Lightdox Acquires 'Auber 89' Ahead of Venice Premiere
Lightdox has acquired international sales rights to Giuseppe Schillaci's documentary "Auber 89" ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Deadline reported exclusively on 14 August 2026.
The film screens on 10 September in the Notti Veneziane — the Venetian Nights sidebar of Giornate degli Autori, an independent section of the festival programme — at the Sala Laguna, in its original version with Italian subtitles, followed by a Q&A with the film-maker (Giornate degli Autori).
"Auber 89" centres on Fatsah Bouyahmed, a French Algerian actor who suffered memory loss after an accident. Schillaci, a Palermo-born, Paris-based novelist and film-maker, discovered archival footage of Bouyahmed from his childhood and youth in the Aubervilliers social housing estate outside Paris. He invited Bouyahmed to view it, and that encounter set in motion a process of reconnecting the actor with his own past (Deadline).
In a director's statement, Schillaci described how showing Bouyahmed the archival video made the screen "a machine for recovering memory," and how that became the film's driving force and backbone (Deadline).
Lightdox founder Anna Berthollet called the film a rare case where one person's fractured memory opens a window onto the buried history of an entire community (Deadline). Lightdox, a Geneva-based documentary sales company, handles international sales — the business of licensing a film to distributors territory by territory across global markets.
The production spans France and Italy. Label Vidéo's Véronique Holley and Raffaele Ventura produce, with co-producers Revolver (Paolo Maria Spina) in Italy and, in France, Via93 (Sylvain Poubelle and Bruno Niepceron) and E2P (Pierre-Jean Bartheye). Schillaci co-wrote the screenplay with Gabrielle Culand (Giornate degli Autori). Zoltan Hauville served as cinematographer, Christine Bouteiller edited, Thibault Frisoni composed the music, and Maya Rosa handled sound (Giornate degli Autori).
Schillaci is no stranger to Giornate degli Autori. His 2024 feature documentary "Bosco Grande" premiered in the same Venice sidebar and went on to win the Grand Prix in the National Competition at FIPADOC Biarritz. His earlier directing credits include "Tranzicion – art et pouvoir en Albanie" (2017), "L'ombra del padrino" (2016), "Apolitics Now!" (2013), and "The Cambodian Room: Situations with Antoine D'Agata" (2009), the last co-directed with Tommaso Lusena (Deadline).
What makes "Auber 89" stand out is the mechanism at its heart. The archival footage is not just source material — it becomes the instrument through which one man's lost history resurfaces, frame by frame, in real time.
