Juno Films Takes U.S. on Female-Centric Zombie Movie ‘Ever After’

By John Hopewell

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Boutique distribution company Juno Films has acquired exclusive U.S rights to “Ever After” (“Endzeit”), a feminist zombie apocalypse road movie hailed as delivering a fresh take on the walking dead cannon.

The deal was negotiated between Elizabeth Sheldon, Juno’s CEO and co-founder, and Andreas Rothbauer, founder of Berlin-based Picture Tree International, “Ever After’s” sales agent.

World premiering in Toronto’s Discovery section, “Ever After” will open in New York City  in 2019 followed by a national rollout in theaters across the U.S., and on digital, and home video.

As it also rolls out sales in international, “Ever After” is bound for Sweden’s Göteborg Festival, Scandinavia’s biggest film event, where it will screen in its Apocalypse section. It will also screen next week at Ventana Sur, Latin America’s biggest film market.

The second feature from Berlin-based Swede Caroline Hellsgard (“Wanja”), “Ever After” is woman-powered on and off the screen, weaving folktale, feminist and ecological beats as two young women, the fragile, traumatized Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohñhof) and zombie slayer Eva (Maja Lenhrer) attempt to cross the bucolic but undead-ravaged countryside from Germany’s Weimar to Jena, the only two cities which have not succumbed to a zombie cataclysm.

In an ideological dichotomy echoing the Cold War, Weimar simply slaughters anybody infected. Jena, which is attempting to find a cure for the undead, offer more humane hope for he future.

A sorority tale, where the two women need to rely on each other simply to survive, “the shared journey that transpires feels like a female-centric, coming of age road movie, albeit one that’s regularly punctuated by brutal attacks from marauding zombies,” a press release said Wednesday.

“Ever After” delivers a genre take on the need for renewal, sweeping away an old order. voiced in a building body of international cinema.

“The apocalypse is not the end, but the beginning of something new and exciting. It is a chance for a different kind of co-existence, with nature and with ourselves. It is the only way out,” said Hellsgard.

Off-screen, “Ever After” was adapted by Olivia Vieweg from her own 2011 graphic novel, and produced by Ingelore König and Carolina Schroeter at Grown Up Films, teaming with Geramn public broadcaster ZDF and upscale French-German TV service Arte.

“Ever After” is at once philosophical, irreverent, refreshing and scary as hell, not for the monsters but for its vision of the future,” Sheldon enthused.

“We are happy that ‘Endzeit’ has found a very good home in the U.S. with Juno Films. ‘Endzeit’ is a very special film and Juno Films has understood and embraced this from the beginning.”