Cercamon Boards Trengove's 'The Smell of Apples' Ahead of Toronto World Premiere
Cercamon has picked up international sales rights to John Trengove's third feature The Smell of Apples, releasing a first trailer ahead of the film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Deadline broke the exclusive.
The film, an Afrikaans- and English-language production, will screen in TIFF's Platform section — a curated competitive strand programmed by the festival. TIFF's official site lists the title as a world premiere, with production countries South Africa, the Netherlands, and Chile. Cercamon, headed by founder and CEO Sébastien Chesneau, will handle sales to distributors outside the film's home territories — the deals that determine which international cinemas and platforms eventually carry the title.
The Smell of Apples adapts Mark Behr's 1993 bestselling novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The story centres on a sheltered 11-year-old white boy growing up in what the source material frames as a white utopia in Cape Town during the 1970s, at the height of Apartheid-era racial segregation. The screenplay is credited to Behr, Christopher Ciancimino, and Trengove himself. The cast includes Dawian van der Westhuizen and Hilton Pelser.
Trengove arrives in Toronto with an established festival pedigree. His debut The Wound opened at Sundance in 2017 and was longlisted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He followed it with Manodrome, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody, selected for the Berlinale. More recently he directed episodes of the Cape Town-set crime series White Lies.
The production roster brings together several established names. Eric Abraham and Jack Sidey produce through London-based Portobello Productions — their second South African project together, on a CV that includes the Academy Award-winning Kolya and Ida. Cait Pansegrouw produces through Cadence, and Frank Hoeve through BALDR Films.
A new Academy Awards rule adds a layer of stakes to the Platform slot. Under the updated eligibility, a non-English-language winner of the main TIFF Platform award will qualify directly for Best International Feature Film consideration at the 99th Academy Awards. With The Smell of Apples carrying significant Afrikaans-language dialogue, the prize could hand its distributor a straight path into the Oscar race — no small thing for a film still seeking buyers across most of the world.
For Trengove, Toronto marks a return to the awards conversation that The Wound opened nearly a decade ago. The trailer, released alongside the sales announcement, gives distributors and festival audiences their first look at an Apartheid-era story told from inside the white enclave that sustained it.
