Noticias

We’re delighted to exclusively announce that KimStim has acquired all North American rights to the Quay Brothers’ Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. A stop-motion/live-action masterpiece inspired by the works of Jewish-Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz, this personal passion project is their first feature since 2005’s The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

KimStim plans to release the film theatrically later this year. Ian Stimler negotiated the deal with Thania Dimitrakopoulou, sales executive of The Match Factory, in Cologne.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass first premiered as an Official Selection: Giornate degli Autori at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival. The film is not a direct adaptation of the source material but a visual-poetic homage, blending stop-motion animation with projection-based theatrical staging that’s more about evoking Schulz’s mood and texture than telling a straightforward story.

The narrative centers on Jozef, who embarks on a journey...

MetFilm Sales has picked up worldwide rights to “Marriage Cops,” the feature documentary from directors Shashwati Talukdar and Cheryl Hess set to world premiere at this year’s Hot Docs festival in Canada. The filmmakers have unveiled the first clip from the documentary.

The Hindi-language doc, a co-production between India and the U.S., follows Sub-Inspectors Sandhya and Krishna, two dedicated career police officers who work at the Women’s Helpline in Dehradun, India, where they mediate marriage disputes that involve everything from abusive spouses and deadbeat dads to cheating wives and interfering mothers-in-law.

The film explores the complex role of law enforcement in the personal lives of citizens, employing a vérité approach to capture the contradictions and power struggles within domestic relationships.

“What we discovered was far more complex than we expected,” said directors Talukdar and Hess. “The police, despite being an arm of the state, often feel powerless...

Europe has rolled out the red carpet for American buyers. Thanks to European Film Promotion’s Europe! On Demand initiative, co-organized with Copenhagen documentary festival Cph:dox, U.S. distributors and other buyers are being offered access to seven European documentaries playing at the festival and available for North America.

On March 12, a dozen U.S. buyers from top outfits including Neon, Mubi, Netflix, Sony Pictures Classics and Kino Lorber were invited to an online pitching session with the films’ respective artistic, production and sales teams. The U.S.-European bridging event will continue on-site with an in-person networking event during the festival’s industry sidebar, Cph:forum (March 24-27).

Five of the documentaries are world premiering in the festival’s most prestigious Dox:award section. Handled internationally by Universal Pictures Content Group, “Á demain sur la lune” (“See You Tomorrow on the Moon”) is directed by the multi-awarded Thomas Balmès. Under the Rise & Shine banner,...

European Film Promotion and Copenhagen documentary festival Cph:dox have launched online showcase Europe! On Demand, an initiative designed to boost the visibility of European documentaries in the North American market.

The showcase will present a curated selection of seven European documentaries from the festival lineup to U.S. buyers.

Efp’s managing director Sonja Heinen said the initiative would offer “a tailor-made platform to connect European filmmakers with key players in North America.” She added it would build “on Efp’s mission to enhance the international reach of European cinema.”

Mara Gourd-Mercado, head of industry and training at Cph:dox, said the selection offered “a great opportunity for European documentaries to gain visibility and potential distribution in the North American market.”

The titles include several from the main competition section, Dox:award:

“See You Tomorrow on the Moon” (France) by Thomas Balmès, a poignant documentary about a young family navigating terminal illness...

European Film Promotion (Efp) and Cph:dox have jointly launched an online showcase to boost the visibility of European documentaries in the North American market.

Europe! On Demand will present seven European documentaries and world premieres from this year’s Cph:dox line-up to US buyers and distributors. The initiative is jointly curated by Efp and the programming team at Danish documentary festival Cph:dox.

The Europe! On Demand line-up includes several films from its Dox:Award section.

They include See You Tomorrow On The Moon (Fr) by Thomas Balmès, about a young family navigating terminal illness and palliative care; The Castle (Fr-It) by Danny Biancardi,...

UK-based MetFilm Sales has acquired international rights excluding North America and Switzerland to Jasmin Gordon’s The Courageous.

MetFilm Distribution will release the film in UK-Ireland cinemas this summer.

The Courageous debuted in Discovery at Toronto Film Festival last year, going on to play Rome and winning the critics award at Zurich.

A debut feature for Swiss-American filmmaker Gordon, it follows a delinquent, eccentric mother crushed by society, who is determined to prove to her children and herself that she is a good person.

The Maximage production is written by Julien Bouissoux from a story by Bouissoux and Gordon, and...

Timothy and Stephen Quay have developed an entirely unique style in the world of stop-motion animation: vigorously kinetic yet meticulously controlled; balletic in its interweaving of aural and visual rhythms; full of the sort of trivia and esoterica that fascinated Borges and Pessoa; and given to looped sequences of pure, sensual, cinematographic abstraction. Their latest production, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which draws generously from Bruno Schulz’s novel of the same name, adds yet more stylistic oddities to the foregoing list, albeit in a more conventional, narrativized context.

The precise details of this context are hard to elaborate completely, but we can be sure of a few things. The protagonist is Jozef, a lithe, ruddy man who is visiting his father at a sanatorium in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. In the real world his father is dead; but at the sanatorium, where the clocks have...

They hate using big name voice actors and their eerie stories defy sense – yet they have seduced the likes of superfan Christopher Nolan. The identical twins explain how they have just managed to sneak out their third feature in 50 years

The Brothers Quay, identical twins, make marvellous, mystifying films in which eerie stop-motion puppets outnumber the few live performers. These films might be set in a strange school for servants, or a lecture hall, or a labyrinth, but really they take place in a small desktop universe that runs according to its own alien rules. The brothers hate the idea of having actors voice the puppets and have done so only under duress, once or twice, because it feels so demeaning. Demeaning to the actors? No, they say. To the puppets.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is just their third feature in a 50-year career, after Institute Benjamenta...

Animation veterans Stephen and Timothy Quay return to feature films — and to the works of Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz — with Venice premiere “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.”

Sold by the Match Factory, watch its exclusive clip here:

They discovered Shulz back in the 1970s; incidentally, that’s also when Polish filmmaker Wojciech Jerzy made a film based on the same story.

“When we visited poster designer Andrzej Klimowski in Warsaw, he introduced us not only to Schulz, but also his contemporaries Gombrowicz and Witkacy, along with the music of Krzysztof Komeda and Ewa Demarczyk,” they recall, mentioning other important Polish artists. The Quay brothers prefer to be quoted together.

“Suddenly, the world of Bruno Schulz materialized into our psyches and into our hands. It was particularly through his ‘Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies’ that we found an entry point into what animation could bring to the world...

Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg Names New Boss

Influential German funding body Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg is getting a new Managing Director. Sarah Duve-Scmid will succeed Kirsten Niehuus in the middle of next year. Duve-Scmid was previously a deputy board member and head of funding at the Leiterin der Förderabteilung bei der Filmförderanstalt (Federal Funding Agency). She was also Managing Director of Vision Kino. Niehuus is retiring in 2025, and a supervisory board picked her successor, who will work alongside Helge Jürgens, who is to remain Managing Director of Games and New Media until mid-2028. “With the Supervisory Board’s decision, the Medienboard is moving towards a continued successful future,” said Florian Graf, Head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Medienboard. “Building on the great 20 years of work by Kirsten Niehuus, who made the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region the center of German film, Sarah Duve-Schmid stands for...

The Giornate Degli Autori, simply known as Venice Days, has unveiled its 2024 lineup.

The independently run event, which takes place alongside the Venice Film Festival, will this year follow a theme of creatures “poised over an abyss, walking a tightrope.” “To reach the other side, or else to escape from something behind them, or just because, seen from above — lost in time, lost in space — things look very different,” event organizers said.

The only Italian title in competition is Ciro De Caro’s Taxi Monamour, about two women who lose their way yet stubbornly persist in living life as they wish. Dutch filmmaker Jan-Willem Van Ewijk’s third feature film, Alpha., follows a troubled father-son relationship set high in the Swiss Alps.

French filmmaker Marie Losier revisits the feminist singer and performer Peaches and a 14-year-long friendship in Peaches Goes Bananas, shot over the course of 17 years, while the directorial debut of Shahab Fotouhi,...

The Noose.The first scene in Wojciech Has’s filmography belongs to an accordion. The instrument is shown in a contracted state, dangling from the ceiling of an antique shop. Outside the shop, a little boy ogles it through the window; he dreams of playing it. Later in Has’s debut fiction short, Harmonia (1947), he dramatizes that dream. Has’s understanding of cinema as an oneiric canvas is apparent from the very beginning, and his sense that its narratives were meant to trip over themselves through elisions, reversals, and collapses reinforced itself throughout his career. His films are frequently in a state of mutation and his characters always on introspective journeys; objects are the only constant, as their material weight exhibits more solidity than his stories’ whims or his characters’ souls. All the while, Has’s camera acts like an accordion, playing in its own time, starting wide and pushing...

The After Dark Films supernatural thriller that was first announced in January 2013, Sanatorium, is making its way to DVD and VOD on December 23rd.

Brant Sersen directed the picture which stars Kate Riley, Megan Neuringer and Don Fanelli.

On New Year's Eve in 1955, Richard Howell, a patient at the Hillcrest Sanatorium, went on a bloody, child-killing rampage, before he hanged himself.

Fifty-six years later, a team of ghost hunters - from the popular TV series "Ghost Trackers" - prepares to spend the night at the sanatorium.

The post After Dark Films Squeezes Out Another DVD Release appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

After Dark Films proudly announces the fifth film in its After Dark Originals 2 series (ADO2), Sanatorium, a terrifying film that authentically captures a Paranormal Investigation TV show’s worst fears.

Sanatorium is directed and written by Brant Sersen (Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, Splinterheads), starring Kate Riley (College Humor), Megan Neuringer (Kroll Show) and Don Fanelli (Inside Amy Schumer)

“I’m really pleased that Brant Sersen’s film Sanatorium has joined the After Dark Films canon. … Continue reading →...

After Dark Films proudly announces the fifth film in its After Dark Originals 2 series, Sanatorium, a film that "authentically captures a Paranormal Investigation TV show's worst fears."

Brant Sersen (Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story) directed the picture which stars Kate Riley, Megan Neuringer and Don Fanelli.

On a bitterly cold December night, a paranormal investigations team has set their sights on the bloody Hillcrest Sanatorium to answer the age old question: Is there life after death? With rumors of hauntings and local children gone missing, they may just get their answer the hard way when members of the team mysteriously disappear, leaving behind unnerving evidence...  Check out the poster inside!

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It's been awhile since we had a new horror flick to talk about from the good folks over at After Dark as they've been dabbling with action flicks as of late, but here we are with a haunting new tale primed and ready to start spooking!

From the Press Release

After Dark Films proudly announces the fifth film in its After Dark Originals 2 series (ADO2), Sanatorium, a terrifying film that authentically captures a Paranormal Investigation TV show's worst fears.

Sanatorium is directed and written by Brant Sersen (Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story, Splinterheads), starring Kate Riley (College Humor), Megan Neuringer (Kroll Show) and Don Fanelli (Inside Amy Schumer)

"I'm really pleased that Brant Sersen's film Sanatorium has joined the After Dark Films canon. We've built a library of 40+ horror features over the past 6 years, and it's been so rewarding to work with these exciting filmmakers to get their films out into the world.