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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe MatrixFollowing months of rumors comes the official announcement that Lana Wachowski will be writing and directing the fourth Matrix film, with the confirmed return of both Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. The ever-prolific Steven Soderbergh has confirmed production of a new film, entitled Let Them All Talk, starring Meryl Streep and Gemma Chan. Meanwhile, Soderbergh's latest, The Laundromat, is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Theater screenings of classic and cult films find themselves struggling against Disney's ownership of Fox titles, and its tightening policies regarding screening rights for the studio's older titles. Animator Richard Williams, best, known for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and The Thief and the Cobbler, has died over the weekend. Dan Schindel of Hyperallergic writes that Williams was "an artist whose refusal to settle meant he was forever blazing toward perfection.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Elizaveta Stishova's Suleiman Mountain, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from August 19 – September 17, 2019 in Mubi's Debuts series.Love is a tricky thing to find in Elizaveta Stishova’s Suleiman Mountain. In her debut feature the Russian director journeys to the mountain-hugged region of Osh, Kyrgyzstan to explore the most unconventional of families. A young boy named Uluk (Daniel Daiyrbekov) is discovered in an orphanage by his alleged mother Zhipara (Perizat Ermanbaeva) after a long and unspecified disappearance. Amongst the overcrowded beds filled with orphaned boys half-asleep, Uluk is shaken from a deep slumber to the sound of the orphanage warden announcing that his mother has come to take him away. It is a moment of bewildering rebirth. Stiff shouldered and perturbed, Uluk is returned to a home he does not recognize—he...

Leading curated streaming platform Mubi announced today its August release slate of films and curated series from both emerging talent and acclaimed directors from across the globe. Mubi continues its ongoing commitment to exclusive new releases with two bold first features in the “Debuts” strand. Elizaveta Stishova’s gritty and unconventional “Suleiman Mountain” charts the exploits of a con-man on the run across the Kyrgyzstan countryside, while Yui Kiyohara’s subtle yet unsettling “Our House” uses Bach’s fugues as the backdrop for an exploration of parallel realities and hidden mysteries.

Mubi will celebrate the 72nd edition of the Locarno Film Festival with an exclusive presentation of some of the most exciting titles from last year’s festival including Tarık Aktaş’s award-winning debut “Dead Horse Nebula”.

Highlights from the August line-up are as follows:

Exclusive Premieres

[Debuts] Elizaveta Stishova’s unconventional family drama centers on a con-man on the run,...

Festival will open with omnibus film Half The Sky from five female directors.

Mohamed Ben Attia’s Dear Son (pictured), Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined and The Man Who Surprised Everyone, from Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov, are among the films selected for the Crouching Tigers section of this year’s Pingyao International Film Festival (Pyifff).

The section, dedicated to debut or second features from new talents, will also screen the world premiere of Hotel Imperio, from Portuguese director Ivo Ferreira (see full line-up below).

Meanwhile, the festival’s Hidden Dragons section, dedicated to “imaginative and original genre...

The second edition of the Pingyao International Film Festival will kick off next month with a screening of “Half The Sky,” in which five female directors approach the subject of womanhood and femininity by telling the stories of different women.

The film is directed by Daniela Thomas, Elizaveta Stishova, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Liu Yulin, Sara Blecher and produced by Jia Zhangke, the Chinese auteur who established the festival.

The festival, which runs Oct. 11-20 and counts Marco Mueller as its artistic director, is located in the United Nations heritage town of Pingyao in North East China’s Shanxi Province. Purpose-built venues include a main theater in a converted diesel engine factory, and five smaller halls.

The female angle is given additional heft with “Lust Stories,” a four-part anthology film telling stories about women, which joins “Sky” among the four gala screenings. Its three men and sole woman director are Anurag Kashyap,...

In the blue waiting room of an orphanage sits a Kyrgyz woman in a traditional head scarf, while in a nearby dormitory a young boy is awakened and told his mother has finally come to pick him up. As mother and son stride across the playground together, the other children envy his luck. But there’s something inscrutable about the pair: Zhipara (a beautifully careworn Perizat Ermanbaeva) seems more grimly determined than overjoyed at this reunion, after an unexplained 10-year separation. And Uluk (Daniel Daiyerbekov) looks wary, his eyes those of an old man, set deep and sad in his little-boy face.

This is the quietly arresting beginning to Russian director Elizaveta Stishova’s Kyrgyzstan-set “Suleiman Mountain,” a mixture of sober, ethnographic study and high melodrama that compels even when it doesn’t quite convince. Perhaps it’s Stishova’s outsider point of view that places the film indefinably but...

The surprising thing about Suleiman Mountain (Sulayman too), an exotic and engrossing drama set in the Kyrgyz mountains, is its feeling of authenticity, even though its director is Russian. Elizaveta Stishova makes an impressive directing debut with this unusual story, which involves a man on the fringes of society driving around the country in a camper with two wives and a long-lost son. The fact that the older wife is a working shaman adds an unapologetically mystical note.

As the title rightly suggests, location has a major role to play. Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country lodged between Kazakhstan and China,...

The surprising thing about Suleiman Mountain (Sulayman too), an exotic and engrossing drama set in the Kyrgyz mountains, is its feeling of authenticity, even though its director is Russian. Elizaveta Stishova makes an impressive directing debut with this unusual story, which involves a man on the fringes of society driving around the country in a camper with two wives and a long-lost son. The fact that the older wife is a working shaman adds an unapologetically mystical note.

As the title rightly suggests, location has a major role to play. Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country lodged between Kazakhstan and China,...

Personal stories and quests for truth dominated the Karlovy Vary film fest this year with Romanian Radu Jude taking the Crystal Globe and $25,000 for best film with his story of a director who refuses to compromise with Holocaust deniers, “’I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians.’”

The film, which also won the Europa Cinemas network prize and support, employs a meta-structure historical immersion to convey a little-known chapter of WWII in which popular general Ion Antonescu led a massacre of Jews. Jury member Mark Cousins said Jude’s film “points a finger at those people who are rewriting history.”

Producer Ada Solomon, in accepting the award with Jude, dedicated it “to every true patriot who dares to speak the truth about their country.” She cited parallels in the fight for the truth about Romania’s role in Holocaust with the honesty of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov,...

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians has taken the top Crystal Globe award at the 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Czech fest’s Special Jury Prize went to Ana Katz’s Sueño Florianópolis, and Olmo Omerzu was named best director for the film Winter Flies.

See the complete list of winners below.

As previously announced, the festival, which ran from June 29 – July 7, presented a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema to actor and director Tim Robbins, and to Rain Man director Barry Levinson.

In all, the non-specialized festival, with three competitive categories, screened 236 films, with a total of 140,135 tickets sold, according to the festival. Among the films were 143 full-length and 38 short features; 55 documentary films (including 35 full-length). World premieres totaled 35 films, with eight international premieres and seven European premieres.

The fest was organized by Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary,...

Radu Jude’s latest film won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 29 - July 7) closed today with its annual awards ceremony.

Radu Jude’s latest film “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” won the Grand Prix - Crystal Globe, whilst Robert Pattinson and Barry Levinson also collected awards.

Scroll down for full list of winners

“Barbarians” was selected by grand jury comprising Mark Cousins, Zrinka Cvitešić, Marta Donzelli, Zdeněk Holý and Nanouk Leopold. The Crystal Globe comes with $25,000 prize money.

Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” won the Grand Prix Crystal Globe, the top jury prize at the 2018 Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The international competition winner tells of an artist who reenacts a real-life ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Romanian army in 1941, this time as an artistic installation.

The movie is a coproduction of six countries, led by Romania. In 2015, Jude won Berlin’s Silver Bear for best director for his film “Aferim!”

Also Read: Belarus to Enter Oscar Race After 22 Years With Indie Gem 'Crystal Swan'

The festival at Karlovy Vary, nestled in a spa town outside Prague, Czech Republic, also awarded a special jury prize to Ana Katz’s “Sueño Florianópolis,” and awarded a best director prize to Olmo Omerzu for “Winter Flies.” Mercedes Morán (“Sueño Florianópolis”) and Moshe Folkenflik (“Redemption”) won best actress and best actor, respectively.

Vitaly Mansky’s “Putin’s Witnesses,...

Ten world premieres are among the 12 films competing for the Crystal Globe at Central and Eastern Europe’s premier film festival, Karlovy Vary, which runs June 29-July 7. The competition titles include leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” an exploration of nationality and national trauma; Argentine Ana Katz’s family drama “Sueno Florianopolis”; and Canadian filmmaker Sebastien Pilote’s “The Fireflies Are Gone,” the story of a rebellious teen relationship.

A standout performance by Caleb Landry Jones dominates Peter Brunner’s dark Austro-American drama “To the Night,” while two filmmakers returning to Karlovy Vary present “noticeably more poetic new films”: Russia’s Ivan Tverdovsky (“Zoology”) will screen “Jumpman,” while Israeli director Joseph Madmony brings his third premiere to West Bohemia, the drama “Redemption,” co-directed by cinematographer Boaz Y. Yakov.

Czech Republic-based filmmaker Olmo Omerzu will screen a road movie centered on boyhood friendship,...

Dating back to 1948, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is one of the oldest film festivals in the world and has become one of Eastern and Central Europe’s most prominent events for cinema. The festival, which takes place in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic every July, has now announced the program of films for its Official Selection, East of the West, and Documentary competitions.

The Official Selection is composed of 12 films – ten world premieres and two international premieres – and is led by renowned Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s latest film I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians, which plays as an investigation on the large idea of nationality, and esteemed Argentinian director Ana Katz’s film Sueño Florianópolis, a family drama structured with elements of both trite and humorous storytelling. Among them, the line-up includes the complex romance The Fireflies Are Gone (by Canada’s...