FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 26, 2025

CINEMA GUILD ACQUIRES MARTA MATEUS’
LOCARNO SELECTION FIRE OF WIND

NEW YORK, NY (Feb. 26, 2025) – Cinema Guild announced today the acquisition of North American distribution rights for Fire of Wind directed by Marta Mateus. A critical favorite at the Locarno Film Festival, Mateus’ debut feature had its North American premiere at the 62nd New York Film Festival in September. The film was produced by Mateus and Pedro Costa of Clarão Companhia, in collaboration with Fabrice Aragno of Casa Azul Films and Richard Copans of Les Films d'Ici. Cinema Guild will release the film in theaters in 2025.

In the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus is from, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion. It’s harvest time and there’s discontent in the fields. Soraia, a young girl, cuts herself. Blood mixes with wine. A black bull is on the loose and the laborers must scramble for shelter up in the oak trees. As the specter of the beast looms below, they share bread and wine, memories and dreams, the history of the landscape and of struggles past and present. We enter a long night, where nature also speaks. The fiery wind that brings the heatwave, it's burning.

"Mateus is a rare filmmaker, one whose deep sense of form, language, gesture, and poetry is inseparable from her political commitment to the working class of her home region," said Cinema Guild’s Edward McCarry. "Her first feature heralds an essential vision in contemporary film. We are very proud to be releasing it in the cinema."

The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with Clarão Companhia.

Cinema Guild is a premier distributor of world cinema, independent films and documentaries, whose upcoming releases include Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me, Shinji Somai's Love Hotel, Hong Sangsoo's By the Stream and What Does That Nature Say to You, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the films of João César Monteiro. Recent releases include Hong Sangsoo's A Traveler’s Needs and Somai’s Moving.

For press inquiries, please contact us at:

(212) 685-6242 or press at cinemaguild dot com

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