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The Locarno Film Festival, at its 78th edition this year, is inviting audiences to explore The Seasons (As Estações).

The movie is the solo directorial feature debut from Maureen Fazendeiro (medium-length film Les Habitants, short Black Sun), a French filmmaker and casting director living in Lisbon who is known as a long-time collaborator of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, with whom she co-directed The Tsugua Diaries and co-wrote Grand Tour. The film will world premiere in the Swiss festival’s main competition lineup on Aug. 11.

The film is based on accounts and tales collected during its preparation and the personal

archives and fieldnotes of German archaeologists Georg and Vera Leisner, who studied megalithic sites in Iberia.

”Weaving together accounts of rural workers and field notes of a couple of archaeologists, amateur footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems, and songs, As Estações is a journey through the real history and the tales...

If you saw Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, starring Vicky Krieps, or Josef Hader’s Wild Mouse, among other films, you have experienced Ulrike Kofler’s work as an editor. But the Austrian creative also works as a writer and director.

After directing and co-writing What We Wanted, starring Lavinia Wilson, Elyas M’Barek, and Anna Unterberger, her second feature as a writer and director is the family drama Gina, which tells the story of a nine-year-old girl, played by Emma Lotta Simmer in her first-ever acting role. Growing up in a household overseen by her young, pregnant and struggling mother, portrayed by Marie-Luise Stockinger (Maria Theresia), she must take care of her two siblings in a home that often has no food on the table and gets regular visits from the child services department.

Kofler, who has two children, one of them a foster child, shows the world through Gina’s...

The Berlin Film Festival has named the first dozen titles for its 2025 Panorama lineup, Berlin’s main sidebar, and there are a few familiar faces in the mix.

Berlinale regular Ira Sachs will return with Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall, a feature based on a 1974 conversation between photographer Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, offering insight into the New York art scene. Canadian filmmaker and fellow Berlinale alum Denis Côté is back in Panorama with Paul, a documentary on a cleaner who uses his job cleaning homes and sharing his routines on social media to help combat depression and social anxiety.

Other Panorama titles announced Tuesday include Emilie Blichfeldt’s Danish horror feature Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister), a dark twisted fairy tale, which will premiere in Sundance; Frelle Petersen’s Hjem kaere hjem, a social realist drama on the life of an elder...

Right from its opening moments, Austrian director Elisabeth Scharang’s Woodland is visually arresting, commanding one’s attention. Which is fortunate as the film is light on dialogue and primarily concerns the isolating experience of a woman living alone in wooded country. Through jagged memories that pierce the placid exterior of the film and our protagonist, we uncover the buried traumas and demons she is running away from. Or running towards, as it turns out. In her native hometown, a reckoning awaits her, that just might set her free.

Adapted from Doris Knecht’s novel Wald and inspired by Scharang’s personal experience, Woodland charts Marian’s (Brigitte Hobmeier) return to the small agrarian town she grew up in. She sets up camp in her abandoned family home––cobwebbed, without electricity, and freezing––and only occasionally charges her cell phone at the local pub. Her desire to disconnect from the world seems paramount.

Berlin-based sales agency Picture Tree Intl. has picked up “Woodland” (“Wald”), written and directed by Elisabeth Scharang, which has its world premiere in the Centrepiece section at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film’s trailer has also just been launched.

Picture Tree Intl. also handled world sales on Scharang’s sophomore feature film, “Jack,” which also played at Toronto.

“Woodland” is inspired by the novel “Wald” from bestselling author Doris Knecht, and the personal experience of Scharang, who witnessed the attack of a terrorist shooter in Vienna in 2020 in which four people were killed and 23 others were injured. The film marks Scharang’s second collaboration with Dop Jörg Widmer, who is a frequent collaborator with Terrence Malick.

Brigitte Hobmeier as Marian Malin in “Woodland”

In “Woodland,” Marian Malin (Brigitte Hobmeier) has everything she could wish for — a passion, a job and love — until she and her husband (Bogdan Dumitrache...

“Men are all the same,” tuts the midwife delivering the titular Snotty Boy at the start of this animated biopic of cult cartoonist Manfred Deix, showing at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. But Snotty Boy is not the same as anyone else in his small, conservative Austrian town. He’s a talented artist and a fledgeling liberal — although he does share an obsession that all the menfolk have: women.

Deix’s cartoons were dominated by curvaceous females, comical sex acts and scatalogical humor. Inspired by his drawings and life, directors Santiago López Jover, Marcus H. Rosenmüller and their animators offer an affectionate, playful homage to Deix, who worked as Art Director on the film before his death in 2016.

Set in the year 1967, this centers on a pubescent boy who secretly sketches the townsfolk, especially a local sex worker who has a habit of undressing by her window. One might...

Opens June 30.“If humanity isn’t free, everything dies with it” — Georg Elser, “13 Minutes”. An intense true story of one man’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1939 … the ultimate “what if”?

U.S. theatrical release by Sony Pictures Classics to Open in New York & Los Angeles June 30, 2017. International sales by Beta. Premiered at Berlinale 2015.

Georg Elser (Christian Friedel) in “13”

So relevant today as we watch an isolated passionate man’s solitary attempt to eliminate a monstrous dictator whom he can see is destroying society. “13 Minutes” is a true story about an individual in pre War Nazi Germany who can no longer bear to witness the persecution and injustice into which his land has descended and decides to act decisively to eliminate the mad man dictator.

This well made, well directed film, with big sets and cast and a faithfully recreated period brings our own thoughts to bear upon our...