Oscar-Shortlisted ‘Gunda’ And ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ Get Letterboxd Premiere Dates

'Gunda' star Gunda the pig and some of her piglets — Neon

Neon said Thursday that it is partnering with film-centric social media platform Letterboxd to make six of the distributor’s Oscar-shortlisted pics available exclusively on the service for a week beginning Monday. Those titles include Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary Gunda and Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida?, the official Oscar submission of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It will mark the U.S. premiere dates for both titles, and the first time Letterboxd will be offering new films that have not streamed on any other platforms.

Those two, plus the documentaries Notturno and The Painter and the Thief along with Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! and Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, are involved in the deal. The will be available from March 8-14 as a package for $19.99.

Neon, which distributed last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner Parasite, made Gunda one of the first U.S. deals at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. The pic, executive produced by Joaquin Phoenix, is a dialogue-free black-and-white film that looks at the daily life of a pig and its farm animal companions, two cows and a one-legged chicken. Kossakovsky has said that for years he wanted to make a film that would allow viewers to perceive the sentience of beings that are routinely and casually butchered for food.

Last month, Neon’s boutique label Super Ltd landed North American rights to the Bosnian drama Quo Vadis, Aida?, which debuted at Venice. The movie is set in the Bosnian summer of 1995 during the Serbian occupation of Srebrenica, declared to be safe zone by the United Nations. Jasna Djuricic stars as Aida, who works as a translator for the UN peacekeeping task force in charge of a camp where her husband and two sons are being held along with thousands of other Bosnian citizens.