Lightening Entertainment pick up International sales rights to Ascendant Releasing’s Martial Arts action film NIGHTSHOOTERS

Lightening Entertainment has picked up International sales rights to Ascendant Releasing’s Martial Arts action film NIGHTSHOOTERS starring upcoming action star and SAG Nominated Jean-Paul Ly (Jailbreak).

“We’re delighted to be working with Lightening Entertainment on NIGHTSHOOTERS. They immediately saw the same potential in Marc Price’s vision for the film that we did, and they’re the prefect partners for this. We hope this is the first of many collaborations between us” says Bart Ruspoli of Ascendant.

Andrew Brown, head of sales at Lightening commented ‘’Lightening are thrilled to be working with such a talented and exciting team on internationally award winning director Marc Price’s third film. Together with Jean-Paul Ly, touted as one of the biggest action stars of his generation, and a fantastic cast, the team have delivered a stunning blend of superb martial arts action with the very best of a British gangster film!”

NIGHTSHOOTERS wrapped production in early January and will be released in the UK in July of this year by Ascendant Releasing.

Lightening Entertainment will start approaching buyers at the Berlinale in February.

Bart Ruspoli: After forging a very successful acting career for himself in England and in Italy, Bart expanded in to production and writing. After working as first a script reader then a script editor at Great British Films, Bart worked on numerous scripts including Bye Bye Blackbird, Minotaur, Lord of War and Tell No One. Bart's first TV series -the Sci-fi Horror Order 8 was optioned at treatment stage by Circle Multimedia, the production company behind Wire In the Blood. With the multi-award winning Devil’s Playground providing his breakthrough and selling in 13 territories, Bart went on with Freddie to produce Screwed and then co-write and direct Genesis, Cryptic and World War Dead, alongside an 8 episode TV series called The Big Picture which is in development. A fan of genre, Bart has a number of sci-fi features which are in discussions with distributors for potential co-productions.

Freddie Hutton-Mills: Freddie has been an award winning writer, director and producer of Film, TV, and commercials for over 10 years. He wrote and produced four seasons of the highly successful Takeshi’s Castle making up 160 episodes in all, before concentrating much of his time to making features, documentary and factual entertainment programmes producing over 200 hours of TV. The move to concentrate on feature films was born out of the notion of having a larger vision for franchises. Initially producing the highly successful Devil’s Playground and Screwed, Freddie went on to write and direct Cryptic (released by Spirit Entertainment) and World War Dead (co-pro with Anchor Bay). These were followed with the UKS science fiction blockbuster Genesis (starring John Hannah and Olivia Grant) due for release in 2017. These five feature films provide the foundation from which to launch this strategy. An avid writer, Freddie has over 5 other genre led feature film ideas that he is developing on his slate.