French sales company MMM Film Sales has acquired international rights to "Agata the Writer," a debut feature from Australian filmmaker and artist Kuba Dorabialski starring Mia Wasikowska, ahead of its world premiere in the Venice Days competition at the Venice Film Festival. The film is produced by Alex White, whose previous credits include the acclaimed "Babyteeth," and centres on a Polish-Australian novelist who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to research a war novel, only to have her motives questioned by locals and her creative certainty unsettled by a mystery involving vanishing artworks.

The story ultimately reframes Agata's book, and the film itself, as being less about the war than about quiet moments of resilience in its aftermath, exploring questions of storytelling, identity and responsibility. "Agata the Writer" is a Whitefalk Films and Produktion Productions venture, backed principally by Screen Australia with additional support from Creative Australia and the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. Producer Alex White's earlier film "Babyteeth" won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice and nine AACTA Awards, while director Dorabialski, born in Wrocław and based in Sydney, is a visual artist who has previously won the John Fries Award and the Fisher Ghost Art Prize.