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Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof is set to attend the Cannes premiere of his latest feature, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, after receiving an eight-year prison sentence from Iranian authorities and fleeing his home country.

Speculation had been rife that the dissident director would attend the festival when the film receives its world premiere in Competition on Friday (May 24), having found asylum in Germany, but Cannes’ general delegate Thierry Fremaux has now confirmed his attendance.

“We are particularly touched to welcome [Rasoulof] here as a filmmaker,” Fremaux said in a statement to Agence France-Presse (Afp).

Our joy will be that of...

International filmmakers are calling for solidarity with Mohammad Rasoulof and persecuted filmmakers in Iran in an open letter, shared with Variety.

Rasoulof – about to screen his latest film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Cannes’ main competition – was sentenced to imprisonment and torture by the Islamic Republic of Iran. He fled the country.

“We condemn the inhumane treatment of Rasoulof and numerous other independent artists in Iran, who are being severely punished, criminalized and silenced for exercising their artistic freedom,” it was stated in the letter, already signed by “Holy Spider” star Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Fatih Akin, Atom Egoyan, Ildiko Enyedi, Andrew Haigh, Agnieszka Holland, Laura Poitras, Sandra Hüller, Sean Baker, Payal Kapadia and Ariane Labed.

“We stand in full solidarity with Rasoulof’s demands and call upon the international film community to raise our voices against an Islamist dictatorship that systematically oppresses every aspect of their society’s lives.

Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on “Not a Word,” which will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. The cast is led by Maren Eggert, who won the best acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for “I’m Your Man.”

The film is written and directed by Hanna Slak, whose credits include the Slovenian Oscar entry “The Miner,” and was lensed by Claire Mathon, the cinematographer of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “Saint-Omer,” “Stranger by the Lake” and “Spencer.”

Eggert plays ambitious musician and conductor Nina. When her teenage son, Lars, has a strange accident at school, she decides to take a break from city life and together they head to their vacation home on an island on the rugged Atlantic coast. Bound in silence, their already brittle relationship is pushed to the edge.

Jona Levin Nicolai co-stars as the provocative teenage son while Maryam Zaree,...

In today’s Global Bulletin, Atresmedia commissions a Spanish version of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Steve McQueen’s “Lovers Rock” trailer drops, Lightbox will produced a three-part docu-series about Sophie Toscan du Plantier for Netflix, Hardcash announces a new coronavirus doc for ITV, and the Seville and Zagreb festivals announce their 2020 winners.

Format

¡Hola Hola Hola! Media company World of Wonder is teaming with Spanish broadcaster Atresmedia and production company Buendía Estudios on “Drag Race Spain,” a new Spanish version of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” for Atresmedia’s SVOD platform Atresplayer Premium. The Spanish update adds to the list of previous format deals in Thailand, Chile, Canada, Netherlands, and “RuPaul’s Drag Race U.K.,” recently renewed for a second and third season.

Passion Distribution brokered the deal with Atresmedia and will distribute internationally, including an exclusive deal with Wow Presents Plus in the U.S., U.K and internationally, which will...

Other laureates at the human rights film festival, which took place online and in cinemas in three of the biggest Serbian cities, include Digger, Acasă - My Home and Wildland. The 16th, hybrid edition of the Free Zone Film Festival took place from 5-10 November in cinemas in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš, as well as online. The human rights-themed and audience-orientated event traditionally screens around 40 fiction and documentary films, and does not discriminate between formats within individual sections. Eliza Hittman's Berlinale Silver Bear-winning title Never Rarely Sometimes Always (USA/UK) triumphed in the International Selection, beating the documentaries The Reason I Jump by Jerry Rothwell, Epicentro by Hubert Sauper, My Favorite War by Ilze Burkovska Jacobsen, Welcome to Chechnya by David France and Schlingensief: A Voice That Shook the Silence by Bettina Böhler as well as the fiction features DNA by Maïwenn and Yalda, a Night for Forgiveness by.

New releases scarce in the week before ‘Tenet’ hits many markets.

UK-Ireland, opening Friday August 21

It is a quiet weekend for new releases in UK and Irish cinemas, with just two new titles on screens: Sam Quah’s Chinese crime thriller Sheep Without A Shepherd and Grégory Magne’s Perfumes.

Sheep Without A Shepherd reached number one at the Chinese box office following a December 2019 release, and was one of the last blockbuster hits in the country before Covid-19 forced the closure of venues in January. It was re-released on July 20, following the reopening of some cinemas.

Released by Trinity Film...

New releases scarce in the week before ‘Tenet’ hits many markets.

UK-Ireland, opening Friday August 21

It is a quiet weekend for new releases in UK and Irish cinemas, with just two new titles on screens: Sam Quah’s Chinese crime thriller Sheep Without A Shepherd and Grégory Magne’s Perfumes.

Sheep Without A Shepherd reached number one at the Chinese box office following a December 2019 release, and was one of the last blockbuster hits in the country before Covid-19 forced the closure of venues in January. It was re-released on July 20, following the reopening of some cinemas.

Released by Trinity Film...

The section will also showcase the world premiere of Srdan Golubović’s Father

The Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20-Mar 1) has completed the line-up of its Panorama strand with a further 15 world premieres.

The newly announced titles take the Panorama total to 35, after a first wave of features for the strand were announced last month.

They include the world premiere of Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli (previously titlted Mughal Mowgli), which stars Riz Ahmed as a UK rapper on the verge of international stardom when a crippling illness strikes him down, and he is forced to move back in with his family.

Based on the same real-life “honor killing” that inspired fellow German Feo Aladag’s prize-winning 2010 feature “When We Leave,” Sherry Hormann’s “A Regular Woman” takes a compelling new approach to the contentious 2005 case that shocked Germany: By allowing the murdered woman — a 23-year-old German of Turkish-Kurdish ancestry shot point blank by her youngest brother — to narrate the action both before and after her death, the director (“Desert Flower”) restores the victim’s voice. Further fest screenings and niche arthouse play should follow the film’s Tribeca world premiere.

From a family of strict Sunni Muslims and the oldest daughter of nine siblings, Hatun “Aynur” Sürücü was forced to leave her Kreuzberg school in 1998, age 16, and marry a cousin in Istanbul. In her voiceover, which outlines the expectations assigned to a dutiful daughter, Aynur calls it “a change of owner,” as control over her person shifts from father to husband.

Margarethe von Trotta remembers the first time she saw it. It was the early Sixties, and this young German woman — still several years from establishing herself as an actor, and a little over a decade away before The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) would induct her into the ranks of Das Neue Kino directors — was visiting Paris. She’d heard about this film that Cahiers-crowd cinegeeks had been crowing over, something about a knight who’d lost his faith, a chess game and Death. So von Trotta found a theater that was playing it.

Ulfers Foundation Award‬ honoree Margarethe von Trotta with Volker Schlöndorff and Friedrich Ulfers at Deutsches Haus, NYU

Margarethe von Trotta's Searching For Ingmar Bergman, co-directed by Bettina Böhler (von Trotta's editor of Hannah Arendt which stars Barbara Sukowa and Christian Petzold's Transit with Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer) and Felix Moeller (producer of Volker Schlöndorff's Diplomacy and director of Forbidden Films) with interviews of Liv Ullmann, Stig Björkman, Jean-Claude Carrière, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Carlos Saura, and Daniel Bergman, screened in the 56th New York Film Festival on Monday night.

Margarethe von Trotta ‪honored for her remarkable career with the inaugural Ulfers Foundation Award Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Marianne & Juliane, and Rosa Luxemburg will be shown in The Political Is Personal retrospective as part of a celebration of the remarkable career of Margarethe von Trotta, starting on November 2 at the Quad Cinema in New York.

Margarethe von Trotta's Searching for Ingmar Bergman screens in the 56th New York Film Festival Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that Margarethe von Trotta's Searching For Ingmar Bergman, co-directed by Bettina Böhler and Felix Moeller (producer of Volker Schlöndorffs Diplomacy and director of Forbidden Films) with interviews with Liv Ullmann, Stig Björkman, Jean-Claude Carrière, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Carlos Saura, and Daniel Bergman will screen in the Retrospective section. Gastón Solnicki's tribute to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's assistant Hans Hurch, Introduzione all’Oscuro, and Pamela B Green's Be Natural: The Untold Story Of Alice Guy-Blaché, narrated by Jodie Foster, round out the documentaries on cinema program of the 56th New York Film Festival.

Alice Guy-Blaché became head of production at Gaumont in 1896 at the age of 23. Guy-Blaché's...

Pastiches, homages, and carbon copies of films made years, decades, and movements ago clog today’s cinema. Art house fare as diverse and varied as Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Queen of Earth (2015), The Death of Louis Xiv (2016), The Untamed (2016), and First Reformed (2017) all draw from a—now sizeable—history of cinema, for better or for worse. Add Valeska Grisebach’s Western to the batch. Eleven years since her previous work, Longing (2006), Grisebach returns to cinema with a slow-boiling film that injects the DNA of the western genre into a narrative concerning inter-European relations. And to be sure, Grisebach had some movies in mind while making Western (a few low-key nods to My Darling Clementine here and there), but as she told Daniel Kasman on this site, “it was more like they were traveling with [her] while [she] was making the film.” Western isn’t so much an homage as a muted mutation.

Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (2000) and Christoph Hochhäusler's The City Below (2010) will be showing in September and October, 2017 on Mubi in most countries around the world.Christian Petzold (left) and Christoph Hochhäusler (right) on the set of Dreileben. Photo by Felix von Böhm.We meet in Christian Petzold’s office in Berlin-Kreuzberg. A giant wall of whispering books, almost like a Borgesian brain of fiction, encircles the table at which Christoph Hochhäusler, myself and the owner take place to discuss their films. The idea of the interview was to get Petzold’s take on Hochhäusler’s The City Below (2010) and Hochhäusler’s take on Petzold’s The State I Am In (2000). In the end, both filmmakers ended up talking about a lot more, as cinema for them has always been something that shines most brightly when remembering it, discussing it and loving it. The fictions proposed...

What's contemporary Europe got that we ain't got? Powerful, serious filmmaking like that by Christian Petzold, starring the impressive Nina Hoss. Their sixth collaboration is a loaded narrative that takes some pretty wild narrative themes -- plastic surgery, hidden identities -- and spins them in a suspenseful new direction. Phoenix Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 809 2014 / Color / 2:39 widescreen (Super 35) / 98 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date April 26, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Imogen Kogge. Cinematography Hans Fromm Film Editor Bettina Böhler Original Music Stefan Will Written by Christian Petzold, Haroun Farocki from ideas in the book Le retour des cendres by Hubert Monteilhet Produced by Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Michael Weber Directed by Christian Petzold

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

I had seen only one Christian Petzold feature before this one. 2012's Barbara is an excellent Deutsche-Millennial thriller starring Barbara Hoss as an East German doctor trying to do...