Signe Baumane’s ‘My Love Affair With Marriage’ coming to Bluray and DVD this month
Skwigly
MVD Entertainment Group has acquired North American rights to acclaimed director Signe Baumane’s (Rocks in My Pockets) award winning animated feature film My Love Affair With Marriage. Featuring the voice talents of Dagmara Dominczyk (HBO’s Succession, The Count of Monte Cristo), Matthew Modine (Oppenheimer, Full Metal Jacket), Michele Pawk (Anastasia, Cradle Will Rock), Stephen Lang (Avatar, Don’t Breathe) and Cameron Monaghan (Tron: Ares, Showtime’s Shameless), MVD is planning its North American debut on Bluray and DVD September 9th.
Set against a backdrop of historic events in Eastern Europe, My Love Affair With Marriage follows Zelma (Dominczyk), who navigates through a series of romantic encounters, each one shaping her understanding of love and marriage. With unflinching honesty, she grapples with the conflicting forces of passion and disillusionment, her own desires, fears, and insecurities, painting a raw and intimate portrait of the human heart. Told from a woman’s point of view, the film blends historical, biological, societal, and emotional arcs with a lively sense of humor and musical numbers, tackling issues of love, gender norms, domestic violence, fantasies and toxic relationships to propel a woman’s journey toward independence and liberation.
My Love Affair With Marriage premiered at Tribeca Festival in June 2022 and went on to screen at over 110 film festivals around the world winning 25 awards. Director Signe Baumane recently completed a 24-city tour around the U.S., presenting the film to audiences, holding Q&As and giving away original drawings from the film. A Latvian / USA / Luxembourg co-production, the film took seven years to complete and was financed with the help of nearly 1,700 individual donors along with grants from many arts and cultural institutions. According to writer / director Signe Baumane:
Animation is very time and labor consuming storytelling medium. For seven years our teams worked on making sets, photographing them, animating, scanning 60,000 drawings, coloring and compositing them. After all this work we are thrilled how audiences have responded to the film. Although set in specific time and place, we have found that the story of a young woman’s quest for perfect love and lasting marriage resonates across cultures and genders around the world – that the question: Can you find love and be happy if you are different? It’s unequivocally universal.
Baumane took the journey to complete the film with her life partner and producer Sturgis Warner (Mother’s Song), who said:
After seven years of production and nearly two years of traveling with the film to cinema audiences around the world we are honored and excited to sign a North American distribution deal with MVD to bring the film to wider audiences.
Following 8 Above’s North American theatrical release of the film in the fall of 2023, the company’s founder and CEO Jon Reiss introduced the film to Eric D. Wilkinson, MVD Entertainment Group’s Director of Acquisitions. Said Wilkinson:
The moment I saw the film, I immediately fell in love with it. The groundbreaking, original and traditional animation, the story, the music, the humor and universal themes all resonated with me. This is an important and critically acclaimed movie that film lovers need to see and I’m proud to be bringing this to audiences this fall.
My Love Affair With Marriage (Signe Baumane/MVD Visual)
My Love Affair With Marriage has not only wowed audiences, but critics as well. A New York Times “Critic’s Pick”, they called the film “remarkably beautiful”. The Hollywood Reporter said of director Baumane, “this portrait of the artist as a young woman is the work of an inspired filmmaker, and it was worth the wait” and RogerEbert.com hailed the film saying, “Funny, moving, and visually stunning throughout”.
My Love Affair With Marriage was produced by Signe Baumane, Raoul Nadalet, Roberts Vinovskis and Sturgis Warner and executive produced by John Jencks, Adam Rackoff and Matthew Modine.
The deal was negotiated by 8 Above’s Jon Reiss, on behalf of the filmmakers and The Marriage Project, LLC and by Eric D. Wilkinson on behalf of MVD Entertainment Group.
BONUS MATERIALS
- Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Presents Director Signe Baumane on the Making of ”My Love Affair With Marriage’
- Original Theatrical Trailer
- Optional English, Spanish, French and Latvian Subtitles
For more on My Love Affair With Marriage visit myloveaffairwithmarriagemovie.com and learn more about the journey of the film in our podcast interviews with Signe Baumane: