Gersh and Other Angle Board Avi Nesher's 'Our Loves' Ahead of Toronto Premiere
Gersh and Other Angle Pictures have boarded Avi Nesher's feature film Our Loves for sales, with Gersh handling U.S. rights and the Los Angeles-based Other Angle taking international (Variety).
The deal lands weeks before the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere. Our Loves screens next month in TIFF's Centrepiece programme, then opens the Haifa International Film Festival, where Nesher will receive a lifetime achievement award. United King Films is handling the Haifa opening.
Our Loves follows five men and women, each navigating an unusual or fractured relationship in the months leading up to October 7. Their lives intertwine unknowingly as the date approaches. The ensemble cast is large — Shalom Michaelshvili, Magi Azarzar, Yaniv Biton, Noa Cohen, Daniel Gimpel, Hadas Yaron, Evelin Hagoel, Lena Fraifeld, Sean Mongoza, Kim Or Azulay, Leib Lev Levin, Nomi Aharoni-Gal, Lior Miller, Elad Turgeman, Amir Banai, Nevo Katan and Itamar Pinto — and spans multiple interlocking storylines. Azarzar plays a community relations officer in a same-sex relationship who keeps her sexuality and her lover hidden from her ageing mother (TIFF). Cohen plays a young woman named Liri (Variety).
The film is Nesher's 21st feature in a directing career spanning more than four decades, beginning with The Troupe (Jerusalem Post). His previous credits include Rage and Glory, Turn Left at the End of the World and The Secrets.
The producing team behind Our Loves reflects a mix of Israeli and international players. United King Films, Shari Redstone's Sipur Studios, Fox Entertainment Studios, Len Blavatnik and Danny Cohen's Access Entertainment, Moriah Media and Artomas Communications are the production companies. Producers are Moshe Edery and Leon Edery of United King Films, Emilio Schenker and Gideon Tadmor of Sipur Studios, Nesher himself through Artomas Communications, and Danny Cohen of Access Entertainment. Executive producers include Sipur's Shari Redstone, Fox Entertainment's Fernando Szew, and Moriah Media's Jim Berk and Sheldon Rabinowitz. Aviv Ben Shlush of Zoa Films is associate producer.
Our Loves has already drawn attention at home. It received 12 nominations at the Israel Academy of Film and Television's Ophir Awards, including for best picture. Under the Academy's rules, the Ophir best-picture winner automatically becomes Israel's official submission for the international feature film Oscar. The film is tipped as a strong contender for that slot.
Nesher himself has been blunt about his ambitions. Speaking at a panel on how Israeli films can break through internationally, he said of Our Loves: "I genuinely believe it has Academy Award potential" (Jerusalem Post).
The sales pickup gives the film distribution muscle on both sides of the Atlantic as it heads into a festival run that will put it in front of critics, buyers and awards voters in quick succession. Gersh, a talent and literary agency that also operates a film sales arm, will pitch the film to U.S. distributors. Other Angle, which specialises in international sales, will handle territories outside America.
For a film already carrying the weight of its subject matter and the expectations of an Oscar campaign, having two sales agents in place before Toronto means the business of finding distributors is settled. The conversation at the festival can stay on the film itself.
