales rights for French director Paul Nouhet’s Rewind Barcelona (Barça Zou) ahead of its world premiere in Cannes parallel section ACID.
The film follows a trip to Barcelona, the mecca of skateboarding, by four friends on their first independent trip to together as they turn 18. A decade later, they reunite and reminisce about the holiday which helped shaped them and their friendships today.
Rewind Barcelona grew out of Nouhet’s 2023 medium-length autobiographical work Salut Les Zins, in which he revisited his adolescence as an avid skateboarder in Bordeaux.
Nouhet and his real-life friends Emile Pierre, Edouard Hascoët and Léo Cholet appeared as themselves with actors playing them as 13-year-olds. They return for the new feature which reconstructs real memories with fictionalized segments.
“I started writing Rewind Barcelona with Émile, as shown in the film: by calling our friends Hascoët and Léo to chat about our trip to Barcelona ten years ago,” explains the director.
“But we quickly realized that we didn’t remember everything that well, or rather, we remembered details that weren’t necessarily part of what had happened there… it was from there that Émile and I filled in the gaps, injecting fiction.”
It is produced by Dorothée Levesque under the banner of Les Films du Sursaut.
Celluloid Dreams Head of Sales and Acquisition Saliha Guemraoui, who picked up the baton of leading the company following the death of its founder Hengameh Panahi in 2023, says the film clicked with the label’s auteur focus.
“Rewind Barcelona is a vibrant and deeply embodied portrait that captures with great sensitivity that fragile threshold between adolescence and adulthood. Through a free and fluid approach to storytelling, blending documentary immediacy with a strong formal sensibility, Paul Nouhet conveys the fleeting nature of youth with remarkable authenticity,” she said.
“We are particularly drawn to this raw cinematic voice, capable of transforming everyday fragments into a powerful reflection on identity and belonging, in a way that strongly resonates with the editorial line of Celluloid Dreams.”
Rewind Barcelona is among nine films being showcased in the ACID section this year, which previously championed the early works of Justine Triet, Kaouther Ben Hania and Radu Jude.
“More than just a feature about skateboarding and friendship, Rewind Barcelona lingers on the anecdotal, mundane memories of youth that grow in significance as time goes by. The constant urge to document these moments, to preserve their images and sounds, places us both in the immediacy of the present and in the distance of the archive,” said directors Anne Colson, Martin Jauvat and Déni Pitsaev who are on the ACID selection committee.
“This is the film’s greatest strength: it showcases rare vitality, with ease and gentleness, tinged with the melancholy of youth that has just passed and is already steeped in nostalgia.”
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