Specialty B.O. Preview: ‘The Rocket’, ‘Raze’, ‘In Bloom’, ‘Loves Her Gun’, ‘The Great Flood’

Brian Brooks is a Deadline contributor.

2014 is kicking into gear with a number of new Specialty titles hitting theaters, though heavy-weight titles in the caliber of August: Osage County and Inside Llewyn Davis, for instance, have yet to make their debuts in the New Year. Kino Lorber will roll out its Tribeca winner The Rocket in limited runs with an explosive story set in Southeast Asia, while IFC Midnight will bow its genre title Raze. Distribution (somewhat) newcomer Big World Pictures will bring Georgia’s foreign-language Oscar entry In Bloom to a pair of New York theaters, while Icarus will open documentary The Great Flood at one downtown Manhattan location. And the director (and a star) of SXSW’s Loves Her Gun will open day and date with a unique DIY strategy for the film’s limited theatrical run beginning this Friday.

The Rocket
Director-writer: Kim Mordaunt
Cast: Sitthiphon Disamoe, Loungnam Kaosainam, Suthep Po-ngam, Bunsri yindi, Sumrit Warin, Alice Keohavong
Distributor: Kino Lorber

Writer/director Kim Mordaunt penned The Rocket over 2009 – ’10. The drama centers on a boy who is thought to bring bad luck to everyone around him and leads his family and two new friends through Laos to find a new home. After a disaster-filled journey, he proves he’s not bad luck by building a giant rocket to enter the year’s most exciting and dangerous event, the Rocket Festival. Mordaunt’s previous documentary effort, Bomb Harvest, looked at the legacy of war in Laos and provided a good amount of background in the form of history as well as the mythology from the Southeast Asian country that formed the backbone of The Rocket. (more…)