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Exclusive: Spain’s MoreThan Films has acquired rights to French filmmaker T completed feature The Tree of Knowledge.

Rui Pedro Silva, Diogo Dória, and Ana Moreira star in the dark fable about a teenager who falls under the control of a mysterious ogre bound by a demonic pact.

Producers are Portugal’s O Som e a Fúria and France’s Le Plein de Super.

MoreThan Films was founded in 2021 by Lidia Damatto, Queralt Pons, and Emma Caviezel and operates out of Berlin, Barcelona, and São Paulo. Its slate includes Denise Fernandes’ Hanami and Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Listen To The Voices,...

The Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center has announced the full lineup for the 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, unspooling at MoMA on April 2–13.

The event, presenting 24 features and nine short films — including 20 North American or U.S. premieres — will open with Sarah Friedland’s Venice award-winner Familiar Touch and close with Alex Russell’s Lurker from Sundance and Berlin. Both are New York premieres.

Familiar Touch, Friedland’s debut, won three top prizes in the 2024 Venice Film Festival Orizzonti Competition and showcases an astonishing performance by Kathleen Chalfant.

Russell’s feature debut Lurker, is a tense thriller about the darker side of pop-star worship.

Films in the Nd/Nf program probe a diverse array of themes, including community and co-existence, family histories, the lives of artists, global political issues, and the complexities of youth and coming of age. A number of works experiment with hybrid forms,...

The 22nd edition of the True/False Film Fest, kicking off Feb. 27, will feature a lineup of 30 feature documentaries and 24 short docs. The Columbia, Missouri-based four-day doc film festival will showcase eight Sundance 2025 films, including U.S. documentary prize winner “Seeds,” “Predators,” and “The Dating Game.”

The fest’s lineup includes seven world premieres, one international premiere, and three North American premieres. Fourteen of the True/False feature docus were made by first-time feature directors.

“This year’s films run the gamut when it comes to form, tone, and perspective, but the thing that unites them is their unwavering commitments to their artistic visions,” said True/False artistic director Chloé Trayner. “The lineup is a kaleidoscope of reflections on our modern world, embracing past, present, and future in beautiful, devastating, and hopeful ways. We can’t wait to share these films with our audience soon.”

Since launching in 2004, True/False...

Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prix winner All We Imagine As Light and Mohammad Rasoulof’s special prize recipient The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, along with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Venice selection Harvest are among the international competition selections at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival running October 16-27.

A packed line-up also brings Joshua Oppenheimer’s Telluride entry The End to the International Feature Competition, along with the North American premiere of The Quiet Son from Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, which debuted on the Lido.

There are world premieres for Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges’s Suçuarana...

Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prix winner All We Imagine Is Light and Mohammad Rasoulof’s special prize recipient The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, along with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Venice selection Harvest are among the international competition selections at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival running October 16-27.

A packed line-up also brings Joshua Oppenheimer’s Telluride entry The End to the International Feature Competition, along with the North American premiere of The Quiet Son from Delphine Coulin and Muriel Coulin, which debuted on the Lido.

There are world premieres for Clarissa Campolina and Sérgio Borges’s Suçuarana...

Toxic (Akiplėša), the debut feature from Saulė Bliuvaitė, has won the 2024 Golden Leopard, the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Toxic follows two teenage girls from a bleak industrial town who join an extreme local modelling school. Featuring a cast of non-actors, it was selected for Les Arcs work-in-progress programme in 2023, and was also a prize-winner at Meeting Point Vilnius this year.

Bendita Film Sales are handling sales. The film also won Locarno’s Swatch first feature award.

The Golden Leopard for best film includes a cash prize of Chf 75,000 to be shared equally between the film’s director and producer.

French Guiana is, to put it mildly, rarely shown in cinema – perhaps we might see its beautiful landscapes, its jungle, its shoreline, maybe even its gold mines. These backdrops and adornments are those that Maxime Jean-Baptiste, director of “Listen to the Voices”(“Kouté vwa”)– showing in the Filmmakers of the Present section at the Locarno Film Festival and sold by MoreThan Films– wanted to avoid at all costs.

When asked by Variety about how he aimed to depict Guiana, Jean-Baptiste mentions, as a counter example, “Jean Galmot, Aventurier,” a French ‘70s adventure film, in which his father was an extra – something essential in his shorts “Nou Voix” (2018) and “Moune Ô” (2021). In fact, most of Jean-Baptiste’s work is a family matter – besides those titles, he co-directed “Listen to the Bear of Our Images” (2021) with Audrey Jean-Baptiste, his sister, who also co-wrote “Listen to the Voices.”

What makes “Listen to the...

Spain’s MoreThan Films has secured international sales rights outside France to “Listen to the Voices” (“Kouté vwa”), from Brussels/Paris based Maxime Jean-Baptiste, in the run-up to August’s Locarno Film Festival where the film world premieres in Filmmakers of the Present.

Jean-Baptiste’s feature debut, the fiction film tracks young Melrick, 13, who travels from Stains in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris to spend with his grandmother the summer holiday in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana.

For Melrick, the summer may well mark him for life. It is a return to his roots, embodied in his desire to learn how to play the drum and become part of a local drum and dance band, Mayouri Tchô Neg. He never seems happier, encountering also an early sense of his own identity as part of the Guianese diaspora in France.

Yet it’s also his first encounter with larger ethical issues,...

Taking place August 7-17, the official selection for the 77th Locarno Film Festival has been unveiled, featuring a stellar-looking slate of highly anticipated films. Highlights include Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year, By the Stream, starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee; Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney, Wang Bing’s second part of his Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), as well as new films by Radu Jude, Bertrand Mandico, Courtney Stephens, Ben Rivers, Gürcan Keltek, Denis Côté, Kevin Jerome Everson, Fabrice Du Welz (featuring Abel Ferrara!), and many more. Also of particular note is the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored cut of The Fall, which features a slightly different edit as he recently noted.

Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival said, “We are very excited and happy with our selection for Locarno’s 77th edition, which we believe...

Few American filmmakers of the last 40 years await a major rediscovery like Hal Hartley, whose traces in modern movies are either too-minor or entirely unknown. Thus it’s cause for celebration that the Criterion Channel are soon launching a major retrospective: 13 features (which constitutes all but My America) and 17 shorts, a sui generis style and persistent vision running across 30 years. Expect your Halloween party to be aswim in Henry Fool costumes.

Speaking of: there’s a one-month headstart on seasonal programming with the 13-film “High School Horror”––most notable perhaps being a streaming premiere for the uncut version of Suspiria, plus the rare opportunity to see a Robert Rodriguez movie on the Criterion Channel––and a retrospective of Hong Kong vampire movies. A retrospective of ’70s car movies offer chills and thrills of a different sort

Six films by Allan Dwan and 12 “gaslight noirs” round out the main September series; The Eight Mountains,...

A reliable way for filmmakers to generate audience sympathy is flattering attendees by stoking their regional pride, as at my first screening of True/False Film Fest 2023: Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short Moune Ô, followed by the world premiere (one of eight at this year’s fest) of Sebastián Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes’ La Bonga. Attending in-person, the latter pair spoke of the sense of community they felt in Columbia, Missouri and how that related to their film, an observation that raised some cheers. In his subsequent webcam-taped intro, Jean-Baptiste said how happy he was to have his film showing even if he […]

The post True/False Film Fest 2023: Constructed Communities first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A reliable way for filmmakers to generate audience sympathy is flattering attendees by stoking their regional pride, as at my first screening of True/False Film Fest 2023: Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s short Moune Ô, followed by the world premiere (one of eight at this year’s fest) of Sebastián Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes’ La Bonga. Attending in-person, the latter pair spoke of the sense of community they felt in Columbia, Missouri and how that related to their film, an observation that raised some cheers. In his subsequent webcam-taped intro, Jean-Baptiste said how happy he was to have his film showing even if he […]

The post True/False Film Fest 2023: Constructed Communities first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSOn the Adamant.The Berlinale wrapped up over the weekend. The Golden Bear was awarded to Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant, while other major prizes went to Christian Petzold, Philippe Garrel, Angela Schanelec, and Dp Hélène Louvart. You can browse the full list of winners on Notebook, and keep your eyes peeled for our reports.In other festival news: Ruben Östlund will preside over this year’s Cannes jury, and the full lineup has been unveiled for Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA’s New Directors/New Films.The pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye—the first African woman to make a commercially distributed feature film—died last week at the age of 80. Writer and programmer Yasmina Price recently surfaced a thread of archival material,...

Sffilm announced the full lineup for the 65th annual San Francisco International Film Festival, the longest running film festival in the Americas. This year the Festival will make its return to theaters in person, featuring more than 130 films from 56 countries, including 16 World and 10 North American premieres, along with many Sffilm-supported titles. Of the films selected for the Festival, 56 are helmed by female or non-binary filmmakers and 52 are directed by Bipoc filmmakers. The Festival will also celebrate cinematic icon Michelle Yeoh with a special tribute to be presented by critically acclaimed actor Sandra Oh. The 2022 Festival will run April 21–May 1, with tickets on sale now at sffilm.org.

Michelle Yeoh was recently hailed by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott as “one of the great international movie stars of the past quarter-century.” Her tribute will be an intimate conversation with Emmy Award-nominated actress Sandra Oh, about her prestigious and extensive...

Vienna-based sales agent acquires worldwide rights to Philip Scheffner’s Europe and Dane Komljen’s Afterwater.

Wouter Jansen’s Vienna-based sales and distribution outfit Square Eyes has added two Berlinale Forum titles to its EFM slate.

The first is Philip Scheffner’s Europe which was originally conceived as documentary and is described by Jansen as a “forced fiction”. It tells the story of Zohra Hamadi (Rhim Ibrir) who lives in France and has just undergone major surgery. For the first time in her life, she can walk upright, virtually pain-free. Her husband Hocine is waiting in Algeria to finally get a family reunification visa,...

The Berlin International Film Festival has made a series of additions to its 2022 program, including unveiling the Books At Berlinale industry event lineup and a selection of films for the Forum strand.

As reported yesterday, the festival is slimming down the core days of its film program this year, with all premieres taking place February 10-16, and repeat screenings running 17-20. Cinemas will also be at 50% capacity, among other restrictions.

Also announced yesterday was the opening film, François Ozon’s Peter Von Kant.

Today, the fest has revealed the 10 books that will take part in Books At Berlinale this year, which is part of the Co-Production market and will thus run virtually as per the rest of the industry activity in the European Film Market.

Berlin has also announced a selection of titles in its Forum Special titles, including films that continue the Fiktionsbescheinigung series that began as part of...

Work hard, make enough money to fund your passion projects and have courage.

That was advice given to filmmaker Brietta Hague during a 2016 workshop with Werner Herzog in Cuba, which ultimately gave her the guts to make her first narrative short three years later.

It paid off: Hague’s Baltasar was awarded Best Australian Short Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival (Miff) Shorts Awards yesterday evening.

The jury, comprising journalist Osman Faruqi, writer/director Natalie Erika James (Relic) and Arcadia Films’ head of acquisitions and distribution Alexandra Burke, deemed Hague’s directorial debut as impressive, exploring the racial prejudices over Spain’s Three King’s holiday with “nuanced and vibrant writing, an unflinching eye and empathy for all.”

“Babou Cham is compelling as Aziz – a migrant father working to provide for his family in Senegal – and beautifully captures his quiet dignity and heartbreak in the midst of displacement. This...