Berlin-based gross sales agent ArtHood Entertainment has picked up world rights, outdoors of a lot of East Asia, to “Salli,” a movie which has its world premiere this week within the Busan International Film Festival’s A Window on Asian Cinema program.

The Mandarin-, Taiwanese-, English- and French-language movie follows a lonely middle-aged rooster farmer Hui-Chun, who doesn’t converse English and develops a romantic relationship by means of an app with a French man who calls himself Martin. In the web world, Hui-Chun is Salli. Despite everybody calling it a romance rip-off, she desires to show that love certainly exists.

The Taiwan-France movie marks the function debut of Taipei-based filmmaker Lien Chien-Hung after a number of acclaimed shorts and a TV film.

“The reason why I want to make ‘Salli’ is because of very common news in Taiwan. Many men and women are deceived by love on the internet,” Lien informed Variety earlier this yr. “As bystanders, we always laugh at why these people are so stupid. How can they believe in love on the internet? But I reflected, is there something wrong with these people who believe in love? They just want to be loved. So I started Salli’s story.”

“What I want to say through ‘Salli’ is that everyone longs to love and to be loved, but don’t get lost in the search for love and forget that, most of all, you have to love yourself first,” Lien provides.

“Salli” is produced by Lee Lieh (“Detention”), Dennis Wu (“The Post-Truth World”), Amanda Tseng Man-Yin (“The Forest”) and Uilin Ong (“The Silent Forest”) and manufacturing corporations embrace ENLA Media, the Graduate Co. and Bole Film.

At venture stage, the movie attended a number of markets and venture pitching occasions together with the 2019 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion Plan, the place it gained that yr’s grand prize, in addition to the more recent Hong Kong — Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF).

“We have been following the title since HAF, followed by their pitching in Cannes,” mentioned Nesligul Satir, gross sales supervisor at ArtHood, informed Variety.

The firm’s remit excludes Taiwan, China (together with Hong Kong and Macau), India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, and Myanmar. 

ArtHood Entertainment describes itself as “a sales company for arthouse and auteur cinema focused on films from the Middle East, a region gaining more and more political, economic and cultural importance.”

“’Salli’ is our first film acquired from outside the MENA region. With ‘Salli,’ we are expanding into new territories and discovering new talents,” Satir mentioned.