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Indie sales house, Free Stone Productions has picked up sales rights on “To The Ends Of The Earth,” the new film by Japanese directing icon Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, and Shota Sometani, the film is a rare example of a Japanese-Uzbekistan co-production. Production is by Eiko Mizuno-Gray and Jason Gray of Tokyo-based Loaded Films and Toshikazu Nishigaya of Tokyo Theatres. Uzbekistan’s national cinema agency Uzbekkino serves as co-producer, with backing from the Ministry of Tourism, through the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan for Tourism Development.

The story involves the host of a popular travel show who is in fact insular and shy on a trip to Central Asia, where her assignment calls for the filming of a mythical fish. As things go wrong, and team members return to Tokyo, she discovers a new freedom in the mountains.

“The once-great Timurid Empire has fascinated me for decades.

Every year, more than 1,000 wide-eyed wannabes stream through the gates of France’s most exclusive film school, desperate to earn a coveted spot at the famed La Fémis (aka Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son). The odds are not in their favor: Only 60 students are accepted to each class, and those who matriculate are scattered across a variety of disciplines that range from directing and screenwriting to movie theater management.

Rejected candidates are allowed to submit two more times, but the strict age limit — 27 — is one of many respects in which the four-month process is more reminiscent of “American Idol” than it is American academia. The chosen few, on the other hand, are hardly guaranteed success, but they’re invited into a remarkable band of insiders that counts the likes of Claire Denis, Alain Resnais, Céline Sciamma, and Andrzej Żuławski amongst its ranks.

Would those...

In the age-old divide (perhaps most evident in the United States) between film production and criticism, crossed by certain pioneers yet often left unbridged, it can sometimes be forgotten just how much the former is a process: not only in the actual procedure of filmmaking but also in everything that surrounds it. More than any art heretofore created, the process is, in all but the most independent or outsider context, explicitly and necessarily a collaborative process, defined by people in various roles that push and pull at each other, influencing each other’s craft in order to create a single film. An even less recognized aspect of this process is both subject and operative principle in Claire Simon’s The Competition, a documentary covering the 2014 application cycle at La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world and whose famed alumni include Alain Resnais, Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma,...