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Diverse aspects of the human condition are key drivers of the projects from Vietnam selected at the Southeast Asia Film Lab, which is part of the Singapore Media Festival.

Linh Dan Nguyen Phan went to film school in New York and then went to Vietnam and worked as a cinematographer and also directed a few shorts. The filmmaker’s debut feature, “If Wood Could Cry, It Would Cry Blood,” adapted from the autobiographical novel “Tam Van Phong Dao” by Vietnamese comedian Mac Can, will delve into his childhood as the middle child in a family-run traveling circus. The film centers on the three siblings who, together, sustain their family by performing a knife throwing act.

The abiding theme of the film is oppression. “Women in peril has been a trend in entertainment, the smaller the weaker the girl put in danger was, the more thrilling the performance is,” says the filmmaker.

Distributors releasing titles before James Bond takes screens.

Musical adaptation Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, action thriller Gunpowder Milkshake and Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story of Looking are three of 19 new films landing in UK-Ireland cinemas this weekend, as distributors look for screen space in advance of No Time To Die in two weeks.

The number of releases each week has been steadily increasing throughout the summer, with just eight on June 4, two weeks after cinemas reopened in England. This has risen to 15 last weekend, and jumped further to 19 this time out.

The increase is a welcome sign for the theatrical industry,...

A feature film debut for directors Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers

UK-based sales outfit Parkland Pictures has acquired worldwide sales rights (excluding UK) to A Brixton Tale, which had its world premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival.

It is the first feature film from commercials director Darragh Carey and music video director Bertrand Desrochers.

The cast features Lily Newmark (Misbehaviour), Ola Orebiyi (Limbo) and Craige Middleburg (The Batman) alongside former Screen Stars of Tomorrow Jaime Winstone and Barney Harris.

Dennis Gyamfi and Beau Rambaut are producers with Rupert Baynham, who also wrote the screenplay with Chi Mai. The project was written,...

For their first feature, A Brixton Tale, filmmaking team Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers set themselves a trap. It’s a film about filmmaking ethics—who gets to tell which stories, and where is the line between artistic expression and exploitation? By asking those questions, the Irish Carey and Québécois Desrochers put themselves under the microscope, too, in their depiction of a housing estate in rapidly gentrifying Brixton. They preempt those criticisms with a title card at the beginning that reads, “Made in collaboration with the community,” and yet I still can’t shake the feeling that A Brixton Tale is made with an outsider’s gaze––not because it’s exploitative, but because it’s generic. It’s a film that plays it too safe, sanding off the thorny edges of its characters to make something tiresomely morally straightforward.

The story is centered on a romance between Benji, a Black Brixtoner,...

More than just about any existing film festival, Slamdance was started with an eye toward inclusion. In the case of the Park City festival, which was founded as a more freewheeling alternative to Sundance back in 1995, that sense of inclusion largely pertained to the filmmakers themselves: first-timers, experimentalists and enterprising directors without much in the way of resources to have their films shown in a proper theatrical environment. For Slamdance’s president and co-founder Peter Baxter, however, the ongoing pandemic provided an opportunity to consider how its open-door policy ought to work both ways.

“Independent film should be seen as inclusive, but in a lot of ways it’s been very exclusive,” Baxter says. “You look at film festivals, you look at Park City — you’re in a privileged situation if you’re able to go to Park City and experience Sundance and Slamdance. The travel, accommodations, time away from...