News

Artem Vasilyev, the Russian producer and CEO of Metrafilms and its animation arm Studio Metrafilms, has launched the new label Lazy Sunday, based in Ireland and dedicated to developing and producing both animation and live-action projects for international audiences.

The new outfit will serve as a bridge linking Western Europe with Eastern Europe, Vasilyev hopes, while also connecting with his current base of operations in Moldova.

“I strongly believe that the Eastern European region is extremely rich in world-class talent and exciting stories that are yet to be told,” he said. “Eastern European talent can bring a lot to the international film industry table, and Lazy Sunday is a company that can bridge East and West thanks to our experience, history and where we are today. This is truly an exciting position to be in.”

Lazy Sunday, which will have an office in Dublin, is actually the rebranded Irish arm of Film and Music Entertainment,...

When Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is arrested by Nazis and put on a train to a concentration camp, he has every reason to believe that his life is over. It’s 1942 in Nazi-occupied France, and all of his Jewish traveling companions are making peace with their inevitable deaths. When a stranger on the train begs him to trade half of a sandwich for a book of Persian myths, he makes the deal out of mere charity as much as anything else.

That chance encounter that kicks off “Persian Lessons” ends up saving his life, as Gilles is the only passenger spared. As it turns out, the Nazi officer who controls his destiny has been “looking for a Persian.” Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger) is already thinking ahead to the end of WWII — the former chef plans to move to Tehran and open a German restaurant in the desert. But before he can do that,...

In “Schindler’s List,” most of the actors spoke English, using accents to indicate their characters’ origins. In “Son of Saul,” the cast struggles to communicate in a mish-mosh of languages, as Jews of different nationalities were thrown together in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stories about the Holocaust — so vital in trying to reconcile the horrors of the past century — must at some point take a philosophical stand on how to deal with how their characters express themselves.

And then there is “Persian Lessons,” a most peculiar anomaly among tales of the Shoah: It tells of a Belgian Jew who invented a language in order to survive World War II. The film claims to be “inspired by a true story” but is really a parable in the tradition of “The Reader,” wherein a terrified prisoner (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) agrees to teach Farsi — a language he does not know and is therefore obliged to...