News

Pope Francis, Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Un chief Ban Ki-Moon will be honored at the upcoming Cinema for Peace gala in Berlin on February 19.

The long-running gala run by the Cinema for Peace Foundation will be accompanied by the inaugural World Forum on the Future Of Democracy, Tech and Humankind.

The latter event will run from February 18 to 19 at the Allianz Forum next to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with the aim of promoting the renewal of democracy and freedom at a time when both are under threat.

The Cinema for Peace Foundation was created in 2008 as an international non-profit organization with the goal to foster change through film. Over the years it has worked with a host of stars including Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney.

Clinton and Ban will attend the February 19 gala in person while Pope Francis will be shown receiving his award in a recorded video.

Constantins’s Us teen drama ‘After Passion’ was a surprise hit with young female audiences.

Cinema-going in Germany saw a slight year-on-year recovery in box-office takings and admissions for the first half of 2019 with admissions rising by 6% and ticket revenues by 5.6%, according to provisional figures collated by ComScore.

In the same period in 2018 German exhibitors had been faced with an almost 17% year-on-year drop in box office and admissions, and 2018 had ended with overall attendance sliding by 13.9% to 105.5 million admissions, the lowest level since German reunification in 1990. Gross box office receipts failed to pass the €1bn threshold for the first time...

In today’s film news roundup, Jacqueline Bisset has joined “Honey in the Head,” Freestyle Digital buys “Carter and June” and the editorial employees of Nickelodeon Animation Studio have unionized.

Casting

Jacqueline Bisset is set to join the cast of “Honey in the Head” opposite Nick Nolte, Matt Dillon and Emily Mortimer, Variety has learned exclusively.

She will play the mother of Mortimer’s character, and likes to playfully flirt with Nick Nolte’s character whenever she has the opportunity. “Honey in the Head,” the English-language remake of the 2014 German drama “Honig Im Kopf,” will start production in May in Germany, Italy, and the U.K.

The original movie, produced by Barefoot Films, was directed by and starred Til Schweiger as the son of a retired veteran suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who convinces his widowed father (played by Dieter Hallervorden) to move in with him. The film, co-produced and distributed by Warner Bros.

Nick Nolte and Matt Dillon will play father and son in Honey in the Head, Til Schweiger's English-language remake of his hit 2014 German dramedy.

Nolte will play the lead, a man suffering from Alzheimer's struggling with his disease and personal grief following the death of his wife after 50 years of marriage. The role, which Michael Douglas had initially been linked with, was played in the original by German comedy legend Dieter Hallervorden.

Dillon will play Nolte's son, an American-born husband and father living in England jointly raising his daughter with his estranged wife (Emily Mortimer). The grandfather decides...

Nick Nolte and Matt Dillon will play father and son in Honey in the Head, Til Schweiger's English-language remake of his hit 2014 German dramedy.

Nolte will play the lead, a man suffering from Alzheimer's struggling with his disease and personal grief following the death of his wife after 50 years of marriage. The role, which Michael Douglas had initially been linked with, was played in the original by German comedy legend Dieter Hallervorden.

Dillon will play Nolte's son, an American-born husband and father living in England jointly raising his daughter with his estranged wife (Emily Mortimer). The ...

Germany’s film producers have expressed ¨exceptional regret¨ at learning that Angela Merkel’s cabinet has proposed reducing the annual budget for the Dfff ¨German spend¨ incentive by another €10m to €50m in the global federal budget for 2015.

In a first reaction, the German Producers Alliance said that it welcomed the statement by the new State Minister for Culture and Media Monika Grütters that she would push in future budget negotiations for the current level of €60m to be retained.

However, the German film community had already been disappointed by Bernd Neumann’s successor earlier this year when she seem to go back on pronouncements made at the Berlinale in February to keep the Dfff’s budget at €70m when she indicated at the German Film Awards in May that €60m would be her goal.

It remains to be seen whether she has the political clout to hold her own - and the interests of the German...

The Golden Lola for best feature film went to veteran director Edgar Reitz’s Home From Home - Chronicle of a Vision at the German Film Awards.Scroll down for full list of winners

The black-and-white epic, set in a fictitious village in Germany’s Hunsrück region in the mid-19th century, also received awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay (shared with co-author Gert Heidenreich) after being nominated by the members of the German Film Academy in a total of six categories.

The co-production with Margaret Ménégoz’s Les Films du Losange is handled internationally by Arri Media Worldsales and was released theatrically in Germany by Concorde Filmverleih.

The prizes were handed out at the 64th annual film awards, held in Berlin.

Austrian accent to ceremony

The night belonged to Austrian film-maker Andreas Prochaska and his producers Helmut Grasser of Allegro Film and Stefan Arndt of X Filme Creative Pool with their Alpine western The Dark...

Efm: Brisk business for Beta Cinema; Pandastorm buys five.

Beta Cinema’s two Competition titles – Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations Of The Cross and Edward Berger’s Jack – were the Munich-based sales company’s top-selling titles at this year’s European Film Market (Efm).

Stations Of The Cross has been sold to France (Memento), Italy (Satine Film), Spain (Caramel), Poland (Aurora), Benelux (Wild Bunch), Portugal (Vendetta Films), Greece (7 Films), Scandinavia and the Baltic States (Nonstop), Ex-Yugoslavia (Discovery) and Hungary (Circo).

As reported by ScreenDaily yesterday, the UK (Arrow) has also taken the drama, which had been the top-rated film of the Screen jury before Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was screened.

Further interest has been shown from the Us and Australia for the Ufa Fiction production, which received the Silver Bear for Best Script and the Ecumenical Jury’s prize for the best film in the Competition..

Jack has been acquired for France (Diaphana), Japan (Showgate), Norway (Europa...