Vivarium, a new Irish film directed by Lorcan Finnegan, has been awarded the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution as part of Critics' Week Competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2019. Vivarium is written by Garett Shanley.

Lorcan Finnegan was understandably thrilled at the win. "Winning the GAN Foundation distributor award is amazing for Vivarium,” he said last night. "The prize will enable The Jokers, our brilliant French distributors, to release our film to a large audience in France. It’s a strange, funny, sad and frightening nightmare of a film, so now more people will get to experience its full effect in theatres."

James Hickey, Chief Executive of Screen Ireland offered his congratulations to Lorcan, and to the cast and crew. The success of Vivarium is a coup also for Fantastic Films.

"This award will no doubt help garner audiences on its release in France and also around the world,” Hickey said. "We were delighted to see Vivarium receive such a strong reception at Cannes, and Screen Ireland is proud to have supported Lorcan throughout his career, first with his critically acclaimed 2011 short film Foxes and in 2016 with Without Name, funded under our Catalyst Project.”

The aim of the award is to help distribute a 'first or second' feature film in France in the hope of promoting new filmmakers. This Award for Distribution is given to the French distributor of one of the seven feature films in competition, and the winning distributors receive €20,000 to come up with one or several marketing strategies for the film release.

For more than 30 years, the Gan Foundation for Cinema has accompanied the artists from the writing stage through the distribution of their films. It rewards ambitious and original feature films, both fiction and animation.

Vivarium stars Imogen Poots (I Kill Giants, Sweet Virginia) and Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Café Society) as a young couple who follow a mysterious estate agent and get trapped in a strange housing development.

Vivarium is a European co-production with Brendan McCarthy and John McDonnell producing for Dublin’s Fantastic Films, along with Jean-Yves Roubin of Belgium’s Frakas Productions and Alexander Brøndsted of Denmark’s Pingpong Film, with XYZ Films executive producing and handling global sales.