By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
CONDÉ NAST ENTERTAINMENT ACQUIRES ACADEMY-AWARD® NOMINATED DOCUMENTARY SHORT “KNIFE SKILLS” FOR THE NEW YORKER’S ONLINE PROPERTIES
The Film Will Appear as Part of The New Yorker’s “Screening Room” Series Highlighting Short Films and the Stories behind Them
NEW YORK — February 6, 2018 — Condé Nast Entertainment (CNE) has acquired the Oscar® Nominated short documentary, “Knife Skills,” for The New Yorker’s online properties. Directed by Academy Award®-winning director, Thomas Lennon (“The Blood of Yingzhou District”), “Knife Skills” follows the launch of an haute cuisine restaurant in Cleveland, staffed by men and women recently released from prison. The documentary will be presented in The New Yorker’s “Screening Room” series, featuring award-winning short films.
“Knife Skills” follows the hectic launch of Edwins restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio. We discover the challenges of men and women finding their wat after being released from prison in this improbable setting, with its tantalizing dishes and its arcane French vocabulary. We come to know three trainees intimately, as well as the restaurant’s founder, who is also dogged by his past. They all have something to prove, and all struggle to launch new lives—an endeavor as pressured and perilous as the ambitious restaurant launch of which they are a part.
The film is directed and produced by Thomas Lennon, whose work in documentary film has earned him an Academy Award® and four Oscar® nominations, as well as two Emmy Awards®, two duPont-Columbia awards, and two Peabody awards.
“Knife Skills” premiered at the 2017 Traverse City Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Short. It has also screened at SFFILM Doc Stories, Meet the Press Film Festival with AFI, and DOC NYC, among other festivals.
“When it comes to storytelling, The New Yorker is as good as it gets,” said Thomas Lennon. “The combination of The New Yorker’s prestige and the immense online muscle of Condé Nast Entertainment represents an incredible lift for our short film.”
The United States is a global leader in incarceration, with more than 2.2 million people in state and federal prison. Over 650,000 people are released from prison every year, and that number is on the rise. “Knife Skills” gives a human face to the challenges of those reentering society.
Produced, directed and filmed by Thomas Lennon, “Knife Skills” was edited and co-produced by Nick August-Perna. Executive Producers are Joan Ganz Cooney and Holly Peterson. Jannat Gargi serves as Co-Executive Producer.
Last year, Condé Nast Entertainment also acquired the Oscar® Nominated short documentary “Joe’s Violin” for The New Yorker’s “The Screening Room.”
O&O: http://video.newyorker.
YT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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ABOUT CONDÉ NAST ENTERTAINMENT (CNE)
Condé Nast Entertainment (CNE) is an award-winning next generation studio and distribution network with entertainment content across film, television, premium digital video, social, and virtual reality. In just six years since inception, CNE achieved profitability for its digital business ahead of schedule, reached TV-like scale for many of its digital videos, and has won Emmy and Critics’ Choice Awards, as well as garnered Academy Award and Peabody nominations. Culling from IP across Condé Nast’s iconic publishing brands, including Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ and Wired, CNE has produced series for Netflix, Investigation Discovery, Amazon, and more; and currently has feature films with Sony and Fox Searchlight. In addition, the Next Gen Studio produces and distributes over 5,000 pieces of original digital video content a year averaging over 1 billion views a month. CNE has an extensive digital distribution network of nearly 60 partners across about 2,300 websites and ranks in the Top 25 in unique viewers in comScore’s Top 100 Properties, ahead of Complex, The New York Times, ESPN, Viacom, Time Inc, Vice, Vox, Scripps, Refinery 29, Meredith and Hearst.
ABOUT THE NEW YORKER
The New Yorker is a multi-platform media enterprise, spanning print, digital, audio, and video content, and live events. With more than a million subscribers to the weekly magazine and more than twenty million readers every month on newyorker.com, The New Yorkerdelivers unparalleled reporting and commentary on politics, foreign affairs, business, technology, popular culture, and the arts, along with humor, fiction, poetry, and cartoons. Reaching beyond print, the Web, digital editions, and apps, you can find The New Yorker’s writers, editors, and artists on the radio on “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” on TV via Amazon’s “The New Yorker Presents,” and at marquee events like the New Yorker Festival. The creativity, influence, and impact that have characterized The New Yorker since its founding, in 1925, are today amplified far beyond its pages.