News

Brazilian director and screenwriter Julia Murat will develop her fourth fiction feature film, “White Masks,” in Projeto Paradiso’s Pop Up Film Residency in Revine Lago, Italy. Focusing on the development of a fiction feature film, the program is carried out in more than 10 countries and offered to a Brazilian filmmaker by Projeto Paradiso, Brazil’s only philanthropic organization supporting the audiovisual industry.

Murat made her feature debut with the 2008 doc “Father’s Day” and then moved on to work largely on fiction feature films. She has previously directed “Rule 34,” which won Locarno’s Best Film Prize as well as earning Murat the Best Directing award at the Rio Film Festival; “Pendular,” winner of Berlin’s Fipresci Prize; and “Found Memories,” a film that amassed 39 international awards and was selected for more than 80 festivals including Venice, Toronto and Rotterdam. The director also produced Marcelo Martinessi’s “The Heiresses,” winner...

Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat clinched the Golden Leopard prize in the main international competition of the 75th Locarno Film Festival with her latest feature Rule 34.

The film follows Simone, a young law student who finds a passion for defending women in abuse cases. Yet her own sexual interests lead her to a world of violence and eroticism.

Rule 34 is Murat’s third feature film after Pendular, which picked up the Fipresci Prize at the 2017 Berlinale. The Brazillian filmmaker’s first film, Found Memories, debuted at Venice.

Locarno’s Golden Leopard comes with a Chf 75,000 cash prize to be shared equally between the director and the producer. Murat produced the film alongside Tatiana Leite.

This year’s Golden Leopard competition jury was comprised of Swiss producer Michel Merkt, British filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond, French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, American producer William Horberg, and Italian director Laura Samani.

In other main competition awards, the...

Project is directed by Joao Miller Guerra and Felipa Reis.

Source: Still Moving

‘Djon Africa’

Paris-based sales and production company Still Moving has boarded world sales on Portuguese directors Joao Miller Guerra and Felipa Reis’s Cape Verde-set identity quest drama Djon Africa ahead of its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) this week.

The feature is among eight films due to compete in Iffr’s 2018 Hivos Tiger Competition this year.

It stars Miguel Moreira as the titular Djon Africa, a good-natured, young, Portuguese Rastafarian who heads to the Cape Verde islands off the West Coast of Africa in search of his paternal roots and a father he never knew.

The trip does not go as planned and the young man finds himself caught up in a strange personal odyssey, oscillating between Cape Verde’s vibrant night-life and the solitude of its countryside, in which he probes his identity, where he belongs...

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...

How many relationships hit choppy seas with the utterance of the words "I need more space?" That common refrain is literalized in Julia Murat's Pendular, a smart and involving look at two artists attempting to share both a life and a studio without losing sight of their own needs in the process. Half-serious comparisons being made to La La Land are illustrative despite the vast chasm between the films: Where Damien Chazelle observed lovers filled with a desire to make it in entertainment, Murat's picture revolves around the need to make art, with career an afterthought. The film will find...

One of the best festivals during the first half of the year is The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films, which kicks off its 46th year this March, running from the 15th to the 26th. With last year’s line-up including some of the year’s best films, including Cameraperson, The Fits, Kaili Blues, Neon Bull, Weiner, and more, we can expect many more discoveries this year.

Opening with Patti Cake$ and closing with Person to Person, in between will be one of our favorite films from Sundance as the centerpiece, Beach Rats. Also among the line-up is a handful of other festival favorites, including The Dreamed Path, The Giant, Menashe, and Lady Macbeth.

“Authenticity is an elusive thing these days, and without it we risk ruin. This is particularly true in cinema,” says Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief...

The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center has today announces their complete lineup for the 46th annual New Directors/New Films (Nd/Nf), running March 15 – 26. Dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent, this year’s festival will screen 29 features and nine short films. This year’s lineup boasts nine North American premieres, seven U.S. premieres, and two world premieres, with features and shorts from 32 countries across five continents.

The opening, centerpiece, and closing night selections showcase three exciting new voices in American independent cinema that all recently debuted at Sundance: Geremy Jasper’s “Patti Cake$” is the opening night pick, while Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats” is the centerpiece selection and Dustin Guy Defa will close the festival with “Person to Person.” Other standouts include “Menashe,” “My Happy Family,” “Quest” and “The Wound.”

Read More: The Sundance Rebel:...

Exclusive: French sales and production company fills out slate with upcoming films by the Alayan brothers and new Egyptian title.

Paris-based sales and production company Still Moving has boarded two upcoming Arabic-language pictures, Palestinian film-makers Muayad and Rami Alayan’s The Reports On Sarah And Saleem and Egyptian director Omar El Zohairy’s Feathers Of A Father.

The Reports On Sarah And Saleem is the second feature by the Alayan brothers, former Berlinale Talents who premiered their first film Love, Theft And Other Entanglements at the festival in 2015.

It revolves around a dangerous love affair between a Palestinian man and an Israeli woman.

Feathers Of A Father is the debut feature of El Zohairy, following a series of award-winning shorts – includingThe Aftermath Of The Inauguration Of The Public Toilet At Kilometer 375.

The director also worked as an assistant director to Ahmad Abdalla on Rags & Tatters and Tamer El Said on In The Last Days Of The City...

Eight features and eight short films from the Netherlands or supported by the Dutch have been selected for the 67th Berlin International Film Festival that runs 9–19 Feb 2017.“The Wound”

“The Wound” is the only film ever to world premiere in Sundance, continue into Hivos Tiger Competition in Rotterdam and play Opening Night at the Berlinale Panorama. The movie is universal and potent exploraton of conflicting conceptions of what it means to be a man.

A lonely, young factory worker Xolani travels to a remote mountain camp in South Africa to tend teenage boys going through a traditional Xhola rite of passage. This year, Xolani is assigned to mentor Kwanda, a coddled Jo’burg boy who challenges the customs of the camp and is ostracized by other initiates. Kwanda, as observant as he is insolent, quickly notices the attraction between Xolani and his fellow caregiver, the volatile Vija. Heeding Kwanda’s exhortations,...

Berlin’s Panorama lineup also includes new films from Us, China and Brazil.

Berlin’s Panorama strand is now complete following the addition of 24 additional titles.

A total of 51 works from 43 countries have been chosen for screening in the section, including 21 in Panorama Dokumente and 29 feature films in the main programme and Panorama Special. 36 of these films will be getting their world premieres at the Berlinale.

The German production Tiger Girl by Jakob Lass will open this year’s edition of Panorama Special at Berlin’s Zoo Palast cinema, along with the previously announced Brazilian production Vazante.

Among newly confirmed films are UK Sundance title God’s Own Country, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome, feminist fairy tale The Misandrists by Berlinale regular Bruce Labruce, Erik Poppe’s The King’s Choice and Belgian-French-Lebanese co-production Insyriated which stars Hiam Abbass as a woman trapped in an apartment during war.[p...