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Paris-based sales house completes string of deals on both films.

Slony Sow’s Franco-Japanese culinary comedy Umami starring Gérard Depardieu has racked up a slew of international sales through Paris-based MPM Premium.

The film has sold across Europe to Jerome Hilal’s brand new distribution label Zinc in France, Neue Visionen in Germany and Austria, Praesens in Switzerland, Vernice in Spain and J&j in the Netherlands.

Rialto has also snapped up the rights in Australia in New Zealand, New Cinema will distribute in Israel and Otaku in the Baltics. In Asia, the film will head to China via Age of Smart Screen Co.

Click here to read our french "Shokuzai" movie review, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa with Kyôko Koizumi, Hazuki Kimura, Yû Aoi starring.A young girl, Emili, is killed by a stranger in elementary school. Although her four friends saw the suspect, they say they don't remember it. 15 years have passed and the incident is still unsolved. Emili's mother, Asako (Kyoko Koizumi), makes them do penance for it....

You know where you are right away with "Tokyo Sonata" -- Kiyoshi Kurosawa-ville, a suburb of Japanese cinema that's commonly plagued by secret chaotic pressure, bubbling to the surface and causing cracks in the pavement. Here, it's a storm wind blowing in from off-camera, whisking a wide sheet of newspaper off a table and floating it across the room like a lazy manta. A woman scurries over to close the door, wipes up the rain on the floor, and then opens the door again, to watch the onslaught of weather in the trees. Bad times are coming.

Kurosawa is one of the most tirelessly fascinating directors at work today -- he almost single-handedly lit the fuse for the J-horror movement, but actually his best-known films, from "Cure" (1997) to "Pulse" (2001) to "Doppelganger" (2003), aren't genre films but confrontational parables about instability and dislocation, often garlicked up with a Buñuelian sense of...

KYÔKO Koizumi, Inowaki Kai, Teruyuki Kagawa, And YÛ Koyanagi In Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa'S Tokyo Sonata. Courtesy Regent Releasing. Over the past decade or so, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has established himself as one of the most interesting genre directors in world cinema. The Japanese writer-director was born in Kobe in 1955, and first made 8mm shorts while studying Sociology at Rikko University. He began directing features in the early 1980s, working on direct-to-video titles, including yakuza movies, and studied under the tutelage of directors Shinji Somai and Kazuhiko Hasegawa. He then had minor successes with films like the college-set drama The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (1985) and the blackly comic thriller Guard from the...