Deadline has announced that yet another deal for 21st Century Fox has come out of the Sundance Film Festival. This time it was National Geographic that acquired rights to documentary film Sea of Shadows.
What’s happening:
- Deadline is reporting that National Geographic Documentary Films has acquired the distribution rights to documentary film, Sea of Shadows directed by Richard Ladkani.
- Distribution rights to the film were sold for a $3 million worldwide deal.
- Sea of Shadows premiered on Sunday, January 27, and went on to win Sundance’s Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary.
- Shadows is produced by Terra Mater Factual Studios in association with Leonardo DiCaprio and Appian Way, Malaika Pictures and Wild Lens Collective.
Sea of Shadows:
- The documentary is “framed as a tense thriller that spotlights a rescue mission to save a collapsing ecosystem and with it, the vaquita – the most endangered and elusive whale on earth. In the Sea of Cortez, a war is being waged by Mexican drug cartels and Chinese traffickers. A native species of fish, the totoaba, are being poached at an alarming rate because of a superstitious belief among some in China that their bladders — which cost more per ounce than gold — possess miraculous healing powers. Nicknamed the ‘cocaine of the sea,’ these extremely rare fish have triggered a multimillion-dollar black market that threatens not only their existence, but virtually all marine life in the region – including the endangered whale known as the vaquita.”
- A group of scientists, high-tech conservationists, investigative journalists, undercover agents and the Mexican Navy choose to put their lives on the line to save the remaining vaquita whales, and bring a crime syndicate to justice.