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The San Sebastian International Film Festival has revealed 13 features selected to compete in itsNew Directors competition.

New Directors, comprising first or second features, will open with Jonatan Etzler’s UK produced thriler comedyBad Apples,starring Saoirse Ronan. The film follows a primary school teacher struggling to deal with an adversarial student. Etzler’s credits include 2023feature One More Timeand2021 short Swimmer whichwon the best comedy prize at Clermont-Ferrand.

Closing the line-up is Japanese featureWhite Flowers And Fruits,adebut by Yukari Sakamoto, about a suicide in an all-girls boarding school that deeply affects a pupil who can see ghosts.

British filmmaker...

Trece primeros y segundos largometrajes competirán por el Premio Kutxabank-New Directors. © Ssiff

El Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián ha anunciado las películas que componen la sección New Directors de su 73ª edición, que se celebrará del 19 al 27 de septiembre.

En esta sección que pone el foco en el talento emergente, cineastas de todo el mundo, procedentes de China, Costa Rica, Dinamarca, España, India, Japón, Reino Unido, Rusia, Suecia, Taiwán y Turquía, presentarán sus primeras y segundas películas. Los títulos, trece en total, competirán por el Premio Kutxabank-New Directors y el Premio Dama de la Juventud, este último concedido por un jurado compuesto por 150 estudiantes de entre 18 y 25 años.

Desde su creación hace más de cinco décadas, New Directors ha servido como plataforma de lanzamiento de cineastas que luego se han convertido en figuras clave del cine contemporáneo. Por ella han pasado Olivier Assayas, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jonathan Glazer,...

Saorise Ronan in Bad Apples Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

Saoirse Ronan stars in the opening film of this year's San Sebastian Film Festival New Directors section, which was announced today.

The Irish star features in Jonatan Etzler's UK-produced Bad Apples, which tells the story of a teacher trying to deal with a disruptive 11-year-old pupil.

The section, featuring filmmakers' first or second features, will also include movies from China, Costa Rica, Denmark, India and Japan, among others.

The Son And The Sea Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

Also of UK interest The Son And The Sea, by London-born director Stroma Cairns, co-written with her mother, producer Imogen West, the film follows the travels of two friends on Scotland’s north-east coast.

Among the more experienced participants are Anton Yarush, who previously wrote Closeness and Unclenching The Fists who, working with DoP-turned director Sergey Borovkov will present Foreign Lands,...

Jonatan Etzler’s “Bad Apples,” and Stroma Cairns’ “The Son and the Sea” are two of the 13 titles selected for this year’s San Sebastián New Directors strand, the biggest sidebar outside the festival’s main competition, along with its Horizontes Latinos section, and a powerful platform.

Dedicated to first and second features, talent which has competed at New Directors takes in New Directors has helped to boost the discovery of filmmakers such as Olivier Assayas, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jonathan Glazer, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Bong Joon-ho, Isabel Coixet and Kevin Smith.

Starring “Game of Thrones’” Jason Anderson and “Hanna’s” Saoirse Ronan and described as a primary school set biting satirical comedy with thriller elements, Bad Apples” reps the English-language debut of Swedish writer-director Etzler (“One More Time”). HanWay Films launched pre-sales at 2023’s American Film Market of the film, produced by the U.K.’s Pulse Films.

A BAFTA TV...

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,...

The old adage “write what you know” has rarely paid off with such bleak, persuasive power as it does in Unclenching The Fists, which won the Grand Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar this year, is Russia’s submission to the International Feature race at the Oscars and is screening at AFI Fest. Mubi has U.S. rights and is planning a theatrical release ahead of digital in 2022.

Kira Kovalenko’s confident debut feature is largely based on events of her own youth. Like her fictional heroine Ada (Milana Aguzarova), Kovalenko grew up in a dreary mining town in the Caucasus. She captures, with unsentimental precision, the way life spent with the same few people, year after year, can be both suffocating in its intensity and numbingly dull.

Ada’s home is in North Ossetia, a thinly populated but strategically important wedge of Russia on the border of Georgia and next to Chechnya.

Casablanca Beats is first Moroccan film to play in Cannes Competition since 1962.

Wild Bunch International (Wbi) has boarded sales on French-Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch’s Casablanca Beats ahead of its world premiere in Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in July.

The film follows a group of youngsters living in the Casablanca slum district of Sidi Moumen as they participate in a workshop encouraging them to express themselves through hip-hop music and dance.

It was shot in Casablanca’s Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen (The Stars of Sidi Moumen) cultural centre, which Ayouch created in 2014 with novelist Mahi Binebine.

Company brings 10 recent sales acquisitions to the market also including feature animation The Summit Of The Gods.

Wild Bunch has boarded sales on Italian director Michele Placido’s upcoming drama Caravaggio’s Shadow, exploring the tempestuous life of the 17th-century painter.

It revolves around a secret Vatican investigation into Caravaggio, ordered by Pope Paul V as he debates whether to grant the artist clemency for murdering a love rival.

Riccardo Scamarcio plays Caravaggio opposite Louis Garrel as the investigator – known as The Shadow. Isabelle Huppert also features as a noblewoman who was a steadfast protector of the artist, hiding him...

The American Film Institute (AFI) has announced the films that will be featured in their New Auteurs and American Independents sections at the upcoming AFI Fest 2017 presented by Audi. Selections include a number of lauded features from around the festival circuit, including Cannes offerings like “I Am Not a Witch,” SXSW favorites like “Gemini” and “Mr. Roosevelt,” the Sundance breakout “Thoroughbreds,” and Joseph Kahn’s Toronto Midnight Madness favorite “Bodied,” among others.

Highlighting first- and second-time feature film directors, New Auteurs is designed as the festival’s platform for upcoming filmmakers from all over the world to showcase their new films. This year, the section includes 11 films, nine of which come from female directors. Similarly, AFI Fest’s American Independents section aims to represent the best of this year’s independent filmmaking. Pushing boundaries of form and content across narrative and documentary cinema, this section includes 11 films from both fresh...