Sony Pictures Classics just purchased the US rights to Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York from Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. The film screened in official competition at the Cannes International Film Festival. Kaufman’s previous writing credits include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He received Academy Award nominations for all three films, winning an Oscar for the last. This is his first attempt at directing.

Academy award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman plays theater director Caden Cotard, who views his life in Schenectady, New York, as bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his body's autonomic functions. Worried about the transience of his life, he moves his theater company to a warehouse in New York City. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.

Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, and Tom Noonan also star. Anthony Bregman, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, and Sidney Kimmel produced the film.