TWC
Sets March USA Release Date
For 'The Sapphires'
- Australia’s Answer
To The Supremes
January 26, 2013
The Weinstein Company acquired global distribution rights to the Australian film, calling it a "feel-good" movie, after it screened at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and it was announced yesterdau that TWC will open the film in the USA on March 22.
It's an Australian musical drama titled The Sapphires, which is inspired by the real-life story of a soul singing quartet comprised of 4 Aborigine women (all sisters) who were the heroines of a play in which writer/director Wayne Blair was an actor in 2005.
Fast-forward 7 years later, and that experience has been reimagined as a feature-length film that's captured audiences all over the world, as it's traveled the international film festival circuit.
Branded as Australia’s answer to The Supremes, the film's full synopsis reads:
1968 was the year the planet went haywire. All around the globe, there were riots and revolution in the streets. There were hard drugs, soft drugs, free love and psychedelic music. There was the shock of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations. And dominating every other news story… There was Vietnam. For four gorgeous young women from a remote Aboriginal mission, 1968 was the year that changed their lives forever. Sisters Gail, Julie and Cynthia, together with their cousin Kay, are discovered by Dave, a down-on-his-luck Irish musician with attitude, a taste for Irish Whiskey and an ear for Soul Music. Dave steers the girls away from their Country & Western origins then flies them to the war-zones of South Vietnam, where they sing Soul Classics for the American Marines. On tour in the Mekong Delta, the girls sing up a storm, dodge bullets… And fall in love.
The Sapphires stars Chris O’Dowd, Aboriginal actress Deborah Mailman, pop singer Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell, and Tory Kittles.
It was released in Australia last year, and was reportedly a box off smash - the best opening for an Australian movie in almost two years - and picked up 12 nominations in the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, which will be handed out next week.
USA audiences will now get to see what the hype is all about for themselves.
Watch the trailer for the film below; and underneath you'll find an additional clip: