EXCLUSIVE: WTFilms has unveiled a slew of deals on Fabrice du Welz’s thriller Maldoror, inspired by the 1990s case of infamous Belgian pedophile and serial killer Marc Dutroux, as the movie releases in France ahead of its theatrical launch in Belgium next week.

In Europe, the movie has sold to the Nordics (Njutafilms), German-speaking territories (Capelight Pictures), Italy (Movies Inspired), Spain (La Aventura), Poland (Velvet Soon), CIS, Baltics, Ukraine (Exponenta), and Greece (Femeway Limited).

In the rest of the world, Film Movement has taken U.S. rights while the picture has also sold to Japan (Pflug) and Latin America (California).

The Jokers Films, which also produced the movie with Belgian company Frakas, has launched Maldoror theatrically in France today while O’Brother Distribution is gearing up for its release in Belgium on January 22. Gusto Entertainment has a set an April launch for the Netherlands.

The thriller is inspired by the botched investigation into infamous Belgian pedophile Marc Dutroux who abducted six young girls between June 1995 and August 1996, and then imprisoned them in the basement of his house in the former coal-mining town of Marcinelle, on the outskirts of Charleroi.

Despite being a convicted sex offender, Dutroux slipped through the hands of the law due to a stand-off between federal and local police and was able to continue torturing and sexually abusing his young victims, killing four of them.

The movie weaves in details of the real affair the story of fictitious figure rookie police officer Paul Chartier (Anthony Bajon). He is assigned to a surveillance operation called Maldoror tracking potential suspects in a series of child abductions, which in turn reopens personal wounds from his own difficult childhood.

The real-life Marc Dutroux case is viewed as a dark chapter in recent Belgian history with public anger over the botched investigation leading to street demonstrations and a constitutional crisis at the time.

Questions also remain over whether Dutroux, who is serving a life sentence, was acting alone or as part of a wider pedophile ring, potentially involving establishment figures.

Du Welz told Deadline in an interview last year that he hopes the release – which coincides with the 30th anniversary year of the first abductions – will prompt further debate around what happened and questions that remained unanswered as well as help heal the communities hit by the abductions.