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Exclusive: French-Iranian filmmaker Emily Atef is attached to direct an untitled feature film project centered on the life of Farah Pahlavi, Empress of Iran, who was married to the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for 20 years before he died in exile in Egypt in 1980.

As Deadline announced last summer that under a newly formed collaboration with Women of the Movement producers Serendipity Group and John Powers Middleton, who Her Majesty authorized her life rights to, a documentary and a scripted project were in the works. The doc was in production in Washington, DC at the time of announcement and was expected to continue through the end of 2024 and resume in March. The scripted project being developed simultaneously is now known as the Untitled Farah Pahlavi Film Project with Atef directing.

The film will explore the life of Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, focusing on the resilience of a woman who,...

Feature film projects from The Blue Caftan filmmaker Maryam Touzani and Four Daughters director Kaouther Ben Hania are among 24 titles that have received a combined €6.78m in the latest session of Council of Europe co-production fund Eurimages.

The 24 feature films backed by Eurimages include four documentaries and one animation. 16 are to be directed or co-directed by women, representing over 75% of the total funding awarded.

Morrocan filmmaker Maryam Touzani’s Spanish language Calle Malaga was awarded €500,000. It’s the story of a 74-year old woman who belongs to the Spanish community of Tangier who has to leave her home but unexpectedly...

Goodbye, First Love: Atef Explores Pangs of Passion Amidst Detached Reunification

For her sixth feature film, Germany’s Emily Atef returns to themes of circumstance keeping lovers (and loved ones) apart with the languorously titled Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen). Set on an idyllic farm located on the recently evaporated border between East and West Germany in 1990, a teen girl comes of age through a tempestuous affair with an older man, an experience akin to the passionate whirlwinds from the classic literature she reads.

Although her situation is unique, including Atef revisiting the invisible thaw in Germany which created more economic and personal upheavals, Atef’s script, co-written by Daniela Krien is beautifully bucolic but a surprisingly flat plateau.…...

Updated with Comma Press’ response: Less than a week ago, the UK’s popular art venue the Home Theatre in Manchester was sharing on social media that it would be “celebrating Palestinian voices” at an event called Voices of Resilience in April.

Two big acting names, Maxine Peake and Kingsley Ben-Adir, were among those set to perform at the event. Among the work scheduled to be read aloud was the poetry of Atef Abu Saif, also currently the minister of culture for the Palestinian Authority.

Now, even though the social media post remains up, the BBC reports that the event will no longer go ahead, after the venue received a letter from the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester (Jrcgm).

The Jrcgm said the event must be cancelled, and claimed specifically that Abu Saif had previously defended Holocaust denial. Comma Press, who organized the event at Home Theatre, called these “baseless and libellous allegations,...

David Thion, the French producer of Justine Triet’s best picture contender “Anatomy of a Fall,” is preparing a raft of projects helmed by daring female directors including Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet (“Anais in Love”) and Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”).

Speaking to Variety ahead of the Oscars, Thion said he and Marie-Ange Luciani, who also produced “Anatomy of a Fall,” have also signed Triet for her next movie, the topic of which hasn’t been decided yet.

“Justine has devoted herself fully to the awards campaign for ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ and she hasn’t had time to decide what her next film will be, but she has a few ideas,” Thion said. He added that Triet’s next film will likely be “mainly shot in French, but could have an Anglo-Saxon actress as the lead.”

Bourgeois-Tacquet, who made her feature debut with “Anais in Love,” which premiered at Cannes’ Critics Week,...

French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s Mercy received €450,000, the biggest slice of funding

Six projects by women filmmakers including Emily Atef, Hafsia Herzi and Lucile Hadzhihalović have received support from the German-French Funding Commission’s Minitraité co-production fund.

The largest single amount of production funding - €450,000 - was awarded to French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s English-language Mercy, an adaptation of Lara Santoro’s eponymous novel. Set in 1997, it is the story of a friendship between a US correspondent in Kenya and a local woman from the slums joining forces to combat the AIDS crisis in the country.

Earlier this year, Atef...

A wacky film based on a stage show by comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, Dicks: The Musical – a riff on The Parent Trap with two adult men as the starring twins — opens in seven theaters in NY, LA and San Francisco on a crowded specialty weekend as theatrical releases of fall film festival titles accelerates.

Dicks, from A24, developed by Chernin Entertainment, is, according to press notes, a first “adult musical comedy” for both. (It’s Chernin’s second musical after hit The Greatest Showman.) Directed by Larry Charles, it stars the two creators Jackson and Sharp as self-obsessed businessmen who discover they’re long-lost identical twins and come together to plot the reunion of their eccentric divorced parents. They’re joined by an A-list roster of Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Bowen Yang and Megan Thee Stallion.

A SAG-AFTRA interim agreement allowed the talent to promote the film at TIFF,...

When the Body Speaks: Krieps & Ulliel Fight for the Right Balance in Atef’s Final Voyage Drama

A too young to die portrait that sees a neutralized Vicky Krieps travel northwards to find her pathway…inwards, Emily Atef’s latest is a non-postcard, straight-forward account of reconnecting with self — not at the most opportune moment, but when it matters most. Made more noteworthy due to it being Gaspard Ulliel’s final screen performance – he fastens his supportive boyfriend character with various degrees of cerebral rage displaying a splintered soul being asked to let go in more ways than one. A melodrama without deep chills, Plus que jamais (More Than Ever) sees Atef make some bolder narrative moves in the film’s second half, ultimately once the film steps foot in Scandi-territory we get some unexpected turns, punches, nips, tucks and forward momentum that makes this a worthy essay on a...

UK-France-Germany co-production depicts the AIDS pandemic at the end of 1990s.

Germany-based sales firm Global Screen has boarded world sales on Mercy, the new film from More Than Ever director Emily Atef.

French-Iranian director Atef is in Cannes sourcing partners for the film, which will be her English-language film debut and is aiming for a 2024 shoot entirely in Kenya.

Atef has written the adaptation of Lara Santoro’s novel of the same name, about a friendship between a US correspondent in Kenya and a local woman from the slums, who pair up to combat the AIDS crisis in the country...

Strand Releasing has bought all North American rights to Emily Atef’s last two movies, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” which competed at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as her Cannes entry “More Than Ever.” Both films are represented in international markets by The Match Factory.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“More Than Ever,” meanwhile, premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard. It stars Vicky Krieps and late French actor Gaspard Ulliel as a couple whose bond is tested when one...

’Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’, ’The Survival Of Kindness’ and ’BlackBerry’ land with middling scores.

Emily Atef’s Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, Rolf de Heer’s The Survival Of Kindness and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry are the first titles to land on Screen’s Berlin 2023 Competition jury grid.

De Heer’s film leads with an average of 2.4, followed closely by the other two titles on 2.3.

Click top left to expand

Seven critics are taking part in this year’s jury grid and will mark all 19 films playing in competition.

The Survival Of Kindness received four three-star ratings...

Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks. That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.

Indeed, what’s most interesting about German-born filmmaker Atef’s return to her home turf — after a directing stint on TV’s “Killing Eve” and last year’s predominantly French romance “More Than Ever,” with Vicky Krieps and the...

Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire.

While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

The series was created and penned by Jose Caltagirone (“Les Combattantes”) and Valentine Milville (“The Bureau”), and will star a high-profile French ensemble cast, including Lambert Wilson (“Benedetta”), Carole Bouquet (“En Therapie...

Emily Atef’s drama, following a dreamy teenager into an affair with a middle-aged man, addresses difficult material with a driving narrative force

More Than Ever director Emily Atef’s new film is a tale of erotic obsession and despair in the farmlands of Thuringia on the eastern side of Germany’s now vanished internal border: it is the summer of 1990, the last historic moments of the Gdr. This is a movie to raise the possibility that Germany has still not perhaps made a full reckoning with the euphoric trauma of the Berlin Wall coming down. Atef finds something mythic, tragic and romantic in the great healing rupture. Something comic, too. There is a bizarre, and unexpectedly funny scene when a Trabant – that well-known symbol of communist Germany’s cultural cringe to the west – veers chaotically off the road, turning over like a biscuit box on wheels; the driver stoically...

Germany’s reunification as a backdrop for two attractive bodies uniting over and over again is one way to sum up Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, which director Emily Atef (3 Days in Quiberon) adapted from Daniela Krien’s popular 2011 novel.

The problem with this handsomely made, well-acted and overwrought rural drama is precisely that: What’s interesting is not the doomed love affair between a beautiful 19-year-old girl and a strapping farmer more than twice her age, in a story that’s plays out like Lady Chatterley’s Lover meets Fifty Shades of Gray in the former Ddr. It’s whatever the film has to say about the struggling family and farming community that serves as its setting, during a period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, Atef gives short shrift to the latter in favor of the former, in a movie that starts off rather promisingly...

Emily Atef, the outspoken French-German filmmaker, may have stepped into a minefield with her latest movie, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” which looks to be one of the Berlinale’s most divisive movies in competition. With such a cute title, one might expect a flowery romance drama, but the movie goes far to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“Making this film would have been like a suicide if I was a man. I would have been lynched,” Atef tells Variety ahead of...

The trailer for “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” French-Iranian filmmaker Emily Atef’s tale of forbidden love, which premieres in Berlinale Competition, has debuted (below). The Match Factory is looking after the film’s international sales, and Pandora Film is handling German distribution.

The film, based on Daniela Krien’s novel, is set in the summer of 1990 in the countryside around Thuringia, in former East Germany.

Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend Johannes on his parents’ farm and would rather lose herself in books than focus on graduating. There is a sense of a new era dawning with the reunification of Germany.

When she bumps into Henner, the farmer living next door, one touch is all it takes to ignite an all-consuming passion between Maria and the headstrong, charismatic man twice her age. In an atmosphere buzzing with possibilities, love is born: a secret passion...

18 titles selected for competition, including films by Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Margarethe Von Trotta and Philippe Garrel.

The 18-strong Competition line-up for the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival has been announced by festival heads Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek.

Scroll down for full list

New films from Christian Petzold, Margarethe Von Trotte, Emily Atef and Lila Avilés are among those selected. Some 15 of the 18 titles are world premieres, with international premieres for Celine Song’s Past Lives after debuting to strong reviews at Sundance; Makoto Shinkai’s animation Suzume, released in Japan last November; and Australia’s The Survival Of Kindness by Rolf de Heer,...

Gaspard Ulliel and Vicky Krieps in More Than Ever Photo: Courtesy of London Film Festival

Never in her wildest imaginings could director Emily Atef have predicted her film More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais in French) would have such a close connection with the end of life.

One of her two lead actors, Gaspard Ulliel (who plays Matthieu) died in a skiing accident, aged 37, last January, in the mountains of the Savoie in France - just as she was working on the post-production with her editor Sandie Bonnard in Berlin where she lives.

Emily Atef Photo: Peter Harwig

“The news came as such a shock,” said Atef, who had been watching scenes with Ulliel and co-star Vicky Krieps and knew their every facial movement and expression. The film was shot during Covid in Norway which took a long time to open up again. “I was only allowed to take seven of the technical team,...

Director Emily Atef and producer Xénia Maingot paid tribute to late French actor Gaspard Ulliel on the first of anniversary of his death at a screening in London of his last feature More Than Ever on Thursday evening.

The title was the last feature film production Ulliel worked on before he died in a skiing accident in the French Alps on January 19, 2022 at the age of 37 years old.

The drama stars Vicky Krieps as a woman who retreats to the Norwegian fjords as she comes to terms with a life-threatening respiratory illness. Ulliel co-starred as her devoted husband who struggles to come to terms with her decision to strike off on her own.

“Today is a special screening. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to do this event in France today because Gaspard was so immensely loved in France,” Atef told the audience at the French Institute’s Lumière Cinema.

Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen

Quickly after her Cannes Un Certain Regard premiere of More Than Ever, Emily Atef moved onto her next project – the German language Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen (aka Some Day We Will Tell Each Other Everything). Production took place in June with newcomer Marlene Burow and Felix Kramer. The French-Iranian filmmaker looks at a romance that from today’s perspective might not pass. Rohfilm Factory’s Karsten Stöter (3 Days In Quiberon) reteams with Atef as the film’s producer. It takes place in the backdrop of the first summer after the Berlin wall comes down.…...

Tim Burton will receive the festival’s 14th Lumiere Award.

The 2022 Lumiere Festival (October 15-32) kicked off over the weekend for a week-long celebration of heritage films and modern masters.

Today (Oct 18) marks the start of the festival’s International Classic Film market reserved for industry professionals, the only such market in the world dedicated to classic cinema and film rights.

Highlights of this year’s event include a spotlight on Spain, a conversation with Manuel Alduy, director of cinema and digital fiction at France Télévisions, a DVD publishers fair and a focus on sustainability in the industry.

Now in...

The event runs on November 13 across 700 cinemas globally

Filmmakers Lukas Dhont, Alice Diop, Emily Atef, Pilar Palomero, Agnieszka Smoczynska and Valerio Mastandrea have been named ambassadors for the European Arthouse Cinema Day (November 13).

The event will take place in 700 cinemas globally and aims to promote European film.

The programme includes classic titles, premieres and previews as well as panels, exhibitions, Q&a’s and programmes for young people. The ambassadors will take part in some of the events.

The event is organised by the International Federation of Arthouse Cinemas (Cicae) in collaboration with participating cinemas, its national associations, distributors and sales agents.

The films will play in the Laugh and Love strands respectively.

Modern Films has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights on two films that will play in next month’s BFI London Film Festival.

From Memento Films, It has picked up Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick Of Myself, which will debut in the Laugh strand. Produced by The Worst Person In The World producers Dyveke Bjorkly Graver and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, the film follows a couple in an unhealthy competitive relationship that takes a turn when one of them breaks through as a contemporary artist.

It debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May,...

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we’ll shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week, we’re talking with top German talent agency Players. Headed up by Mechthild Holter and Fabian Haslob, the duo have clients that have worked across recent projects such as Babylon Berlin, Unorthodox and Deutchland ’89. In a rare interview, they tell us why now is a great time for German-speaking talent to cross borders.

With film and television sectors more globalized than ever, international talent has fast become a premium for streamers as they lean in on local language productions in foreign markets to offset stagnant domestic growth. One company at the sharp end of this change is Germany’s Players Agency. The company, which was founded by Mechthild Holter in 1994, represents around 180 actors, writers, directors and cinematographers and is...