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Former Film Factory executive Manon Barat joins company as dedicated sales executive.

Heading into Cannes XYZ Films has launched New Visions, an initiative to champion bold global voices, kicking off with Directors’ Fortnight entry In Flames.

Former Film Factory executive Manon Barat has joined the company as a dedicated sales executive and will work alongside longtime head of international acquisitions Todd Brown to oversee the slate.

The highly curated New Visions will discover and support the next generation of filmmakers and give established talents room to make smaller, more intimate and challenging work.

Besides Zarrar Kahn’s Pakistani-Canadian horror In Flames,...

XYZ Films has unveiled New Visions, an initiative designed to spotlight bold new voices alongside established talent striking a new path in the international cinema space.

The initiative will serve as a curated collection of films that “exists to discover and support the next generation of great filmmakers at the inception of their career, and to give established talents room to do something smaller, more intimate, or challenging outside of the usual box of independent filmmaking,” XYZ said in a statement.

The slate will launch in Cannes with Directors’ Fortnight selection “In Flames,” a Pakistani-Canadian horror film directed by Zarrar Kahn and executive produced by Shant Joshi. As revealed by Variety, XYZ had boarded the title last year. In the Karachi-set film, after the death of the family patriarch, a mother and daughter’s precarious existence is ripped apart by figures from their past – both real and phantasmal. They must...

XYZ Films have launched a new label for low-budget international genre films, called New Visions.

The company will launch its first New Visions slate at the Cannes Film Market next month with In Flames, the feature debut of Pakistani-Canadian director Zarrar Kahn. The Urdu-language horror movie, which was just picked for the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight lineup, follows a young woman who is tormented by vivid hallucinations after the death of her boyfriend. Other titles in the New Visions slate include the Czech science fiction title Restore Point from director Robert Hloz, and Irish folk horror All You Need Is Death from Very Extremely Dangerous helmer Paul Duane.

XYZ Films has hired Manon Barat, formerly a sales and marketing executive with Barcelona-based Film Factory Entertainment, as a dedicated sales executive overseeing the new slate, working alongside XYZ head of international acquisitions Todd Brown.

Brown framed the new label as a return to the roots for XYZ,...

XYZ Films has hired Manon Barat, a former executive at the Spanish sales company Film Factory, to head a slate of titles that will fall under the company’s newly-launched global film initiative, New Visions.

Barat will work alongside XYZ Head of International Acquisitions Todd Brown to oversee the new slate, which the company has described as a “highly curated collection of films.”

XYZ will launch the new slate in Cannes with In Flames, a Pakistani-Canadian horror film directed by Zarrar Kahn and executive produced by Shant Joshi. The pic will screen as part of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar. Check out a first-look image from the film below.

Other titles from the initial New Visions slate include the Czech sci-fi pic Restore Point, directed by Robert Hloz and produced by Jan Kallista, which will have footage screened at the Marché du Film as part of the Fantastic 7 lineup. Paul Duane...

John Cale hosted an early 50th anniversary celebration for the classic Velvet Underground & Nico Sunday at Paris' La Phihamonie, with the cellist recruiting artists like Animal Collective, the Libertines' Carl Barat and Pete Doherty, Mark Lanegan, Etienne Daho, Lou Doillon and more to assist him on playing cuts from both that 1967 LP and other tracks from the Vu catalog.

Animal Collective, who previously teamed with Cale on the band's Painting With cut "Hocus Pocus," performed "There She Goes Again" with the Velvet Underground rocker, while Cale himself put a droning...