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Portuguese visual artist Catarina Vasconcelos’s debut is a gorgeously shot fictionalised documentary about longing and loss

Films about dysfunctional families often call to mind Tolstoy’s line from the opening of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It struck me that the opposite might be true watching this thoughtful, gentle debut from the Portuguese visual artist Catarina Vasconcelos: a lyrical, introspective love letter to her family, gorgeously shot on 16mm.

It’s a kind of fictionalised art documentary that for the first hour or so is essentially about Vasconcelos’s grandparents’ life together. It begins with her elderly grandfather Henrique (played by José Manuel Mendes) moving into residential care. In voiceover Henrique talks tenderly to his wife, Beatriz, who died of a stroke in 1984. He was a sailor by trade, away at sea for long stretches of married...

Another month, another Criterion Channel lineup. In accordance with Black History Month their selections are especially refreshing: seven by Melvin Van Peebles, five from Kevin Jerome Everson, and Criterion editions of The Harder They Come and The Learning Tree.

Regarding individual features I’m quite happy to see Abderrahmane Sissako’s fantastic Bamako, last year’s big Sundance winner (and Kosovo’s Oscar entry) Hive, and the remarkably beautiful Portuguese feature The Metamorphosis of Birds. Add a three-film Laura Dern collection (including the recently canonized Smooth Talk) and Pasolini’s rarely shown documentary Love Meetings to make this a fine smorgasboard.

See the full list of February titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

Alan & Naomi, Sterling Van Wagenen, 1992

All That Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk, 1955

The Angel Levine, Ján Kadár, 1970

Babylon, Franco Rosso, 1980

Babymother, Julian Henriques, 1998

Bamako, Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006

Beat Street, Stan Lathan, 1984

Blacks Britannica, David Koff, 1978

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe are proud to debut the first episode of the Mubi Podcast: Encuentros in co-production with La Corriente del Golfo Podcast. This episode inaugurates a new space for dialogues between some of the most interesting voices in Latin American cinema. Despite knowing each other previously through social channels, this is the first time that Gael García Bernal and Colombian writer Carolina Sanín meet to think together about the relationship between film, acting and life itself. Their enthusiastic conversation covers theories and endearing filmmaking anecdotes about cinema's importance in our lives, and a shared interest in cinematic portrayals of the most essential bond: friendship. To listen to the episode and subscribe on your preferred podcast app, click here.According to a new interview with Telerama, Julie Delpy has turned down a fourth Before film by Richard Linklater,...

“The Mountain Bride,” a new feature film by Italian director Maura Delpero, whose 2019 drama “Maternal” made a splash on the international arthouse circuit, is among projects selected for the TorinoFilmLab’s ScriptLab development workshop.

Delpero, who is the winner of last year’s annual Women in Motion Young Talent Award bestowed by the Kering Group and the Cannes Film Festival, is following up her debut drama (pictured), which was set in an Argentinian refuge for adolescent single mothers run by nuns, with another female-centric drama.

“The Mountain Bride” will unfold in the tiny Alpine village of Vermiglio in Italy’s Trentino Alto-Adige region between 1944 and 1945. “Lucia, Nanda and Flavia are the three young sisters in the local schoolmaster’s numerous family. Something changes when a group of soldiers finds refuge in the small mountain community,” reads the project’s synopsis.

After Tfl’s ScriptLab in 2020 moved completely online, this year...

For our most comprehensive year-end feature we’re providing a cumulative look at The Film Stage’s favorite films of 2020. We’ve asked contributors to compile ten-best lists with five honorable mentions—a selection of those personal lists will be shared in the coming days—and after tallying votes, a top 50 has been assembled.

It should be noted that, unlike our other year-end features, we placed no requirement on a selection being a U.S theatrical release, so you may see some repeats from last year and a few we’ll certainly discuss more over the next twelve months. So: without further ado, check out our rundown of 2020 below, our ongoing year-end coverage here (including where to stream many of the below picks), and return in the coming weeks as we look towards 2021.

50. The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos)

The most purely, incandescently beautiful movie of the year is a...

“What human beings can’t explain, they invent.” Catarina Vasconcelos constructs a magnificent, shimmering dreamscape around her ancestors and their enchanted existence in and with nature. This is a universe where oranges are the extension of families. The storytelling is mesmerising, both visually, shot on 16mm film by Paulo Menezes, and in regards to the poetry of the spoken language used to express all that yearning and insight. We see stamps from Senegal and those with the profile of the Queen, and mirrors in the landscape and what a great ear ornament a seahorse makes, especially next to a pearl earring.

In The Metamorphosis of Birds, dreams of the dead haunt little ghosts in sheets. When the dead return in...

Barbara Sukowa stars with Martine Chevallier in Filippo Meneghetti’s Two Of Us Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Filippo Meneghetti’s Two Of Us (Deux), (co-written with Malysone Bovorasmy and Florence Vignon), starring Barbara Sukowa and Martine Chevallier with Léa Drucker (Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room), Jérôme Varanfrain, and Augustin Reynes (France’s Oscar submission); Anna Sofie Hartmann’s Giraffe (produced by Toni Erdmann director Maren Ade) with Lisa Loven Kongsli, Jakub Gierszal and Christoph Bach; Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud In Her Room (Ta Fang Jian li De Yun) starring Jin Jing; Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent (El Agente Topo), starring Sergio Chamy (Chile’s Oscar submission), and (Fipresci Encounters winner at the Berlin Film Festival) The Metamorphosis Of Birds (A Metamorfose Dos Pássaros), directed by Catarina Vasconcelos are five highlights of the 49th edition of New Directors/New Films, presented...

The 10th edition of U.S. In Progress Wroclaw, the industry wing of the American Film Festival in Poland which was held online this year, wrapped over the weekend and presented a variety of awards to the participating American film projects.

The awards range from post-production services to travel bursaries and cash. A $10,000 cash prize to be put towards post-production in Poland was awarded to the film To The Moon from director Scott Friend and producers Cate Smierciak, Everett Hendler, Stephanie Randall, and Gabe Wilson. The full list of awards is below.

In addition to the U.S. projects, a group of U.S. experts including Sony Pictures Classics’ Dylan Leiner and CAA execs Maren Olson and Kat Moncrief took part in pitching and one-on-one sessions with Polish projects seeking U.S. partners. The non-competitive event is designed to foster potential co-productions and was hosted by Deadline.

In the wider festival,...

Industry programme Nebulae was online this year.

Projects from Canada, Argentina and Portugal were the winners the Arché Awards of Doclisboa’s industry platform Nebulae. They were presented in a virtual award ceremony on Sunday evening (November 1).

The Rtp Award for the best project in the editing or first- cut stage went to Sofia Brockenshire’s Canada-Argentina project The Dependents which is based on the diaries of a Canadian immigration officer detailing 30 years of his service in Latin America and Asia.

The award sees broadcaster Rtp pay €25,000 for the TV rights for Portugal and the Portuguese-speaking African countries.

The jury was comprised of Mandy Chang,...

The fictionalized documentary “The Metamorphosis of Birds,” the debut feature from Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos, was the closing film of the Berlinale’s new Encounters sidebar. This week it screens at Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival.

“Metamorphosis” explores the director’s family stories, building on elements developed in her debut 2014 short film, “Metaphor, or Sadness Inside Out,” which she filmed during her Master’s degree course in Visual Communication at London’s Royal College of Art.

The highly personal documentary explores her own family universe beginning with her grandparents, who spent many months apart, since her grandfather was a sailor. Her grandmother died of a stroke in 1984, two years before the director was born, and she herself lost her own mother in 2003, which both she and her father had to come to terms with.

The fictionalized, recreated family scenes feature over seven members of the Vasconcelos’ family, including the director herself.

The International Documentary Association has announced a shortlist of 30 films from which it will choose its nominations for the 2020 Ida Documentary Awards, with a list that includes “76 Days,” “Boys State,” “Crip Camp,” “MLK/FBI,” “The Reason I Jump,” “The Truffle Hunters,” “Time” and “Welcome to Chechnya.”

The list also included a generous helping of foreign-made docs, including “Notturno,” “Acasa, My Home,” “Collective,” “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange,” “Gunda,” “Me and the Cult Leader,” “A Metamorfose dos Passaros,” “Once Upon a Time in Venezuela” and “Softie.”

The rest of the list: “City Hall,” “Disclosure,” “The Forbidden Reel,” “I Walk on Water,” “The Mole Agent,” “Reunited,” “Self Portrait,” “Stray,” “‘Til Kingdom Come,” “To See You Again,” “Unapologetic,” “The Viewing Booth” and “Wintopia.”

The shortlisted films present a dramatically different view of the year in nonfiction filmmaking than the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, which were announced on Monday. Only three films — “Crip Camp,...

The 2021 International Documentary Association (IDA) Awards has announced the shortlists for the Best Feature and Best Short categories. In a year crowded with top-notch documentaries (see the Critics Choice Documentary Awards nominations here), with more debuts unspooling at Doc NYC (November 11-19), every reputable non-fiction awards group helps to curate the sprawling list of eventual Oscar contenders, and the IDA is no exception. (Read IndieWire’s current list of documentary feature predictions here.)

The IDA will bestow 16 awards this year, for Best Feature, Best Short, Best Curated Series, Best Episodic Series, Best Multi-Part Documentary, Best Short Form Series, Best Audio Documentary, David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award, Best Music Documentary, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Writing, Best Music Score, ABC News VideoSource Award, and the Pare Lorentz Award.

Honorees will be announced on Tuesday, November 10. Nominees will be announced on Tuesday, November 24, along with the other awards recipients.

The 2021 International Documentary Association (Ida) Awards has announced the shortlists for the Best Feature and Best Short categories. In a year crowded with top-notch documentaries (see the Critics Choice Documentary Awards nominations here), with more debuts unspooling at Doc NYC (November 11-19), every reputable non-fiction awards group helps to curate the sprawling list of eventual Oscar contenders, and the Ida is no exception. (Read IndieWire’s current list of documentary feature predictions here.)

The Ida will bestow 16 awards this year, for Best Feature, Best Short, Best Curated Series, Best Episodic Series, Best Multi-Part Documentary, Best Short Form Series, Best Audio Documentary, David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award, Best Music Documentary, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Writing, Best Music Score, ABC News VideoSource Award, and the Pare Lorentz Award.

Honorees will be announced on Tuesday, November 10. Nominees will be announced on Tuesday, November 24, along with the other awards recipients.

Georgian-French drama Beginning (Dasatskisi) was the big winner at the San Sebastian Film Festival, winning the top prize Golden Shell at last night’s awards ceremony.

The buzzed-about arthouse film from first-timer Dea Kulumbegashvili also won Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenplay awards. We debuted first footage for the film earlier this month.

Kulumbegashvili wrote the script with Rati Oneli. Starring are Ia sukhitashvili (best actress winner), Rati Oneli and Kakha Kintsurashvili. Producers are Ilan Amouyal, Rati Oneli and David Zerat. Music comes from Dheepan and Ema composer Nicolas Jaar. Wild Bunch handles sales.

The film charts the story of a persecuted family of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries from the perspective of a wife and mother. Following a shocking act of arson on the place of worship she and her husband have established in a remote village outside of Tbilisi, Yana (Sukhitashvili) finds herself descending into a spiral of confusion and doubt,...

The 68th San Sebastián Film Festival helped revive the global festival circuit this season with a physical event held September 18-26 in Spain. The lineup, which kicked off with Woody Allen’s “Rifkin’s Festival,” concluded with the annual awards September 26.

The festival’s big winner was Georgian writer/director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature “Beginning,” taking four of the jury prizes including Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, and the Golden Shell for Best Film. A psychological portrait of the effects of an extremist attack on a rural place of worship, “Beginning” was originally slotted for a Cannes competition premiere, and also played the Toronto International Film Festival. Next, it will head to the ongoing New York Film Festival.

Other highlights included Florian Zeller’s Oscar hopeful “The Father,” winner of the Audience Award — and a likely Best Actor nominee next year for Anthony Hopkins’ devastating turn as a man wrestling with dementia.

13 films were in the running for prizes in this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival competition, but it doesn’t appear to have been much of a contest at all. In a stunning sweep, Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature “Beginning” took four of the jury’s seven prizes, including Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress for star Ia Sukhitashvili, and finally the Golden Shell for Best Film.

It’s a remarkable haul for a harrowing, avant-garde film that has taken critics by surprise this fall festival season, also landing the Fipresci critics’ prize in Toronto last week. The Franco-Georgian production centers on a close-knit community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in remote rural Georgia, and tracks the growing psychological torment of its leader’s wife (played by Sukhitashvili) in the wake of an extremist attack on their place of worship.

A challenging film to economically distil, it has prompted...

The film also won best director, best actress and best screenplay.

Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning has won the Golden Shell for best film at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. The film has also been awarded the prizes for best director, best actress for Ia Sukhitashvili, and best screenplay for Kulumbegashvili and co-writer Rati Oneli by a competition jury headed by Luca Guadagnino.

It is the first time a Georgian film has won the Golden Shell.

The Silver Shell for best actor was shared by the four stars of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round - Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen,...

The film also won best director, best actress and best screenplay.

Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning has won the Golden Shell for best film at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. The film has also been awarded the prizes for best director, best actress for Ia Sukhitashvili, and best screenplay for Kulumbegashvili and co-writer Rati Oneli by a competition jury headed by Luca Guadagnino.

It is the first time a Georgian film has won the Golden Shell.

The Silver Shell for best actor was shared by the four stars of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round - Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen,...

Hong Sang-soo’s ‘The Woman Who Ran’ previously won a Berlinale Silver Bear.

Source: G. Ferrandis 2019/Rectangle Productions Close Up Films - Arte France Cinéma Rts Radio Télévision Sui

New features by Philippe Garrel and Hong Sang-soo are among those set to compete for the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award – a strand at the San Sebastian Film Festival free of style or length constraints.

The section will comprise 10 features and nine shorts, which include a six-minute film by UK filmmaker Peter Strickland titled Cold Meridian.

Several selected features were previously seen at the Berlinale in February, including The Woman Who Ran from South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo,...

Pressing on with plans to hold its physical edition September 18-26, Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival has unveiled the line-up for its Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section, the competitive strand that does not mandate any style or length standards.

There are 10 features and nine shorts present this year. The feature length projects include South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran, which arrives having premiered at Berlinale earlier this year where it picked up the Silver Bear for Best Director.

Also arriving from the 2020 Berlinale selection are Philippe Garrel’s The Salt Of Tears, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Rizi I Days, Catarina Vasconcelos’s The Metamorphosis Of Birds, Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born, Song Fang’s The Calming and Camilo Restrepo’s Los Conductos.

Arriving from elsewhere are Nicolás Pereda’s Fauna, which will have its international premiere in San Seb after debuting in Toronto, and Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Yellow Cat,...

Sheffield Doc/Fest, the U.K.’s leading documentary festival, has unveiled its 2020 selection, with a line-up of 115 films, including 31 world premieres.

Due to coronavirus, this year’s festival is largely taking place online. The June event is also extending its activities throughout the rest of the year both in Sheffield and virtually.

The festival is launching a VOD platform, Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects, on June 10 with pay-per-view and subscription options for U.K.-based public audiences including Q&As with filmmakers.

The Doc/Player, a film industry-oriented video library, is also being made available to festival passholders globally from today to August 31.

The festival is also organising weekend screenings in Sheffield cinemas in October – November.

In addition, Doc/Fest has partnered with BFI Player, Doc Alliance Films, The Guardian, and Mubi which will host its curated programmes at various points between July and November.

As announced previously, Sheffield Doc...

The winners of the International New Talent Competition will be announced online as overseas filmmakers can’t visit Taiwan.

This year’s Taipei Film Festival has confirmed that it will go ahead as scheduled as a physical event from June 25 to July 11, but due to Taiwan’s border restrictions in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus, is not likely to have any international guests.

The festival will open with the world premiere of Ko Chen-nien’s debut feature The Silent Forest, and close with Tsai Ming-liang’s Days, which won the Teddy Jury Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The Taipei Film Festival will go ahead in June, making it one of the first significant festivals to do so in the post-coronavirus era. While its film selection is international, audiences will be entirely local.

Organizers announced Monday that the festival will open on June 25 with the world premiere of Taiwan-made “Silent Forest.” It will close on July 11, with a screening of “Days,” by Tsai Ming-liang, which appeared in competition in Berlin and earned a special mention in the Teddy section for gay film.

Based on real events, “Silent Forest describes a cruel game in which deaf teenagers discover the last row of the school bus, and how the joy of integrating into a new life instantly becomes fear. Festival organizers called it “one of the most stunning and shocking movies of 2020.”

Berlin, in late February, was one of the last major film festivals to take place before the Covid-...

Festival will hold physical screenings of competition titles from May 28 to June 6 exclusively for competition filmmakers and jury members.

South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival has unveiled the eight films selected for its International Competition section of first and second-time directors.

As previously announced, the festival will hold physical screenings of its competition titles from May 28 to June 6 exclusively for competition filmmakers and jury members. Online screenings will also be held for public audiences during those dates.

The line-up includes Chinese director Gao Ming’s Damp Season, about a young couple striving to make a living in the southern...

Update, writethru: The 70th Berlin Film Festival, and the first under new leadership team Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, drew to a close this evening with the Golden Bear awarded to Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil. Rasoulof is currently banned from leaving Iran for participation in social and political activity. This is the second time in five years that Berlin’s top prize has gone to an Iranian filmmaker unable to travel outside their home country — the last time was in 2015 when Jafar Panahi scooped the honor for Taxi.

Along with Panahi and Asghar Farhadi, Rasoulof, whose credits also include Manuscripts Don’t Burn, is among the best-known Iranian filmmakers on the international stage. His last picture, A Man Of Integrity, won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard prize in 2017, but his passport was confiscated that same year. Yesterday, the director issued a statement of regret over his inability to...

What if you never knew your family, and they remained in photographs on a mantelpiece, their lives to be dreamed of, destinies to be imagined? That’s the premise of this engaging and pensive hybrid of fiction and documentary, which closes the Berlin Film Festival’s debut Encounters section, that dovetails the family history of its Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos alongside musings on dealing with the grief that comes inevitably with the passing of time.

The film’s first half focuses on the director’s grandmother Beatriz (nicknamed Triz) who died two years before Vasconcelos was born. Her presence is only known to her through photos and second-hand stories. Triz brought up six children while her husband Henrique was away for much of the year at sea–other than those details, this story is imagined, built on interactions between Triz’s children and long monologues that serve as lengthy voiceovers...

The 70th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20 – March 1) unveiled its Encounters program today, featuring the premieres of new works by Tim Sutton and Romanian director Cristi Puiu.

Also screening is Josephine Decker’s Shirley with Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, marking the film’s international premiere after its upcoming Sundance bow, and Gunda by Victor Kossakovsky, whose last pic was the 2018 Venice doc Aquarela.

Encounters is a newly-created competitive section at the Berlin festival that looks to highlight “new voices in cinema and to give more room to diverse narrative and documentary forms.” A three-member jury will choose the winners for Best Film, Best Director and a Special Jury Award.

“As a result of passionate research, the 15 titles chosen for Encounters present the vitality of cinema in all of its forms. Each film presents a different way of interpreting the cinematic story: autobiographical, intimate, political,...

‘Shirley’, starring Elisabeth Moss, among films in the new competitive strand.

The Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 20-Mar 1) has unveiled the 15 features that will comprise its first ever Encounters competitive strand.

The new section has been introduced to support new voices in cinema, running alongside the long-established competition and Berlinale Shorts, which award the Golden and Silver Bears.

A three-member jury, which has yet to be announced, will choose the winners of best film, best director and a special jury award.

The section will open with Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, a 200-minute drama in which an elite group of individuals...