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Isabel Coixet, the Spanish director of My Life Without Me, Things I Never Told You, The Bookshop and It Snows in Benidorm, will be honored by the European Film Academy with this year’s European Achievement in World Cinema award for her life’s work.

Coixet has carved out an impressive career in what could be called pan-Atlantic cinema, making mainly English-language features with international casts but with a strongly European sensibility. She followed up her promising 1989 debut Demasiado viejo para morir joven (which won the best new director prize at Spain’s Goya awards) with the U.S.-shot drama Things I Never Told You, starring Andrew McCarthy and Lili Taylor. The film premiered in Berlin, a favorite launching pad for Coixet, who returned the German festival in 2003 with My Life Without Me, a romantic drama starring Sarah Polley as a young mother diagnosed with terminal cancer who decides...

Streaming

“Sherlock” Seasons 1-4, “Death in Paradise” Seasons 1-11, “Unforgotten” Seasons 1-4 and “Life Below Zero” Seasons 1-9 are among the series that will be available as part of BBC Studios‘ new content agreement with Lemino, a Japanese video-on-demand streaming service operated by Ntt DoCoMo. The deal, which comes into effect Nov. 15 will also see Lemino subscribers gain access to long-running British dramas like “Call The Midwife” Seasons 1-11 and “Father Brown” Seasons 1-10, period dramas “The Pursuit of Love” and “Sanditon,” as well as documentary series “Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change The World.”

Cheryl Png, VP of distribution for Southeast Asia, South Korea and Japan of BBC Studios Asia, said: “BBC Studios is known for our premium content, powerful storytelling and the ability to connect with a global audience. We look forward to working closely with Ntt DoCoMo to showcase the depth and breadth of our programmes that...

Fresh off her 2023 Goya best actress win for “Lullaby” on Saturday night,” Laia Costa is set to star in the passionate romance drama “Un Amor,” by multi-prized Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet.

Film Constellation, the London and now Paris-based production, finance & sales company, will introduce the new production to buyers at thus and next week’s Berlin European Film Market.

Distributor of Berlin competition entry “20,000 Species if Bees” and La Maternal, a San Sebastian best leading performance winner for Carla Quílez, BTeam Pictures will handle the film’s release in Spain.

Written by Spanish novelist and short-story writer Laura Ferrero and Coixet, “Un Amor” is based on an admired novel by Sara Mesa. A fiction study of emotional dependence in which Mesa returns to the themes of power and subjugation which thread much of her work, “Un Amor” was selected by Spanish newspaper El Pais as Spain’s 2020 book of the year.

Unspooling 24 August - 2 September 2021 in Pescara, Termoli and Macerata, a new festival is emerging on the international film landscape. Isabel Coixet, the world-famous Spanish filmmaker and screenwriter who won three Goya awards in 2018 thanks to The Bookshop and who recently directed Elisa & Marcela and It Snows in Benidorm, will preside over the Official Selection jury of In Movie Fest 2021, an international festival whose first edition will unfold in Pescara, Termoli and Macerata between 24 August and 2 September this year. This new, large-scale cinematic event is joining the global festival circuit at a time when high-quality cinema is in great need of a boost. “Our aim”, insist the organisers of Screen Film’s festival, “is to offer up new artistic opportunities to help overcome social-cultural crises, and to drive home the message that even the remotest and most unknown of places can be the source...

Barcelona-born filmmaker Isabel Coixet arrived at the San Sebastian Film Festival to receive the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s National Cinematography Prize at a prestigious event hosted at the Tabakalera’s Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea.

Coixet, 60, arrived straight from the post-production suite, where last week she finished work on her thirteenth feature film, “It Snows in Benidorm,” starring Timothy Spall. She revealed that she was shocked when told about the award. “I thought that in ten years they might give me the prize.”

A popular and prolific figure in Spanish film, Coixet helmed Goya-winning movies, “My Life Without Me” the Northern Ireland set “The Secret Life of Words,” and the “The Bookshop,” an adaptation of the Penelope Fitzgerald book.

Coixet’s most recent movie, for Netflix, the black-and-white “Elisa & Marcela,” tells the real story of two women in Galicia who tricked a priest into marrying them in 1901. It was released last year.

Madrid — Beating out other suitors, Madrid-based sales company Latido Films has closed international sales rights on Belén Funes’ anticipated San Sebastian main competition contender “A Thief’s Daughter” (“La hija de un ladrón”). BTeam Pictures will release the film in Spain.

Already one of the most talked-about titles heading to San Sebastian this year, based on word-of-mouth generated by sneak-peak screenings in Madrid and Barcelona, Funes’ feature debut is sparking buzz for both its direction as well as Greta Fernández’s lead performance.

San Sebastian Festival director José Luis Rebordinos readily admits that he and his selection team had originally thought of the film as a candidate for the festival’s New Directors section. After screening it, however, they wanted it for main competition.

Seen in Isabel Coixet’s “Elisa & Marcela,” Fernández plays Sara, a single mother traumatized by her jailed father’s abandonment who attempts to juggle reuniting...

Updated with full list of winners: The Berlin Film Festival crowned its winners tonight at a ceremony in the Berlinale Palast. Big winners included Synonyms (Synonymes), which took home the festival’s top prize Golden Bear for Best Film and By the Grace of God, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. I Was at Home, But won the Best Director accolade, and there was a double hit in the acting categories for the Republic of China’s So Long, My Son, which won Best Actor for Wang Jingchun and Best Actress for Yong Mei. Scroll down for a full list of winners.

Golden Bear Best Film winner Synonyms, a French-German-Israeli co-production, was an early favorite at the festival, launching first-timer actor Tom Mercier in the breakout role of a young Israeli man who tries to reinvent himself in Paris, with the help of a Franco-Israeli dictionary that gives the film its title.

With the Berlin Film Festival about to wrap and Cannes fast approaching, the International Union of Cinemas (Unic) is urging programmers at leading festivals to select for competition only films that will receive a full theatrical release.

Unic, which represents exhibitors and cinema associations in 37 countries, mostly in Europe, said in a statement Friday that it expects leading film festivals to “ensure that all selected films observe established industry norms – including a full and genuine theatrical release.” The organization added: “We can’t imagine that festivals propose programs just for a small number of subscribers of specific streaming platforms, privatizing both the audience and the films themselves.”

Unic did not name particular platforms such as Netflix or Amazon. But the organization’s statement came amid the Berlin Film Festival, which sparked anger among German exhibitors over the inclusion of a Netflix film, “Elisa y Marcela,” in competition. It marks the...

In an open letter to Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick and German culture and media commissioner Monika Grütters, 160 independent exhibitors are calling for Isabel Coixet’s competition film “Elisa y Marcela” to be shown out of competition.

“We, the independent arthouse cinema operators in Germany, do not agree with the fact that ‘Elisa y Marcela,’ by Isabel Coixet, a film that will not have normal theatrical distribution but will only be seen on Netflix, is being shown,” the exhibitors wrote. “We therefore demand that the film be shown out of competition.”

The cinema operators said they had taken the step to protest the fact that Netflix was using “the big festivals and film awards as a marketing platform and diminishing the position of cinema as a place of culture. The Berlinale stands for the big screen, Netflix the small screen.”

The demand was echoed by the International Confederation of Art Cinemas...

Berlin — Netflix has unveiled five new Spanish original series, including titles by well-known film director Nacho Vigalondo (“Timecrimes”) and Pau Freixas, executive producer of Spanish breakout “The Red Band Society.”

The new titles see the streaming giant near doubling the number of new and returning scripted series it has in development and production in Spain from six to 11.

Marking its first collaborations with two classic Spanish production houses, Filmax and Plano a Plano, the new series sees the streaming giant still still predominantly targeting women and YA viewers, but brings a far larger variety of series types to the mix.

Announced on the eve of the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, to which Netflix brings a powerful at least 49 executive delegation, and has its first movie ever playing in competition, Isabel Coixet’s “Elisa & Marcela,” the five series announcement marks yet another powerful statement of Netflix’s ambitions in Europe and...

The Berlin International Film Festival on Thursday unveiled several more titles for its 2019 competition line up, including Elisa & Marcela, a black-and-white drama from Spanish director Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop) which Netflix has acquired.

Although the streaming giant did not produce Elisa & Marcela, and Coixet is a regular in Berlin, the film's inclusion in competition is certain to spark controversy, given the uproar surrounding the decision, last year, of the Venice Film Festival to give a competition slot —and eventually it's top prize Golden Lion award —to Alfonso Cuaron's Roma, another Spanish-language black-and-white period drama, which ...