Lino DiSalvo's Mediawan Kids & Family Animated Feature ‘Twisted' Draws Buyers For Sola Media
EXCLUSIVE: Sola Media has sealed a raft of deals at on Twisted, U.S. animator Lino DiSalvo's upcoming animated feature for Mediawan Kids & Family.
The film has sold to the Baltics (ACME), CIS (MJM Group), Ex-Yugoslavia (MCF), Greece (Tanweer), Israel (Red Cape), Latin America (Imagem), Middle East (Selim Ramia), Mongolia (The Filmbridge), Poland (Kino Swiat), Portugal (Cinemundo), Spain (Flins y Pinículas), Turkey (Bir Film) and Ukraine (Green Light).
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Directed by Frozen Head of Animation DiSalvo, the animation is billed as one of the biggest animated features currently in production in France.
Delivery is slated for Q1 2027. French distributor Le Pacte is on board, alongside France 3 Cinéma and Paramount+ France.
Set in a picturesque alpine village in Italy, Twisted follows Angelina, a teenager who inadvertently disrupts her town's beloved festival and unleashes a wave of mischievous magical creatures—each one born from a lie she tells to cover her tracks.
To make things right, she embarks on a cross-country journey with the Badalisc, a reluctant, truth-telling folklore creature, in a heartfelt road-trip adventure about identity, community, and self-acceptance.
Further deals are currently in negotiation, with additional territory announcements expected in the coming weeks.
'The response to Twisted has been truly enthusiastic,' said Solveig Langeland, Managing Director at Stuttgart and Munich-based Sola Media.
'Buyers are drawn not only to the breathtaking Italian setting, but also to the film's timely and universal theme of truth versus lies and its consequences, all wrapped in a fun, heartfelt adventure. We're thrilled with the strong sales and excited by the global appeal the film is generating.'
Mediawan Kids & Family is out in force in Cannes this year as one of the producers on Sylvain Chomet's Marcel Pagnol biopic A Magnificent Life, with past high-profile credits including Miraculous – The Movie and The Little Prince.
Stuttgart and Munich-based Sola Media's Cannes Market slate also features The Pout-Pout Fish and Tafiti – Across the Desert, both set to screen in Cannes. The company also represents Captain Sabertooth and the Countess of Grel, which premieres in Annecy this June.
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The orchestra was able to be a bit more gutsy under Friday's soloist, Pacho Flores. The Venezuelan trumpeter has a sparkling sound, which he dispatched with doting attention to phrase and line in Arturo Márquez's lively, if unseasonal, 'Concierto de Otoño' ('Autumn Concerto'). The work was specifically composed for Flores in 2018, taking unabashed advantage of not just the trumpeter's lyricism but his gatling-gun articulation, unflappable stamina and chameleon flexibility. (He traded four different horns across the 20-minute piece: C and D trumpets in the outer movements, then a flugelhorn and soprano cornet in the middle.) Flores also knows how to work a crowd. Rather than shooting to the stratosphere in his third-movement cadenza, he crawled to the bottom of his range — an amusing subversion of trumpet tropes. He then turned his bell directly at Guerrero and playfully pppththhed at him through his horn, prompting a teasing 'what gives?' shrug from the conductor. 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At one point in 'Lábios Vermelhos,' section trumpets got in on the fun, with a sneering little interjection. Yet another short, Latin-inspired curtain raiser opened the concert: 'Baião n' Blues,' by Chicago composer Clarice Assad. A staple of the Carlos Kalmar years, Assad's inclusion in Guerrero's opening week bodes well for the new festival chief's attention to local composers. Ultimately, though, this performance had some of the same early-season jitters as last week's opener, with a scraggly opening and subdivision disagreement among the violins. 'Baião n' Blues' already isn't Assad's most compellingly structured piece, but a more honed performance might have made a better case. While Mahler sought to depict the world's natural beauty and bizarre juxtapositions in his music, he perhaps didn't anticipate contending with throbbing helicopters, the squeal of a coach's whistle, and hot rods sputtering down Lake Shore Drive on Friday. 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If 'Blumine' is heard at all, it's usually as a standalone piece, for good reason: It's arresting but nearly always out-of-place amid the lustiness of the rest of the symphony. Friday's performance gave the same impression — gauzy and subtle, but stopping short of the richness and emotional abandon that would make a better case for its inclusion. Elsewhere, other idiosyncratic touches intrigued and often convinced: more perky staccatos by oboist Alex Liedtke, orchestral accents like bitter twists of a knife in the funeral march, and a slower reading of the klezmer-band interludes. In all, it endorsed Guerrero's warhorse chops as enthusiastically as his new-music acumen. Rain or shine, Grant Park is looking like a fair place to be under his baton.
