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South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, who won three Oscars with “Parasite,” will be the chair of the jury of the 22nd Marrakech Intl. Film Festival, which runs Nov. 28 to Dec. 6.

The jury awards the Étoile d’Or to one of the 14 first and second feature-length films in the international competition.

Bong said: “For many years, Marrakech has been a champion of fresh, beautiful films. I’m delighted and honored to be part of that tradition. I look forward to sharing a powerful cinematic experience with the festival audience and reflecting on the true value of ‘cinema.’ Our anticipation and excitement will be palpable in front of the big screens of Marrakech.”

“Parasite” won Cannes’ Palme d’Or, two BAFTAs and Oscars for best motion picture, best achievement in directing and best original screenplay. Bong made history becoming the first non-English-speaking filmmaker to win best picture.

Bong’s most recent film was “Mickey 17,...

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”, wrote Milan Kundera. Collective memory is an archive; while history misses to chronicle the lived experiences of people, memory holds a mirror to it. Memory gives birth to an alternate stream of history—which is oral, cerebral, and passed down from one generation to the other like a quiet legacy. The state is not the only unit of measurement when it comes to remembering events; history flows in the nooks and crannies of neighborhoods, families, and individuals. It reshapes them and reinvents them. While they carry the burden of history, sometimes their resistance takes the form of voices, but sometimes it retreats into silence. The Mother Of All Lies is a poignant testament to the interplay between history and memory and how it reshaped its witnesses.

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens in the Film?

The Mother Of All Lies,...

Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, Amjad Al Rasheed’s Inshallah a Boy and Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays are just some of the recent notable films to have benefitted from the Final Cut in Venice. The Venice Film Festival’s industry program supporting works in progress from all African countries and Middle East territories is back for a ninth edition and this year we find the likes of Yemeni-uk director Sara Ishaq‘s The Station and Palestinian-British filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky‘s Standing at the Ruins.…...

The Cannes Film Festival’s La Résidence is welcoming Flóra Anna Buda, Andrea Gatopoulos, Xiwen Cong, Simon Maria Kubiena, Constance Tsang and Rodrigo Ribeyro to their 49th session. From March 15 to July 31, 2025, this next generation of international filmmakers will reside in Paris where they will benefit from a personalized screenwriting residency program and a collective program of meetings with film professionals. Recent filmmakers to benefit from the program include Sofia Alaoui and Asmae El Moudir. The two stand-outs from the half dozen are easily Flóra Anna Buda and Constance Tsang who both made waves in Cannes.…...

Former Netflix Mena Head of Business and Legal Affairs Izzy Abidi and Egyptian entertainment lawyer and consultant, Aliaa Zaky, who works with companies such as Mad Solutions and Film Clinic, hit Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival this week to launch a pioneering award they believe fills a gap in the region.

Their new prize, organized under the banner of the Freshly Ground Stories hub launched by Abidi earlier this year, was among around 30 collateral prizes meted out to the 31 projects showcased in the festival’s Red Sea Souk’s project market.

The first two winners of the Freshly Ground Stories Award will receive business and legal support for a period of 12 months at any stage of the production cycle, worth the equivalent of $5,000.

Abidi and Zaky want to support filmmakers in navigating deals as well as give them insight into the art of negotiation and equip them with knowledge on contracts,...

Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival distributed over $900,000 in prizes at its Souk industry awards.

The biggest award, the $75,000 Red Sea Souk Production Award, went to Katia Jarjoura’s Lebanon-France co-production Robbing Beirut. Produced by Michel Zana for Blue Train Films, the film follows a young woman who becomes a bank robber in order to pay for her sister’s leukaemia treatment.

Scroll down for the full list of awards

Two further titles received prizes in the same section, for Projects in Development. Makbul Mubarak’s Watch It Burn took the $30,000 Red Sea Souk Development Award; with Aboozar Amini...

The fourth edition of the Red Sea Souk, the market arm of the Red Sea Film Foundation, came to a wrap on Wednesday afternoon after five days of activities nested within the dates of the Red Sea Film Festival. Winners include “The Mother of All Lies” director Asmae El Moudir with “Holy Cow” and “Hiding Saddam Hussein” director Halkawt Mustafa with “Farouk.”

“We are concluding a very successful market and I am confident that in the near future we will be hearing several collaborations and deals germinated from the Souk,” said the managing director of the Red Sea Film Foundation Shivani Pandya Malhotra during the ceremony.

“The foundation would like to be the ultimate platform for the underserved regions such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” Malhotra continued. “This region represents two-thirds of the global population and 35% of the world’s box office. It is our endeavor to help...

“Aisha Can’t Fly Away,” “Chronicles From the Siege,” and “It’s a Sad and Beautiful World” claimed a trio of post-production prizes at this year’s Atlas Workshops, which ran from Dec. 1 – 5 as part of the Marrakech Film Festival.

Winner of the top award, “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” walked away with a €25,000 post-production grant. Directed by Morad Mostafa, the film follows a 26-year-old Sudanese woman working as a caregiver in Ain Shams, a Cairo neighborhood known for its sizable African migrant community. Governmental indifference mixes with racial tensions and gang violence, setting the stage for a dark turn when one gang offers Aisha protection – if she’ll offer a favor in return.

The project previously won top honors at Final Cut in Venice earlier this year. Set for delivery in 2025, the lauded title has had festival scouts buzzing for months.

Speaking with Variety from Marrakech, one prominent festival...

Luca Guadagnino,head of the competition jury at theMarrakech International Film Festival (Fifm), reflected on his North African roots at the opening night ceremony on November 29.

The Challengers and Queer director spoke in French and told the audience inside the Salle des Ministres about his Algerian mother, who grew up in Casablanca. “She considered herself half Moroccan,” the Italian filmmaker said, adding he would also like to consider himself half Moroccan, to the delight of the audience.

“Long live Morocco, long live Marrakech, long live cinema,” Guadagnino declared, officially opening this year’s festival.

Glamour is back in Marrakech for...

Trains, the Polish documentary that offers “a collective portrait of people in 20th century Europe, capturing their hopes, desires, dramas, and tragedies” has won Best Film in the International Competition section of the prestigious International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

The film directed and edited by Maciej J. Drygas was a unanimous choice of the five-person jury. The award comes with a €15,000 cash prize. Trains also earned the award for Best Editing in the International Competition, recognizing Drygas.

“This is a bold and inventive use of archive,” said the jury comprised of Juliana Fanjul, Sophie Fiennes, Grace Lee, Asmae El Moudir, and Kazuhiro Soda. “The film shows us routes to the positive and negative consequences of modern industrial innovation. It harnesses the magic of cinema and as an audience we are haunted by our present historical time, even while we bear witness to the past.”

‘An American Pastoral’

The jury awarded...

Found-footage documentary Trains, directed by veteran Polish auteur Maciej J. Drygas, has won the best film award of the international competition at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). It comes with the €15,000 cash prize.

Trains is an archive-based film made without voiceover or commentary other than an opening quote from Franz Kafka. It comprises footage of trains sourced from a reported 45 archives across the world. Much of the imagery is disturbing - wounded and deformed soldiers, dead bodies from concentration camps, Nazi officers on their way to war zones. There is also material of Hitler and Charlie Chaplin.

Drygas’s...

Maciej J. Drygas’ “Trains” won Best Film in the International Competition at this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, with Miguel Coyula’s “Chronicles of the Absurd” taking the Best Film in the Envision Competition.

“Trains” is a journey through the 20th century told entirely through archival footage. The jury of the International Competition, comprising Juliana Fanjul, Sophie Fiennes, Grace Lee, Asmae El Moudir and Kazuhiro Soda, said they were unanimous in their decision, highlighting Drygas’ “bold and inventive use of archive.”

“The film shows us routes to the positive and negative consequences of modern industrial innovation. It harnesses the magic of cinema and as an audience, we are haunted by our present historical time, even while we bear witness to the past,” the jury added of the winning film, which will take home a €15,000 cash prize.

“Chronicles of the Absurd”

The International Competition jury awarded the Best Directing...

The Red Sea International Film Festival has unveiled 38 compelling feature film and TV projects as part of this year’s Red Sea Souk Project Market, showcasing a continued commitment to championing bold storytelling and exciting new voices in cinema. This year’s selection highlights a diverse range of narratives and talent from across the globe.

The selected projects represent the culmination of the Red Sea Labs annual development program within the Lodge, in partnership with TorinoFilmLab and sponsored by Film Alula. Further expanding its support for episodic storytelling, the Project Market will also feature, for the first time, seven series currently in development through Red Sea SeriesLab, in collaboration with Film Independent.”

Marking a significant expansion of the program, the Souk this year opened its call for submissions to filmmakers across Asia for the first time, resulting in 28% of total submissions originating from the continent. Previously, it was open exclusively...

US director Todd Haynes will be president of the international jury of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.

Tricia Tuttle, heading into her first edition as director of the Berlinale, described Haynes as “a dazzlingly gifted writer and director with an impressive range; his body of work is at once stylistically versatile but also unmistakably his.”

“Ever since his debut feature Poison won the Teddy Award in 1991, the Berlinale has followed and loved his filmmaking,” said Tuttle.

Haynes has directed 10 feature films, including 2002’s Far From Heaven, which was nominated for four Oscars including best original screenplay for Haynes.

His...

Asmae El Moudir’s Holy Cow and Cj ‘Fiery’ Obasi’s La Pyramide are among 38 feature film and television projects selected for the Red Sea Souk Project Market, at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival (December 5-14).

Selected in the ‘in development’ section, El Moudir’s Moroccan feature Holy Cow (working title) follows a truck driver transporting cattle for slaughter houses in Rabat, who becomes the scapegoat when two cows escape.

Scroll down for the full list of projects

It is a debut fiction feature for Moroccan filmmaker El Moudir, who won the best director prize at Cannes 2023 with...

Upcoming films from Cannes doc awards winner Asmae El Moudir, Saudi Arabian filmmaker and actor Fatima Al-Banawi, and rising Nigerian filmmaker C.J. Obasi are among 38 feature projects due to be presented at the Red Sea Souk Project Market this year.

The meeting will unfold within the framework of the fourth Red Sea International Film Festival, running in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah from December 5 to 14.

Like the festival, it will return to its original setting of the city’s historic Al Balad quarter after two years in the Ritz Carlton hotel, while a new HQ was being built.

The 12 in-development projects include Al-Banawi’s Do Re Mimi, her second feature in the director’s chair after Basma, which debuted on Netflix this year.

Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir, who won Cannes Oeil d’Or prize for doc The Mother of All Lies, will attend with new working titled project Holy Cow.

The Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia has unveiled 38 feature film projects and, for the first time, TV series projects that will be featured at this year’s Red Sea Souk Project Market, with organizers touting that they showcase “a continued commitment to championing bold storytelling and exciting new voices in cinema.”

This year’s selection highlights “a diverse range of narratives and talent from across the globe,” including seven series, they said. The selected projects represent the culmination of the Red Sea Labs annual development program within the Lodge, which is run in partnership with TorinoFilmLab and sponsored by Film Alula.

“Marking a significant expansion of the program, the Souk this year opened its call for submissions to filmmakers across Asia for the first time, resulting in 28 percent of total submissions originating from the continent,” the market team highlighted. Previously, the Souk was open exclusively to...

Luca Guadagnino has been appointed jury president at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, replacing previously announced Thomas Vinterberg who has cancelled his attendance for family reasons.

Guadagnino will be joined by The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi, Indian director Zoya Akhtar (The Archies), American actor Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), Belgian actor Virginie Efira (Paris Memories), Australian actor Jacob Elordi ( Priscilla), British-American actor Andrew Garfield (Spider-Man: No Way Home), Moroccan actor Nadia Kounda (Summer Days) and Argentine director Santiago Mitre.

Guadagnino arrives at the festival fresh from the launch of Queer starring Daniel Craig, which follows other acclaimed films such as Call Me By Your Name and Challengers.

The Italian director talked of long ties with the city of Marrakech and its festival.

“I will never forget the first time I arrived in Marrakech: it must’ve been more than 20 years ago, when I was a guest of my friend Valentina Cervi,...

Luca Guadagnino has stepped in to replace Thomas Vinterberg as jury president for this year’s Marrakech International Film Festival, which runs from November 29 to December 7.

Festival organisers said in a statement that Danish filmmaker Vinterberg “had to excuse himself for family reasons.”

Guadagnino will be joined on the jury by fellow filmmakers Ali Abbasi, Zoya Akhtar and Santiago Mitre, and actors Patricia Arquette, Virginie Efira, Jacob Elordi, Andrew Garfield and Nadia Kounda.

The Italian filmmaker, whose features Challengers and Queer are competing in this year’s awards season, said he first came to Marrakech two decades ago as a...

Thomas Vinterberg, the Oscar-winning Danish director of “Another Round,” will preside over the jury of the upcoming Marrakech International Film Festival, with which he has a longstanding rapport.

The Marrakech jury will award its Étoile d’Or to one of the 14 first and second films in the fest’s international competition. Recent winners include Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir’s “Mother of all the Lies” last year and French-Iranian helmer Emad Aleebrahim-Dehkordi’s “A Tale of Shemroon” in 2022.

It will mark the first time that Vinterberg attends the Marrakech Film Festival. The Danish filmmaker is one of Europe’s best known directors. He co-founder with Lars von Trier of the Danish Dogme 95 movement in the mid 1990s. His vast and widely praised filmography comprises “The Celebration,” aka “Festen,” (1998) for which Vinterberg won the Cannes jury prize when he was 28; “It’s All About Love (2003)”; “Dear Wendy” (2005); “When a Man Comes Home...

Morocco has selected Nabil Ayouch’s drama Everybody Loves Touda as its submission to the Best International Feature Film category of the 97th Academy Awards.

The feature sees Ayouch explore the country’s tradition of Sheikhat, a type of sung poetry performed by female performers which has its roots in 19th century rural communities. Once revered, these performers saw their status undermined amid the rural exodus of the 1970s, which saw them moving into bars and cabaret clubs.

Nisrin Erradi plays a young woman who with aspirations of reviving the once hallowed status of Sheikhat, but who finds herself instead performing in provincial bars under the gaze of lustful men.

Everybody Loves Touda was selected as Morocco’s submission by commission overseen by the Moroccan Cinema Centre.

It consisted of producer Souad Lamriki; producer-directors Layla Triqui, Asmae El Moudir, Driss Mrini and Driss Roukhe as well as Zine El Abidine Charafeddine,...

Docs are prominent among specialty releases this weekend with South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker renovating a massive Mexican restaurant and creative takes on psychics, oysters, Abraham Lincoln and Casablanca bread riots. The Thicket starring Peter Dinklage marks Tubi Films’ first non-day-and-date release. French Canadian chiller Red Rooms gets a U.S bow from Utopia. Screens for indie fare have been scarce and are now running over with Tim Burton’s anticipated wide release Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! starts a limited run this weekend and has been racking up significant presales that promise one of the highest per-screen averages for a documentary since Covid at its first stop, Alamo Denver. Deadline hears theaters initially scheduled two shows a day but have been upping that to 4-5 shows, possibly with more to be added.

Directed by Arthur Bradford, the doc premiered at Tribeca where it won the audience award,...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

It’s a hybrid docu made on the small scale and dealing with a past that is pieced together through memory and a maquette, the painstakingly beautiful gem of a film presented at this year’s Un Certain Regard section in Cannes (where it won the section’s Best Director award and L’Œil d’Or – for the Best Documentary film on the Croisette) would become Morocco’s submission for the Best International feature category at the 2024 Oscars. Asmae El Moudir‘s The Mother of All Lies is a highly personal and political film — it’s powerful cinema by way of El Moudir’s innovative exploration of the narratives and the transformative potential of art in confronting concealed individual and collective memories.…...

In his documentaries S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh investigates the traumatic legacies of the Cambodian genocide through recreation. In the former, Panh had Khmer Rouge guards who willfully practiced torture act out their violence at the very site of their deeds, while in the latter he used clay figurines to dramatize the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities and reflect on robbed innocence.

In The Mother of All Lies, Asmae El Moudir similarly attempts to recollect a national tragedy that was never fully documented: the Casablanca Bread Riots of 1981, an uprising in which the Moroccan police brutalized and murdered over a purported 600 civilians who were protesting food cost inflation. With the help of her formerly estranged father, El Moudir built a miniature replica of her family’s shanty town, “to free our memories and their words” and to “create a place for those who...

Asmae El Moudir’s award-winning documentary The Mother of All Lies tells a poignant story of family and community using an inventive method. Made in 2019, the film follows El Moudir as she works to understand her own mysterious past. Growing up in Casablanca, Morocco, she found that few photos existed of her childhood, forbidden by her domineering grandmother Zahra. El Moudir sets out to change that, recruiting her father to build miniature replicas of their old neighborhood. Populated with doll-sized figures representing friends and relatives, the replica becomes a stage where long-hidden memories can freely emerge.

El Moudir peels back the layers of her family’s history, guided by those nimble figurines. We learn of Zahra’s “iron fist” rule over not just her household but the entire district. More distressing is the trauma etched into all who lived there during the “Years of Lead” under King Hassan II, when...

Asmae El Moudir employs a delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony to brilliantly evoke personal and collective trauma

Between those who refuse to remember and those who struggle to forget, a tumultuous clash of minds occupies the centre of Asmae El Moudir’s inventive documentary, a prize-winner at last year’s Cannes film festival. Through a constellation of clay figurines and dollhouse-style miniature sets, most of which were constructed by El Moudir’s father, the director recreates her oppressive childhood in the Sebata district of Casablanca. Under the watchful eyes of her domineering grandmother Zahra, all personal photos are banished from the house, save for a picture of King Hassan II.

The delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony brilliantly evokes the personal and collective trauma that stem from Morocco’s “Years of Lead” – a period of state brutality under Hassan II’s dictatorial rule. Lingering on...

The Un Certain Regard jury of five in Xavier Dolan, Maïmouna Doucouré, Asmae El Moudir, Vicky Krieps, and Todd McCarthy offered a total of seven awards/mentions this year and as per our tradition, we were front row at the ceremony on the day before the closing of the 77th edition. This year, it is sixth generation Chinese filmmaker Guan Hu who landed the top prize of the section with Black Dog. Of the eighteen feature films in competition, a total of eight were up for the running for the Caméra d’or (Best Debut Feature) which was also claimed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s Armand.…...

Fantasy horror Hundreds Of Beavers is to be released in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand by Lightbulb Film Distribution, following a festival run including Fantastic Fest, Fantasia and Sitges.

The film is US director Mike Cheslik’s feature debut, and is a dialogue-free homage to silent cinema about a drunken19th century cider salesman whose stock is ruined by hungry beavers and tries to recover his fortune by becoming North America’s greatest fur trapper.

Toronto-based genre specialist Raven Banner has international sales rights. Lightbulb will release the films in UK and Irish cinemas on July 9.

Ryland Brickson Cole Tews...

Not to be confused with Louise Courvoisier’s excellent feature debut which just received its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, The Mother Of All Lies helmer Asmae El Moudir might indeed be making the move into fiction for her next project. Screen Daily reports that the project the filmmaker brought to Cannes Residence is called Holy Cow, and she is currently considering it as her next directing gig. A jury member this year in the Un Certain Regard section, El Moudir was taking on meetings locking up future producer partners on the project which is still in the screenplay mode — the project falls in the comedy genre, thematically looks at violence and makes a point at not making a difference between sentient beings.…...

Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir is hatching her first fiction project.

El Moudir, who won the best director award in Un Certain Regard last year with her documentary The Mother Of All Lies and was on the Ucr jury this month in Cannes, is preparing a new drama with the working title, Holy Cow.

The writer-director has been working on the project through the Cannes Residence development programme. Holy Cow tells the story of a man who, after years of unemployment, finally finds his first job as a truck driver transporting cattle for the Rabat slaughter houses. His first assignment...

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival was officially closed yesterday, on May 25, 2024, as the prizes for the movies and the actors were awarded at the closing ceremony. It was a very exciting and content-filled event, and we have also reported on numerous movies that had their premiere at Cannes, some of which were received well, while others… not so much. But, naturally, everyone wants to know who won and who lost at Cannes, and that is what we are going to report about in this article.

The article will be divided into two main sections. The first one will list all the juries at Cannes, since they are the ones who chose the winners at the film festival, so we think that it is only fair that you know who picked the winners. After that, we are going to list all the winners in each of the categories.

As we have said,...

The 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival concludes today with the Closing Ceremony and presentation of the coveted award, the Palme d’Or which was awarded to Sean Baker’s Anora, on Saturday, May 25.

The Jury, chaired by director Greta Gerwig was tasked with awarding the Palme d’Or to one of the 22 films in the Competition.

Related: Cannes Film Festival: ‘Anora’ Wins Palme D’Or; ‘All We Imagine As Light’ Takes Grand Prize; ‘Emilia Perez’ Jury Prize & Best Actresses

The jury included Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, American actress Lily Gladstone, French actress Eva Green and Lebanese director and screenwriter Nadine Labaki, as well as Spanish director and screenwriter Juan Antonio Bayona, Italian actor Pierfrancisco Favino, Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, and French actor and producer Omar Sy.

Related: ‘Emilia Pérez’ Cannes Film Festival Premiere Photos: Édgar Ramírez, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña & More

Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog...

The hype out of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, for those far-flung and on the ground, tells one story: This was among the weaker lineups in recent memory.

Sure, huge stories broke out of the festival, from Francis Ford Coppola’s distribution push for his self-funded, decades-in-the-making passion project “Megalopolis” to Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof fleeing his home country after being sentenced to eight years in prison, finally making it to Cannes with his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” This journey inspired the jury to award him and his film a Special Prize (Prix Spécial).

Elsewhere in the official selection, Un Certain Regard already handed out its prizes on Friday from a jury led by Xavier Dolan and including Maïmouna Doucouré, Asmae El Moudir, Vicky Krieps, and Todd McCarthy. Among the top winners were Roberto Minervini (“The Damned”) and Rungano Nyoni (“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”) tying for Best Director,...

For the second year in a row, the L’Oeil d’or prize – the top award for documentary at the Cannes Film Festival – is being shared by two films.

The award announced on the Croisette today went to Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, and The Brink of Dreams, directed by Ayman El Amir and Nada Riyadh.

Peck’s film centers on the titular South African photographer who documented life under apartheid for his country’s oppressed Black population. Actor Lakeith Stanfield voices writings from the late artist in the film. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found premiered in the Special Screenings section of Cannes.

Director Raoul Peck at the Deadline Studio during the 77th Cannes Film Festival presented by Neom on May 22, 2024.

The L’Oeil d’or jury – comprised of president Nicolas Philibert, as well as Dyana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani – wrote,...

Guan Hu’s Black Dog has won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival (May 14-25).

It is the Cannes debut for Mr. Six director Guan and follows a former convict who forms an unlikely connection with the titular animal, as he clears stray dogs in his remote hometown on the edge of the Gobi desert before the 2008 Olympic Games. Playtime are handling international sales.

The jury prize went to The Story Of Souleymane from Boris Lojkine, back at the festival 10 years after his 2014 feature Hope, with the story of a...

Chinese director Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog snagged the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar on Friday night.

The drama, set on the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China, follows a man who returns home after a stint in jail and gets a job clearing a town of stray dogs before the Olympic Games. But he forms an unexpected bond with a black dog, and together, they embark on a new journey.

The film’s canine star won a pooch prize earlier in the day, scooping up the Grand Jury award at the Palm Dog.

For Un Certain Regard, the Jury Prize went to The Story Of Souleymane, Boris Lojkine’s Paris-set story of an African immigrant struggling to make a living and get legalized in the city of lights. Lead Abou Sangare also clinched one of the Un Certain Regard performance awards. The other...

Chinese director Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog won the top prize in Cannes Un Certain Regard on Friday evening.

The Jury Prize went to Boris Lojkine’s Paris-set asylum-seeker tale The Story Of Souleymane.

Best Director went to in ex aequo to Roberto Minervini for U.S. civil war drama The Damned and Rungano Nyoni for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

The Performance award went to Anasuya Sengupta for her performance as a young sex worker on the run in Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s India-set drama The Shameless, and Abou Sangare for his performance in Boris Lojkine’s The Story Of Souleymane as a young asylum seeker.

In other prizes, French director Louise Courvoisier won the Youth Prize for Holy Cow, while Saudi director Tawfik Alzaidi was feted with a Special Mention for Nora.

This year’s jury was presided over by Canadian actor, director, screenwriter and producer Xavier Dolan,...

Exactly ten years after the genre-mixing, canine-driven Hungarian thriller “White God” landed the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, this year’s ceremony culminated in the same prize going to a somewhat corresponding title: Chinese director Guan Hu’s “Black Dog,” a fusion of western, film noir and offbeat comedy with a highly lovable mutt at its center. The film, about a damaged loner returning to his desert hometown after a spell in prison and finding a kindred spirit in an equally world-weary greyhound, beat 17 other titles to take the top prize in the festival’s second-most prestigious competitive section. (The festival’s Official Competition awards will be handed out tomorrow night.)

Jury president Xavier Dolan, the actor-auteur behind such films as “Mommy” and “Laurence Anyways,” commended Guan’s film for “its breathtaking poetry, its imagination, its precision [and] its masterful direction.” He echoed the enthusiasm of Variety critic Jessica Kiang,...

The Cannes Film Festival is many things: A prestigious platform for the best of world cinema, a massive industry event where film acquisitions get made, a testament to the French film industry’s classism and rampant sexual abuse. But more than anything, it’s one of the world’s greatest photo opps.

Sure, sure, everyone wants the Palme D’or. But even more people would kill to get seen on the iconic Cannes red carpet, and get their picture snapped by the hordes of press that camp on the Croisette. Some of the world’s most glamorous and beautiful celebrities can be seen on the steps outside the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès every year posing for the cameras, and while it’s not quite the fashion moment that the Met Gala is, it still offers a great opportunity for us pleebs to gawk at some particularly shiny stars in all of their finery.

The Arab Cinema Center has published this year's “Golden 101”, its annual list of the 101 most influential figures in Arab cinema in its 22nd edition of Arab Cinema Magazine, which is being circulated at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival and can be accessed on the Marché du Film website.

Celebrating individuals and institutions who have made the most significant impact on the Arab film industry over the past twelve months, this year's Golden 101 comprises of 13 directors, 16 producers, 14 actors, five crew members, 18 distributors from 12 institutions, 12 executives from 10 governmental cinema institutions, 11 executives from seven video-on-demand platforms, 11 representatives from seven festivals, and seven executives from film financing institutions.

Commenting on this year's Golden 101 list, Colin Brown, Mad Solutions' Managing Partner for International Operations said; “These are the artists, artisans, and power brokers who have distinguished themselves this past year – and the rest of the world should pay attention to them if...

Producer Ina Fichman, Oscar nominated for “Fire of Love,” was at the 25th edition of Hot Docs Forum on Tuesday to pitch her latest project “Ba’s Book.” Directed by Canadian filmmaker Ashley Da-Le Duong, the hybrid docu focuses on Duong’s father and his experiences living through both the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution.

“Let me take you somewhere for a moment,” Duong told the Forum audience and participating distributors including Arte, A24 and Al Jazeera. “It’s 1968 and a young man stands in the middle of a rice paddy field and looks up and sees a helicopter. Not unusual because his house is right beside an American army base, but this time the helicopter overhead shoots at him and he pretends to be dead. He vows to leave his village forever. Eventually he does escape. He wins a scholarship to Iran. But his escaping terror is short...

Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia and Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters lead the nominations for the 8th Critics Awards for Arab Films, which will be held during the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

Both features picked up seven nominations apiece for the awards, focused on Arab films that were produced and premiered outside of the Arab world in 2023. Overseen and run by the Cairo-based Arab Cinema Centre (Acc), it was voted on by 209 critics from 72 countries and the winners will be announced during Cannes on May 18.

Scroll down for full list of nominations

This year’s nominees range from Sudan,...

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters and Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani’s Lupita Nyong’o-EPed drama Goodbye Julia lead the nominations in the eighth edition of the Critics Awards for Arab Films.

Hybrid work Four Daughters, exploring the story of a real-life Tunisian mother who lost two of her daughters to Isis after they were radicalized by a local preacher, world premiered in Competition in Cannes last year.

The film won Cannes’ Golden Eye for Best Documentary and also went on to be nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Kordofani’s Khartoum-set drama Goodbye Julia was also at Cannes in 2023, making history as the first Sudanese film to play in the festival across its 76 editions, with a debut in Un Certain Regard. It represented Sudan at in the 2023-24 Oscar race but was not nominated.

Set against the backdrop of the 2011 South Sudan Independence referendum,...

Update: Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan, whose film “Mommy” received the Cannes Jury Prize in 2014, will head the jury of Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival.

Joining him on the jury will be “Cuties” director Maïmouna Doucouré, “The Mother of All Lies” helmer Asmae El Moudir, “Phantom Thread” actor Vicky Krieps and film critic Todd McCarthy.

“I am humbled and delighted to return to Cannes as President of the Un Certain Regard Jury,” he said in a statement. “Even more than making films myself, discovering the work of talented filmmakers has always been at the very heart of both my personal and professional journeys. I see, in this responsibility I’m assigned, the opportunity to focus with the members of the Un Certain Regard Jury on an essential aspect of the art of film : stories told truthfully.”

Dolan wrote, directed, produced and starred in his first feature “I Killed My Mother...

Canadian actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan will be joined on this year’s Un Certain Regard Jury by French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir, German-Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps, and American film critic and writer Todd McCarthy.

The jury will be in charge of awarding prizes for the Un Certain Regard sidebar. This year, 18 films have been selected, including eight first features. The 2023 Un Certain Regard top prize went to director Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature How to Have Sex. When the light breaks by Rúnar Rúnarsson will open the Un Certain Regard section on May 15.

A self-taught filmmaker, Dolan made his feature directorial debut at 19 with I Killed My Mother, an adaptation of his own short story, which was chosen to represent Canada at the Academy Awards. He followed up that film with the 2010 romantic drama Heartbeats, which brought him into the Un Certain Regard section...

Actress Vicky Krieps and filmmaker Maimouna Doucoure are among the jury members for the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Also joining are Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir, and American film critic and writer Todd McCarthy.

Xavier Dolan was announced as jury president earlier this year.

The quintet will watch 18 films as part of the Un Certain Regard selection, including eight debut films.

Last year’s Un Certain Regard jury, headed by John C. Reilly, awarded six prizes including the main award to Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex.

This year’s Un Certain Regard...

When Victoria Villegas learned how her cousin had fled the Dominican Republic, and was gay like her, she was moved to chart his life

There have been experimental, freestyling essay films and memoiristic documentaries around for years, going back to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil or Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. But just lately it feels like the sprawling poetic-realist subgenre is flourishing, especially in the sunny uplands of film festivals. Like an extension of the creative-writing exhortation to “write about what you know” young documentary-makers are increasingly shooting movies about not just who they are but also their family history. Sometimes family members are even corralled into play themselves or others, like some cinematic family drama-therapy experiment.

If you want a few recent examples, check out Miryam Charles’s recent Cette Maison, or Moroccan director Asmae el Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, both of which...

Last year’s Un Certain Regard section had a treasure trove of highlights in Kamal Lazraq’s Hounds, Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delincuentes, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, Monia Chokri’s Simple comme Sylvain and Felipe Gálvez’s The Settlers and Un Certain Regard section winner in Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sexhas been playing like gangbusters on the festival and awards circuit. This year should offer some more national cinema gems.

À son image –...