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Paris-based sales outfit Memento International has rebranded as Paradise City Sales and will operate under Emilie Georges and Naima Abed’s Paris and London-based Paradise City banner moving forward.

The sales arm aims to board projects from early stages produced by Paradise City like Anthony Chen’s 2023 Sundance title Drift starring Cynthia Erivo, and Hailey Gates’ Sundance Jury Grand Prize-winning Atropia, on which Paradise City is a producer. It will continue to acquire some 10 films per year from independent producers and balance emerging talent with established filmmakers.

Paradise City Sales is at EFM with Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát’s English-language...

Memento Intl., the well-established Paris-based international sales company behind “Call Me by Your Name,” is rebranding as Paradise City Sales and is bringing “My Notes on Mars,” starring Greta Lee and Andrew Scott, to the EFM.

Emilie Georges, who founded Memento Intl. 20 years ago, launched the production vehicle Paradise City a few years ago with London-based Naima Abed. The pair have had great success with the pics they delivered, notably 2025 Sundance hit ”Atropia,” starring Alia Shawkat and Channing Tatum, and Anthony Chen’s 2023 drama ”Drift,” with Cynthia Erivo. “My Notes of Mars,” Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s English-language debut feature, is the latest co-production on Paradise City’s slate.

The rebranding comes at a pivotal time as Georges and Abed seek to build a closer bond between production and sales. As such, the sales outlet will now operate under the same Paradise City banner, which has offices in Paris and London,...

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much common cause between Pablo Larraín’s anticipated Maria Callas biopic, “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as the titular opera singer, and Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” a 215-minute epic about a Holocaust survivor forging a new life in America. Though both films will premiere on the Lido at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where they’re competing for the Golden Lion, they are in most ways worlds apart.

Yet both owe a good deal to the contributions of Hungarian talent, joining a roster of recent awards bait and blockbusters to film in the Central European country that includes Yorgos Lanthimos’ multi-Oscar winner “Poor Things” and both chapters of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi tentpole “Dune.” While an attractive 30% cash rebate is undoubtedly part of the draw, it’s also a testament to a long history of artistry and technical craftsmanship in...

Un romance de ciencia ficción que supone el debut en inglés de la cineasta.

De acuerdo con DeadlineMy Notes On Mars pelicula, Greta Lee y Andrew Scott protagonizarán el romance de ciencia ficción My Notes On Mars, el debut en inglés de la cineasta húngara Lili Horvát (Preparativos para estar juntos un periodo de tiempo desconocido).

My Notes On Mars gira en torno a Margot (Lee), una joven científica brillante con un matrimonio problemático, que desaparece inexplicablemente mientras hace senderismo con su marido Sam (Scott) y un grupo de amigos. Unas semanas después, reaparece milagrosamente el día de su propio funeral. Está claro que Margot no es la misma que antes del accidente. Sin embargo, Sam ve la milagrosa reaparición de su esposa como una segunda oportunidad.

En palabras de la cineasta, la película es «una historia sobre la laberíntica psique humana. Sobre las caras siempre cambiantes del amor. Volver a empezar un matrimonio,...

Kerry Washington leads an historic battalion in the first look at Netflix’s upcoming war drama. Check out the Six Triple Eight trailer below:

If you’ve been hankering for a bit of WWII movie action, the next few months are looking like the best you’ve had in a while. Hot on the heels of Steve McQueen’s London drama, Blitz, which is opening the BFI London Film Festival in October, Netflix are swooping in with The Six Triple Eight – a Kerry Washington-lead drama inspired by the first Women’s Army Corps unit of colour to serve overseas in the conflict. They’ve even got a trailer and everything.

Check out the The Six Triple Eight trailer below:

Based on the WWII History Magazine article Fighting A Two-Front War by Kevin M. Hymel, the story stars Washington as Major Charity Adams, the commanding officer of the 6888th Central...

Lili Horvát’s English-language debut My Notes On Mars will star Greta Lee and Andrew Scott, we’ve learned. More on the sci-fi romance below.

Andrew Scott and Greta Lee starred in two of the most emotionally devastating films of the last few years. Scott’s turn in Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers left us weeping in our cinema seats, while Celine Song’s Past Lives had us longing for all those who got away.

The pair will now maximise their control over our emotions as they team up for Lili Horvát’s My Notes On Mars. Described as a sci-fi romance, Deadline reports that the film will follow “Margot (Lee), a brilliant young scientist with a troubled marriage, who disappears inexplicably while hiking with her husband Sam (Scott) and a group of friends. A few weeks later, she miraculously reappears the day of her own memorial service.

What do you get when you put the star of the best film of 2023 and the co-lead of one of the best films of 2024 on screen together at the same time? No, it's not the set up for a strangely specific cinephile joke, but rather a hamfisted way of saying that Past Lives' Greta Lee and All Of Us Strangers' Andrew Scott are making a movie together. Per Deadline's reporting, the dynamite acting duo have signed up to lead sci-fi romance My Notes On Mars, the English-language debut of Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát (Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time).

Lili Horvát has written the script for this one herself, with the film set to shoot early next year between Budapest and Vienna. And whilst further casting details remain under wraps for the time being, we do have a curiosity piquing description of the plot from Deadline's piece.

Andrew Scott and Greta Lee are teaming up for a new movie!

The Emmy and Golden Globes nominees have sighed on to star in the new movie My Notes on Mars, a sci-fi romance story that will mark the first English-language movie from renowned Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát.

Keep reading to find out more…My Notes on Mars “centers on Margot (Lee), a brilliant young scientist with a troubled marriage, who disappears inexplicably while hiking with her husband Sam (Scott) and a group of friends. A few weeks later, she miraculously reappears the day of her own memorial service. Margot is clearly not the same as before the accident. Nevertheless, Sam sees his wife’s miraculous reappearance as a second chance,” according to Deadline.

In a statement, Lili said the movie is “a story about the labyrinthine human psyche, about the ever-changing faces of love. To start over a marriage,...

Zsófia Szilágyi’s “January 2” has debuted its trailer ahead of the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Films Boutique is handling international sales.

“January 2,” which screens as part of the Biennale College selection, follows Klára, who moves out of the place she shares with her husband. Her friend, Ági, helps her. They make a total of seven trips by car. Although they take the same route there and back every time, each trip is different. The film is a realistic story about a separation from the wife’s perspective with all the challenges she faces following this tough decision.

“January 2” marks Szilágyi’s return to the festival circuit after her debut feature “One Day” premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week in 2018, where the film won the Fipresci award.

“One Day” had a long and wide-ranging international career with premieres in Sydney, New Horizons, Melbourne, Sarajevo (Heart of Sarajevo for...

Fantasporto, the Oporto Intl. Film Festival, kicked off Friday in Portugal’s Porto — a city famed for its elegant Romanesque cathedral, a bookstore that inspired “Harry Potter,” and the heady alcoholic drink — with an eclectic mix of titles but an emphasis on fantasy films.

Typifying the broad tastes of the festival chiefs, film critics Beatriz Pacheco Pereira and Mário Dorminsky, Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand’s satire “Testament” opened the event’s 44th edition at Batalha Centro de Cinema, and Chinese fantasy epic “Creation of Gods I: Kingdom of Storms,” directed by Wuershan, closes it.

Although Pacheco Pereira and Dorminsky, who compete with the Brussels Intl. Fantastic Film Festival and Sitges for fantasy films in Europe, know they can’t please everyone in Porto with their selection “what is really important to us is whether the audiences applaud the films,” Dorminsky says. “This is not a job for us. It is a pleasure.

“Call Me By Your Name” producers Emilie Georges and Naima Abed are launching Paradise City, a London- and Paris-based film, TV drama and branded content production and management company. The banner’s slate includes projects by Edward Berger (“Deutschland 83”), Lili Horvát (“White God”), Anthony Chen (“Ilo Ilo”) and South African author Lauren Beukes (“Slipping”).

Georges is the founder and CEO of sales banner Memento Intl., which is at Cannes this year with Tarik Saleh’s competition film “Boy from Heaven,” Dominik Moll’s “La nuit du 12” in Cannes Premieres, Charlotte Le Bon’s “Falcon Lake” in Directors’ Fortnight and Kristoffer Borgli’s “Sick of Myself” in Un Certain Regard. Abed, who is based in the U.K., produced “Call Me By Your Name” with Georges under their other production banner La Cinefacture and has been building Paradise City’s roster for over a year. So far, the outfit...

Films include Emerald Fennell’s ‘Promising Young Woman’ and Blerta Basholli’s ‘Hive’.

More films than ever before are eligible for this year’s European Film Awards’ feature film and documentary film selection, with 40 feature films and 15 documentary films, and further feature film titles to be revealed in September.

Titles in the feature film selection include Blerta Basholli’s Sundance hit Hive and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. The latter is eligible despite being listed as a film of US origin. The European Film Academy (Efa) told Screen this was because the film reaches the number of points in...

Sebastian Meise’s “Great Freedom,” a prison drama about a gay man repeatedly incarcerated under a draconian law outlawing homosexuality in West Germany, won the award for best feature film at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

The Austrian director took home the Heart of Sarajevo at Thursday night’s ceremony, while leading man Georg Friedrich won the award for best actor for a film that won the runner-up prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar. The prizes were handed out by a jury led by Serbian actress Jasna Đuričić and including American writer-director Mike Cahill, Hungarian director Lili Horvát, Vienna Film Festival artistic director Eva Sangiorgi, and Austrian Film Commission executive director Martin Schweighofer.

Serbia’s Milica Tomović was named best director for “Celts,” which follows three generations who converge at a child’s birthday party against the backdrop of the former Yugoslavia’s painful breakup. The trio of Flaka Latifi,...

Other winners included the three lead actresses of ’The Hill Where Lionesses Roar’.

Sebastian Miese’s Austrian-German drama Great Freedom has won the Sarajevo Film Festival’s top prize, the Heart of Sarajevo for best feature film.

The 2021 winners were announced at an awards ceremony last night (August 20). The film received its world premiere at Cannes last month, where it played in Un Certain Regard and won the jury prize.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The love story tracks the persecution of homosexuality in Germany over the decades following the Second World War. It is the Austrian director...

10 feature world premieres in the selection.

Sarajevo Film Festival has selected 20 features in the competition programme for its 27th edition, which will run in-person from August 13-20.

Nine films have been chosen for the Feature Film section of the programme for fiction titles, including two world premieres – Dušan Kasalica’s Montenegrin-Serbian title The Elegy Of Laurel, and Cristina Grosan’s Hungarian film Things Worth Weeping For.

Other films in the Feature Film section include Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, which won the Camera d’Or for best debut film at Cannes Film Festival last week; and Norika Sefa’s Looking For Venera,...

10 feature world premieres in the selection.

Sarajevo Film Festival has selected 20 features in the competition programme for its 27th edition, which will run in-person from August 13-20.

Nine films have been chosen for the Feature Film section of the programme for fiction titles, including two world premieres – Dušan Kasalica’s Montenegrin-Serbian title The Elegy Of Laurel, and Cristina Grosan’s Hungarian film Things Worth Weeping For.

Other films in the Feature Film section include Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, which won the Camera d’Or for best debut film at Cannes Film Festival last week; and Norika Sefa’s Looking For Venera,...

Of all the international film festivals to roll out the red carpet this summer in what feels like a global industry reboot, few can fall back on past experience when it comes to the logistics of an in-person pandemic edition. But amid the wave of cancellations that all but wiped out the calendar year in 2020, the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival managed to pull off what few others could, relying on a host of open-air venues to successfully welcome moviegoers to the medieval city of Cluj.

One year later, for what in a different era might have been a splashy 20th anniversary edition, TIFF founder Tudor Giurgiu admits, “I thought this year would be easier.” Just days after confusion over Pcr tests and vaccine certificates reigned on the Croisette, however, Giurgiu and the TIFF organizing team have realized that as the coronavirus’ deadly Delta variant sweeps across the globe, a return...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (Josh Greenbaum)

Injecting a sense of delightfully unbridled frivolity to quite a dire era of studio comedy, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar marks Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig’s first project since a decade ago with Bridesmaids. Following best friends as they take their dream vacation in a town that’s being targeted for mass destruction, this is a comedy that understands being dumb doesn’t mean dumbing things down. With a radiant color palette and joke-a-minute delivery, couple with Jamie Dornan’s best performance, this will certainly be the most rewatchable film on this list in the years to come. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: Hulu

Blue (Derek Jarman)

Four...

Jury includes ‘Amores Perros’ screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.

Transilvania International Film Festival has revealed the 12 films that will screen in its official competition and its international jury.

Each title competing for the Transilvania Trophy will receive its Romanian premiere at the 20th edition of the festival, which is set to take place in-person in the city of Cluj-Napoca.

They include What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?, by Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, which played in competition at the Berlinale, and Lili Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time, which was Hungary’s Oscar submission.

The July lineup at The Criterion Channel has been revealed, most notably featuring the new Wong Kar Wai restorations from the recent box set release, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and his shorts Hua yang de nian hua and The Hand.

Also among the lineup is a series on neo-noir with Body Double, Manhunter, Thief, The Last Seduction, Cutter’s Way, Brick, Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and more. The channel will also feature a spotlight on art-house animation with work by Marcell Jankovics, Satoshi Kon, Ari Folman, Don Hertzfeldt, Karel Zeman, and more.

With Jodie Mack’s delightful The Grand Bizarre, the landmark doc Hoop Dreams, Orson Welles’ take on Othello, the recent Oscar entries Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time and You Will Die at Twenty, and much more,...

“Nomadland” wins four awards, including Best Feature; “Sound of Metal” wins three and “Promising Young Woman” takes two

“Nomadland” won Best Feature at the 2021 Film Independent Spirit Awards, which were announced live Thursday, and for the first time in primetime.

“Nomadland” took home four prizes, including Best Feature, Best Director for Chloé Zhao, as well as Best Editing and Best Cinematography. “Sound of Metal” also had a big night, winning Best First Feature, Best Supporting Male Paul Raci and an upset win for Best Male Lead Riz Ahmed. Carey Mulligan also won Best Female Lead for “Promising Young Woman,” and Yuh-Jung Youn won Best Supporting Female for “Minari.”

The coronavirus resulted in moving the Indie Spirits ceremony, now in its 36th year, away from its usual slot as an afternoon hangout in a tent near the Santa Monica pier on the Saturday before the Oscars to now taking place Thursday,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: George Segal and Elliot Gould in California Split (1974). Actor George Segal, a "defining face of 1970s Hollywood" known for his roles in films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Robert Altman's California Split, has died. The 2021 Jury and Special Award winners of the 28th SXSW Film Festival have been announced, with winners including Megan Park's The Fallout and Jeremy Workman's Lily Topples the World. Recommended VIEWINGFor the series A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini, Another Gaze's streaming project Another Screen has also made available a video of Mangini and Agnès Varda's first meeting in 2011. Metrograph's official trailer for Claire Denis' L'Intrus, her 2004 adaptation of an essay by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The film will be available at the cimema's virtual theatre from March 26 to April 8. A fan-made...

A brain surgeon worries that her recent romance may be one big delusion in writer-director Lili Horvát’s seductive psychological drama

The Hungarian entry for best international feature film may not have made it into the 93rd Oscars selection, but I’d strongly suggest that you place it on your own viewing shortlist. From its teasingly enigmatic title (translated fairly literally from the Hungarian original) to its neatly cyclical narrative, this crystalline tale of memory, love and brain surgery from writer-director Lili Horvát (who made 2015’s The Wednesday Child) is a treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.

Natasa Stork is quietly charismatic as Márta Vizy, a Hungarian neurosurgeon who has carved out a respectable career in the US. Yet following a brief encounter with fellow brain specialist and author János Drexler (Viktor Bodó) at a medical conference in New Jersey, her life has been upturned by the realisation that he...

A liaison between two surgeons leads to a psychological riddle – even if director Lili Horvát can’t quite provide a satisfying answer

Here is a puzzle or a riddle of a psychological movie, with distant echoes of Roeg’s Bad Timing or Antonioni’s Blow-Up. A brilliant and beautiful Hungarian neurosurgeon, Márta (Natasa Stork), abandons her career in the United States just shy of her 40th birthday and returns to Budapest. And why? Because she has met a handsome compatriot at an academic conference: János (Viktor Bodó) is a fellow surgeon who romantically arranged to meet Márta at a certain time and date at the city’s Liberty Bridge.

But János doesn’t show up, and when Márta tracks him down and confronts him, he merely says with an air of baffled politeness that they have never met. Márta takes a job in Budapest and rents a certain scuzzy apartment...

Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time (Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre) Greenwich Entertainment Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten Director: Lili Horvát Writer: Lili Horvát Cast: Natasa Stork, Viktor Bodó, Benett Vilmányi, Zsolt Nagy, Péter Tóth Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/7/21 Opens: January 22, […]

The post Preparations To Be Together for An Unknown Period of Time Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

Idea is a solution to the problem of closed cinemas and no physical events.

Hotels will host screening rooms and red carpets for local residents as part of the 26th Vilnius International Film Festival, which is taking place from March 18 – April 24 this year.

The Lithuanian festival has partnered with six of the city’s hotels for what it describes as “the full festival experience”, including red carpets and step-and-repeat marketing boards in communal areas; and films playing in hotel rooms that will have been transformed into screening rooms.

There will also be goody bags and special decorations in the hotel rooms,...

For the first time ever, two Hungarian films are competing for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear: “Forest – I See You Everywhere,” a standalone sequel to the 2003 Berlinale hit “Forest,” from veteran auteur Bence Fliegauf, and “Natural Light” from feature debutant Dénes Nagy. Csaba Káel, chairman of the National Film Institute of Hungary (Nfi), says, “I believe it demonstrates the vitality and strength of the Hungarian industry flourishing despite the unprecedented circumstances caused by the pandemic worldwide.”

The two films represent opposite poles of current Hungarian filmmaking. Brimming with discourse, the independently funded “Forest” tells multiple complex, engaging stories of contemporary life in Hungary. And as he did in his Berlinale-winner “Just the Wind” (2012), Fliegauf creates deep empathy for his characters who deliver standout performances.

On the other hand, “Natural Light,” with its minimal dialogue, harks back to an older tradition in Hungarian cinema where stunning cinematography leads the other formal elements.

“First Cow,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Minari,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” and “Nomadland” scored Best Feature Film nominations for the 2021 Independent Spirit Awards, with “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” leading the pack with seven nominations. “Minari” had six film nominations, and “Nomandland” wound up with five.

And for the first time Film Independent recognized the best in TV. “A Teacher,” “I May Destroy You,” “Little America,” “Small Axe” and “Unorthodox” all landed nominations for Best New Scripted Series. “Unorthodox” and “Little America” each scored three nominations.

Nominations for the 36th annual ceremony were announced Tuesday via Film Independent’s website and YouTube channel by Laverne Cox, Barry Jenkins and Olivia Wilde.

Though the awards are generally held the Saturday afternoon before the Oscars ceremony, the show has been moved up to a primetime slot on Thursday, April 22 and will air on IFC that will also be simulcast on AMC+ and...

If you are looking to stir emotions and grab some tissues this weekend Our Friend has got you covered.

Based on Matthew Teague’s book The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word, Gabriela Cowperthwaite directs this heartfelt drama adapted by Brad Ingelsby that follows journalist Matt (Casey Affleck), his wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and their two young daughters as their lives are turned upside down when Nicole is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Matt becomes overwhelmed with being a caretaker and a parent so he calls on the couple’s best friend Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel) to help out. As Dane puts his life on hold to stay with his friends, the impact of this life decision changes all of their lives in the most profound way.

Our Friend is based on the true story of the Teague family and went by the title The Friend when it made...

The hook for Hungarian writer/director Lili Horvát’s second feature doesn’t lack intrigue. Following a doctor who returns back home to Budapest after a chance, love-inducing meeting with another at a surgical conference, Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time––a mouthful of a title for the mystery-first drama––lives in the grey areas of the workplace, relationships, and loneliness. Once Vizy Márta (Natasa Stork) arrives to meet her hopeful-lover, Drexler János (Viktor Bodó), he’s nowhere to be seen, and after she finds him at the local university (and attached hospital), he seems to not recognize her. According to him, he’s never seen her before in his life.

A film that’s as much about our own perception of relationships as those relationships themselves, Horvát’s story keeps viewers in the dark, intercutting Vizy’s attempt to infiltrate Drexler’s life with behavioral...

Exclusive: Lili Horvát, the writer-director of this year’s Hungarian Oscar entry Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, has signed with UTA.

The move comes after Preparations, her second feature film, debuted at this past year’s Venice and Toronto film festivals. It follows a neurosurgeon (Natasa Stork) who, after 20 years in the U.S., returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor (Viktor Bodó) she met at a conference in New Jersey. When she finally tracks him down, the man claims the two have never met.

Greenwich Entertainment acquired U.S. rights to the psychological thriller and will release it January 22. The pic was part of Deadline’s Contenders International awards-season showcase last weekend.

“The main terrain of this [movie’s] story is mystery,” she said during Contenders, “this place in the unsettling murky no man’s land that separates love from madness.”

Horvát...

Lili Horvát's mystery-drama has been selected for Hungary's submission to the best foreign language Oscar this year. The original title, Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre, and its English translation, Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time, present some graphic design challenges due to its unusual length. These challenges were easily met (and then some) by design firm Frost Foundry, who oft into a gradient of blood red bed sheets occupying more than half of the space, and title planted firmly on the lead actress, Natasa Stork's curved posterior. The point lighting on this image, the contrast in the white and red sheets, the curves and folds in both, and the dark shadow in the top corner all signal mystery, sex, privacy and...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Michael Apted by Andrew H. Walker. Filmmaker Michael Apted, best known for an eclectic filmography that includes Coal Miner's Daughter, The World is Not Enough, and the Up documentary series, has died at 79. In his obituary, Peter Bradshaw writes that the Up series, Apted's epic masterpiece, "had an incalculable effect on [...] the thinking of the British progressive left – as it asked us to ruminate on the inescapability or otherwise of class, and what narratives were possible for working people."Recommended VIEWINGAbove: John Gianvito's Her Socialist Smile (2020). John Gianvito's Her Socialist Smile, one of the best films of 2020, is now playing at the National Gallery of the Arts' website. Read our review of the film by Michael Sicinski here.To commemorate avant-garde filmmaking titan Stan Brakhage's birthday on January 14, Re:voir will be...

European Film Promotion has revealed the 10 actors who will take part in the 24th edition of European Shooting Stars. The program, which launches emerging European thespians onto the world stage, has boosted the careers of actors like Carey Mulligan, Alicia Vikander, Riz Ahmed and George MacKay.

For the first time, Efp will present the neophyte actors to the film industry, public and international press as part of a three-day online program. Efp’s oldest and most prestigious initiative will take place digitally from Feb. 23-25, one week before the industry events of this year’s 71st Berlinale (March 1-5). The Shooting Stars award ceremony will take place within the framework of the Berlinale screenings in the summer.

“Although this year we sadly cannot meet in person, we invite you to join, discover and celebrate the best in rising European acting talent, while staying safe at home,” Efp’s managing director Sonja Heinen said.

Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Hungary’s contender this year for the International Feature Film Oscar, hinges on a moment around seven minutes into the movie.

Brain surgeon Márta Visy, played beguilingly by Natasa Stork, travels home to Budapest from New York for a romantic liaison with a fellow neurologist she met at a New Jersey medical conference. But when the two encounter each other for a second time, the neurologist, János Drexler (Viktor Bodó), claims not to recognize Visy. She then collapses in the street.

The scene was the “sprout” from which the whole film grew, says writer-director Lili Horvát during her appearance at Deadline’s Contenders International awards season-event. The result is a noirish romantic story, told from the perspective a woman who is late to love, which examines the enormous role our imaginations play when we fall for someone.

Did Visy imagine...

Deadline kicks off the New Year and movie awards season with our first edition of Contenders International, which gets underway this morning at 8 a.m. Pt. The event showcases 22 titles from 15 studios, streamers and distributors with presentations including clips and filmmaker/talent Q&As. In all, 19 of the films are official submissions to the Best International Film category at the 93rd Academy Awards.

Due to the pandemic Contenders International will be presented virtually, so click here to register and join the livestream. You can additionally follow along for the day on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram via @Deadline and #DeadlineContenders. See the full schedule of panels below.

While international markets have been a profit center for the studios for many years, local films have begun to take on greater importance outside festivals and indeed their home countries. That was particularly the case in 2019 with South Korea’s Parasite, which went on...

Had Jesse and Celine actually met six months after the events of “Before Sunrise” as planned, had their relationship gone horribly wrong to the point where one of them couldn’t even remember the other, and had they both been neurosurgeons, it might look something like “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time.” This cool-headed debut from filmmaker Lili Horvát is Hungary’s submission for the 2021 Academy Award for Best International Feature. Watch the official trailer, exclusive to IndieWire, below.

With the gloomy echoes of Krzysztof Kieślowski, Horvát follows a doctor named Márta around Budapest — not unlike how Hitchcock chased Kim Novak in “Vertigo” — who’s convinced a perfect stranger is a man she met abroad and had plans to meet up with back in her home city. The mouthful of a title belies the filmmaker’s stark approach to complex material in this haunting cinematic puzzle.

’Preparations To Be Together For An Unkown Period Of Time’ will get a January release in the US.

Hungary’s submission for this year’s international film Oscar, Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time, has been acquired for US distribution by Greenwich Entertainment.

The drama, about a surgeon who returns to Hungary from the US for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor, had its world premiere at the Venice festival and its North American premiere at the Toronto festival. It won several prizes on the festival circuit, including the Gold Hugo in the Chicago festival...

Exclusive: Greenwich Entertainment has picked up U.S. rights to Lili Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time, which is this year’s Oscar submission for Hungary.

The film premiered in Venice Days and was also selected for Toronto. It follows a Hungarian neurosurgeon, who after 20 years in the United States, returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor she met at a conference. When the love of her life is nowhere to be seen, she tracks him down only to have the bewildered man claim the two have never met.

Greenwich is lining up the U.S. release for January 22. It is likely to be a combination of theatrical and virtual cinema.

The film also won the Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Philadelphia Film Festival and the Fipresci Award at the Warsaw International Film Festival with Horvát winning...

by Nathaniel R

Preparations to be together for an unknown period of time (2020)

Hungary has announced its submission to the Oscar race. They have chosen the sophomore feature from new director Lili Horvát called Preparations to be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time. We love a memorable distinct title so this is up there with Lesotho's submission as the best-titled contender for Best International Feature this year. It's a romantic drama / mystery about a female surgeon that won prizes at several festivals including Philadelphia, Chicago, and Warsaw. Horvát began making short films in the Aughts and earlier this decade worked as a casting director, including on the acclaimed Hungarian Oscar submission White God (2014). This is the 29th announced submission that's from a female filmmaker so we're going to hit an all-time high percentage that's nearing gender parity. At this writing 42% of the entries come from female directors.

Let's look...

Bookmark this page for all the latest international feature submissions.

Submissions for the best international feature film award at the 2021 Academy Awards have started to come in, and Screen is keeping a running list of each film below.

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The 93rd Academy Awards is set to take place on April 25, 2021. It was originally set to be held on February 28, before both the ceremony and eligibility period were postponed for two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Submitted films must have been released in their respective countries between the expanded dates of October 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. (Last year it was October-September.

Lili Horvát’s “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time” has been selected as the official Hungarian entry for the international feature film category at the Academy Awards.

The film had its world premiere as part of the Venice Days lineup, and premiered in North America at the Toronto Film Festival. It was awarded the Golden Hugo in the New Directors Competition at the Chicago Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival’s best narrative feature award, Valladolid’s Golden Spike and a Fipresci Prize at Warsaw, among others.

In Variety’s review, the film is described as “a slinky noir-inflected melodrama following a brilliant brain surgeon who fears her own brain may be tricking her into romantic delusion.”

It centers on Márta, a 40-year-old neurosurgeon who falls in love. She gives up her successful career in America, and returns to Budapest to start a new life with the man she loves.

The movie by Hungary’s Lili Horvát has received the Golden Spike for Best Film at the 65th Valladolid International Film Festival, as well as Best New Director and Best Actress for Natasa Stork. The 65th Seminci – Valladolid International Film Festival drew to a close on Saturday 31 October. Although it was an edition with a lower number of screenings, owing to the restrictions imposed by the health crisis, according to its director, Javier Angulo, it was still “carried out with the exactly the same amount of care and hopeful anticipation as in previous years, despite the obstacles”. And so, with a reduced capacity in the Calderón theatre in order to maintain a safe distance between attendees, the prizes were handed out during a gala ceremony that was brought forward from its usual time slot in order to observe the curfew imposed in the region of Castile and León. During...

Chicago – The Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff) is competitive, and the 56th edition presented its awards on October 23rd, 2020, as a live virtual and online event on the Ciff YouTube page. The winner of the Gold Hugo as Best International Film was “Sweat” (France), directed by Magnus von Horn.

The 56th Chicago International Film Festival Celebrates Day Ten of the movie extravaganza, with films available for 2020 virtually and online. Click here for a complete how-to guide on navigating the 2020 Ciff. Go to Page Two for the schedule of October 23rd, 2020.

The awards were presented by the various jury members in each film category, and were hosted by Artistic Director Mimi Plauché, Managing Director Vivian Teng, as well as programmers Anthony Kaufman and Sam Flancher. The Festival’s highest honor is the Gold Hugo, named for the mythical God of Discovery.

International Feature Film Competition

‘Sweat’

Photo credit: Chicago International Film...

Skating into my halfway point for the 56th Chicago International Film Festival, I’m starting to realize the little things I miss about doing this in person. Sure, seeing movies on the big screen is always the preferred way, but what about the other stuff? What about starting each morning by kneeling at the altar of the Dunkin Donuts Express inside the Grand Red Line stop? My Keurig is getting me by, but binging several movies without eating anything just isn’t the same without those little touches.

And rest assured, those little touches cushion the blow each festival has. Meet the first empty movie of this year’s Ciff. It’s the United States premiere of Stefanie Klemm’s Of Fish and Men (Grade: C-), something so stagnant and stretched out that it almost feels like it’s trying to get nothing out of its audiences. Each festival has one of these movies,...

In Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time, a cerebral, desaturated Hungarian melodrama directed by Lili Horvát, two neurosurgeons engage in an erotically charged cat-and-mouse game that feels grounded and simultaneously imponderable. After briefly meeting in the United States for a medical conference, where they nibble at each other’s attention, Márta (Natasa Stork) and János (Viktor Bodó) go on separate paths, not before making a Linklaterian promise to meet again, two months later, in Budapest, to complete the romance. She’s easily convinced that János is the man of her dreams, an idea she’s insatiably obsessing over so much, that she cuts her ties with her job and friends and moves to Hungary just to be in his proximity.

It turns out, János doesn’t exactly recall ever meeting Márta. A first red flag in a series of many, she seems to make up romantic projections for fear.

Chicago – Just because the majority of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival (Ciff) will be virtual and online, doesn’t mean that there won’t be filmmaker and talent appearances. Highlights for appearances for the 56th Ciff include “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” Rachel Brosnahan (for “I’m Your Woman”), legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog (for “Fireball: Visions from Darker Worlds) and director Steve James of “Hoop Dreams” (for “City So Real”). Get the whole list by clicking here.

The 56th Chicago International Film Festival Celebrates Day Two of the just-launched movie extravaganza, with films available virtually and online. Click here for a complete how-to guide on navigating the 2020 Ciff.

Rachel Brosnahan will Appear at the 56th Ciff for ‘I’m Your Woman”

Photo credit: Amazon Prime Video

Events Of The Day: Industry Days (click here) are ongoing until October 18th. It is an opportunity to get an insiders view of the filmmaking industry,...

The winner of Karlovy Vary’s East of the West prize for her debut, “The Wednesday Child” (2015), Hungarian multihyphenate Lili Horvát screens “Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time” at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival after its world premiere in Venice Days. Her unusual love story explores the role of projections in love and the fine line between romance and madness.

Your first film boasted a gritty, neo-realistic look and this one feels mysterious and dreamy. How did you decide on the visual style and why did you decide to shoot on 35mm?

The key element of “Preparations” is insecurity, the fragility and precariousness of reality. While researching that, Róbert Maly, the Dp, and I came upon the work of Saul Leiter, an American photographer, at an exhibition in Vienna. The mysteriousness hidden in his photos, in their texture, color, lighting and framing, became our first point of reference.

More than half of all competition titles directed by women.

Switzerland’s Zurich Film Festival (Zff) has unveiled the full programme for its 2020 edition, which is set to go ahead as a physical event from September 24 to October 4.

Scroll down for list of competition titles

The 16th edition of the festival will comprise 165 films, of which 23 are world premieres and more than half of the competition titles are directed by women. Zff also revealed that Oscar-winning UK actress Olivia Colman will receive an honorary award and Johnny Depp is set to attend the festival with a new documentary.

The feature...

The 45th edition of the Toronto Film Festival is still very much a go, although made up of a reduced programme. After announcing that Spike Lee’s filmed version of the Broadway-acclaimed David Byrne’s ‘American Utopia’ will open the festival the full line-up has now been released.

Taking place between September 10 – 19, the festival will see the first 5 days made up of physical screenings. The program will also be made up of drive-ins, digital screenings, virtual red carpets, press conferences, industry talks.

The highlights of this year’s festival will include ‘God’s Own Country’ helmer Francis Lee’s ‘Ammonite,’Chloe Zhao’s ‘Nomadland,’ Florian Zeller’s ‘The Father’ and Werner Herzog’s doco “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds as well as films directed by Regina King, Viggo Mortensen and Halle Berry.

Also in news – Netflix release first look images from Ryan Murphy’s ‘Ratched’

See the full line-up below;

“180 Degree...