European Drama ‘Holiday’ Bought by Breaking Glass (EXCLUSIVE)

By Dave McNary

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Breaking Glass Pictures has acquired North American rights to Isabella Eklof’s drama “Holiday” in a deal the closed during the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif.

Breaking Glass CEO Rich Wolff and Ioanna Stais of Heretic Outreach made the deal. “” will arrive in theaters in February, with a DVD/VOD release to follow.

“Holiday” held its world premiere during the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win best film and best director in the Next Wave Competition at Fantastic Fest and the Grand Prix at both the Film Fest Sundsvall and the New Horizons International Film Festival.

The story centers on a young woman who discovers her dream life of luxury, recklessness and fun comes at a price when she is welcomed into the “family” of her drug lord boyfriend at his holiday villa in the port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riveria.

The film is a production of Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. It’s an Apparatur presentation in co-production with Oak Motion Pictures, Commonground Pictures and Film I Vast.

Guy Lodge praised the film in a Variety review at Sundance: “The water’s warm and inviting, and that goes for precisely nothing else in “ Holiday ,” a low-temperature, high-impact debut from Swedish-born writer-director Isabella Eklof that impresses with its clinical construction and still, penetrating gaze into male violence.”

Richard Ross, co-president of Breaking Glass, said, “Eklof’s bold, brash and unsettling ‘Holiday’ sends us careening into a world of violent, power-mad gangsters, and the women who exist as their disposable ‘toys’, with Sonne’s tour-de-force turn as ‘Sasha,’ a woman seemingly naive and vulnerable, yet resolutely in control, is absolutely astonishing. Destined to fuel many debates, ‘Holiday’ is a dazzling debut.”