Death Metal Angola

The Vladar Company – an independent motion picture and entertainment studio – has acquired (from production companies Coalition Films and Cabula6) release rights to the critically acclaimed feature documentary "Death Metal Angola," from director Jeremy Xido ("The Machinist"), produced by Joseph Castelo ("The War Within"), with Vlad Yudin and Edwin Mejia exec producing.

The company will release the film in a limited theatrical release on November 7, 2014, in New York & Los Angeles.

The film first caught our attention when it screened at DOC NYC – New York’s premier documentary festival – in 2013.

The short version of the story, goes… Following nearly 40 years of unrelenting war, peace and reconstruction are slowly arriving to Angola. Damaged first by the war for independence from Portugal, Angola was then ripped apart by a devastating civil war that orphaned thousands of children. Huambo, Angola’s second largest city, finds 55 of these children in the Okutiuka orphanage under the care of Sonia Ferreira. Sonia’s boyfriend, Wilker Flores, is a death metal guitarist who uses sounds and rhythms of this hardcore music as a path to healing. Or, as Sonia says, “to clear out the debris from all these years of war.”

The feature documentary follows Wilker and Sonia’s attempts to stage Angola’s first-ever national rock concert, bringing together members from different strands of the Angolan hardcore scene from different provinces, as it all unfolds in fits and starts, against the bombed out and mined backdrop of the formerly stately Huambo.

This will be the second film The Vladar Company has picked up – the first being Generation Iron (another film profiled on this blog) directed by Vlad Yudin, which was one of the top 5 highest grossing documentaries in the US, for 2013. The acquisition of "Death Metal Angola" further solidifies them as an up and coming studio for documentaries. The Vladar Company is also expanding in digital distribution, working with iTunes and Netflix, and more.

The lauded documentary traveled the international film festival circuit, winning over audiences and critics along the way, and more of you will soon be able to see it when The Vladar Company releases it, starting this fall, November 7, 2014..

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