Deadline is exclusively reporting that Apple have closed a deal for the worldwide rights of John Carney’s film Flora and Son, just a few days after its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival.

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The official synopsis for the film (via Sundance Film Festival) is as follows:

Flora, a young mother living in Dublin, lost touch with aspiration long ago. She juggles a sustenance-necessitated child care care and a fraught co-parenting arrangement with her unkind ex as she tries to raise her son, Max. Flora and Max’s brash rapport is both hilarious and revealing of their struggle to understand each other – she searches for autonomy and self-love masquerading as selfishness, while his longing for independence and self-expression manifests as delinquency. When the two connect over a twice-discarded used guitar, the uniting power of music brings them closer than what simple proximity can provide.

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This marks John Carney’s return to directing a feature film, with his previous being 2016’s Sing Street, as he’s spent a few years working on the Amazon series Modern Love. The report states that streamers Apple and Amazon battled it out to acquire the film, with Apple victorious. This marks Apple’s biggest Sundance Film Festival acquisition since CODA in 2021, which they struck a deal worth $25m. The report believes the figure of the deal, sealed by Heads of Worldwide Video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, just landed shy of the $20m mark.

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Not only did Carney direct, but he also wrote the film, as well as produce alongside Anthony Bergman, Peter Cron, Rebecca O’Flanagan and Robert Walpole. Cathleen Dore, Milan Popelka and Alison Cohen serve as executive producers. Flora and Son stars Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Orén Kinlan, Jack Reynor, Sophie Vavasseur and Kelly Thornton.