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Excusive: Ira prison break drama to get private screening on Croisette.

Visit Films heads to Cannes with a sales slate that includes Ira thriller Maze, SXSW selections M.F.A. and Flesh And Blood, and Us coming-of-age drama Cold November.

Ryan Kampe will also be talking up recent Sundance and Rotterdam selections Family Life and Columbus, and Sundance and Berlinale selection Dayveon.

Kampe has scheduled a private buyers’ screening for Maze starring Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Barry Ward, and Martin McCann. Lionsgate will distributes in the UK and a number of territories are pre-sold.

The thriller chronicles the mass break-out in 1983 of 38 prisoners from the Maze high security prison.

The film focuses on Larry Marley, the chief architect of the escape, who strikes up a complex friendship with Gordon, a prison warden.

Stephen Burke directs and Jane Doolan of Mammoth Films and Brendan J. Byrne of Cyprus Avenue Films serve as producers. The Irish Film Board, Film Väst, Rte...

The 1994 film Blue Sky is something of an anomaly from the mid-90s. Filmed in 1991, it would be the last film feature of British auteur Tony Richardson’s career, who had been working in television for several years prior, ever since his coolly received 1984 adaptation of John Irvine’s The Hotel New Hampshire. Then, due to the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures, the film’s distributor, the final product was shelved for three years, at long last released in the autumn of 1994, going on to snag actress Jessica Lange her second Academy Award. Now, twenty years later, it’s a prestige that would seem near impossible to attain for a feature treated to the same fate in today’s market. This distinction potentially sets the film up for failure, which perhaps explains the lack of continued enthusiasm surrounding it.

Nuclear engineer Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones) is forced to uproot his...