EXCLUSIVE: The Pool Films has acquired worldwide sales rights for Salón De Belleza set in a beauty salon in a city ravaged by a mysterious disease which becomes a refuge for the afflicted as they linger between life and death.

The picture will be the directorial debut of Mexican actress Nathalia Acevedo, who his best known internationally for her performance in Carlos Reygadas’s Post Tenebras Lux, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012, winning the best director award.

The Pool Films, which makes its Cannes debut this year with co-founders Gilles Sousa and Tim Belda at the helm, is launching sales on the production at the Marché du Film.

Belgian multi-disciplinary artist Sam Louwyck, whose credits include of Alice Rohrwacher’s Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders and Oscar-nominated Bullhead, stars opposite Erwan Kepoa Falé, whose credits include Honoré’s Winter Boy, Ira Sachs’ Passages and the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight entry Eat The Night.

Acevedo, who is also known for her roles Khavn De la Cruz’s Ruined Heart and Illum Jacobi’s The Trouble with Nature, has taken inspiration from the Médicis Prize-nominated novel by Mario Bellatin for directorial debut, which she has adapted with Diego Sepulveda.

At the heart of the story is the Individuo, a solitary presence who tends to the salon, a place where time and place dissolve into one another, where what is lived, remembered, and imagined coexist in continuous movement. Meaning emerges through ritual, drift, and return to form a meditation on the fragility of existence.

Produced by Mexican production house Kintsugi Cine and new French company Farol, the production has gathered a high-profile crew featuring cinematographer Balthazar Lab (La Jauría, L’Eden, The Heroics), editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm (The Apprentice, The Chronology of Water), Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker (Sound of Metal), and production designer Nathan Parker, who notably worked on The Grand Budapest Hotel and more recently on Harvest by Athina Rachel Tsangari.

“Salón de Belleza is a unique, visually striking film with a bold cinematography and narrative that highlights Nathalia’s very promising talent,” said Sousa and Belda.

Paulina Valencia at Kintsugi Cine said the production is the fruit of many years of  film of transformation and creative dialogue.

“From the beginning, I felt a deep certainty in Nathalia’s vision and the closeness she shares with the universe of Mario Bellatin’s novel and its reflections on human fragility Accompanying that evolution alongside our partners at Farol and producer Matt Porterfield has been deeply meaningful. We hope the film resonates with audiences drawn to singular and deeply human voices in contemporary Mexican cinema,” she said.

Farol co-founding heads Christian Evora and Marco Tulio Pires added: “Salon de Belleza is a deeply human and singular work of cinema that questions its own language while offering a unique perspective on the world. We are delighted to join Kintsugi Cine in supporting Nathalia Acevedo on her first feature film.”

The Pool Films Cannes lineup also includes Gael García Bernal’s Hombre al Agua, in which he also stars, as well as the thriller Gwladys from the writer of The Swarm; the art documentary Caravaggio’s Eye from the producers of the Prado trilogy; Stéphanie Pillonca’s drama The Days After, starring Valérie Donzelli and Jalil Lespert, and the Alcatraz Films (High Life) thriller Black Slaughter, centered on the Ethiopian Jewish community in 1996 Israel.