Italian hit ‘Perfect Strangers’ to be reshot in Arabic with Egyptian and Lebanese cast
Indie film distributor Front Row Filmed Entertainment is taking its first steps into production in a collaboration with Beirut-based distributor Empire International, Kuwait National Cinema Company and Mohamed Hefzy’s Egyptian production powerhouse Film Clinic, which produced this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or contender Yomeddine.
The quartet have signed a deal with Italian producer Medusa Films to deliver an Arabic language remake of 2016 Italian hit Perfetti Sconosciuti (Perfect Strangers), which took $20 million (Dh73.4m) at the Italian box office and $11m worldwide.
The film has already been remade in a $25m-grossing Spanish version, and Greek and Turkish productions, while a French version Le Jeu, opened at number two at the French box office last weekend.
The film tells the story of a group of friends who decide to play a game whereby they all agree to leave their phones on the table over dinner, reading all of each other’s messages and revealing that each of them has a number of different lives going on.
The Arabic version will feature an Egyptian and Lebanese cast. Gianluca Chakra, managing director of Dubai-based Front Row, who negotiated the deal with Medusa, says he hoped to feature a pan-Arabian cast, including an Emirati dinner guest, but logistics and dialect concerns led to the Lebanese/Egyptian mix.
Commenting on the move into production, Chakra says: “We just felt, and we’d noticed as a distributor, that we were going through a particularly poor period for scripts in the Arabic language currently. We’re not necessarily in a position right now to write something new ourselves, although that’s something we’d like to look at in future, so we decided to look for a really solid, high concept, foreign language script that we could adapt. [With Perfect Strangers] Paolo Genovese and team have delivered one of the most clever and universally adaptable scripts known to contemporary cinema, so we’re extremely happy to be involved in such a proven property.”
The relative cinematic simplicity of the script was appealing to a company taking its first steps into the world of making movies. Chakra says: “It’s low-budget, one location, so there’s no huge outlay, it’s a fairly low-risk project, so of course that had its appeal too from practical and business point of view.”
It’s quite common in the Egyptian industry for films to be “remade” without going through such official channels, and Chakra says other Egyptian companies had expressed an interest in remaking the film. Having now signed the deal, however, and with Hefzy’s connections within Egyptian cinematic officialdom, the film’s rights should now be in the hands of the new consortium.
Front Row president and KNCC general manager Hisham Al Ghanim says: “We are also looking into more potential remake rights that could resonate well in the Mena region. The aim for us is to find different business models encouraging co-productions between the Arab world bridging the different cultures, introducing new talent and eventually gaining more markets. With the right material, this can be done.”
The original film won two David di Donatello awards for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, as well as the Best Screenplay prize at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival in the international narrative competition section.
The Arabic version is in pre-production stage. Front Row/KNCC and Empire will theatrically distribute the film in the Gulf and Levant. Film Clinic will handle its theatrical release in Egypt. Front Row will handle post-theatrical sales across the region.