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Beta Cinema has acquired all rights except Greece to Yorgos Zois’s Arcadia which world premieres in the Berlinale’s Encounters section.

Greek director Zois’s second feature is a drama fantasy starring Vangelis Mourikis, who was at the Berlinale in 2014 with Yannis Economides’ Stratos and in 2020 with Georgis Grigorakis‘ Digger, and Angeliki Papoulia, best known for her performances in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth and The Lobster.

Arcadia follows neurologist Katerina and Yannis, a former well-respected doctor, heading off to a deserted seaside resort where Yannis has been called to identify the victim of a tragic accident. Together with Yannis, but...

In “The City and the City,” which bowed in the Berlin Film Festival’s competitive Encounters strand and will have a special screening on March 15 at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Syllas Tzoumerkas and Christos Passalis train their lens on the largely untold story of the atrocities committed against Thessaloniki’s Jewish population during World War II.

Unspooling in six fragmented chapters, the film tells the story of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community from the first half of the 20th century until the present day, where contemporary life reflects a city that violently and irrevocably lost its multicultural character, almost overnight.

Natives who both left Thessaloniki in their twenties, the directors said they wanted to focus on what Tzoumerkas described as a “blind spot” in their respective upbringings, in which the suffering and near annihilation of the city’s Jewish community went virtually unmentioned. “It’s both a homecoming for us,...

Now in its 17th year, the Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Crossroads Co-Production Forum has become a de rigueur stop on the fall circuit for producers, distributors, festival programmers and sales agents from across Europe – and increasingly the rest of the world – as they look to spot promising projects in development from Southeast Europe, the Black Sea, and the wider Mediterranean region.

For Yianna Sarri, who heads Thessaloniki’s industry arm, Agora, the reason is obvious. “They know that they will find the best possible projects in Thessaloniki,” Sarri told Variety.

Recent Crossroads success stories include Christos Nikou’s debut “Apples,” which opened the Horizons strand of last year’s Venice Film Festival, and “Ghosts,” the first feature from Turkey’s Azra Deniz Okyay, which won the Grand Prize at Venice Critics’ Week. Other notable titles in recent years include Mounia Meddour’s Algerian civil-war drama “Papicha,” which premiered in Cannes...

The Greek actor-writer-director’s debut feature is also the first film to start and wrap shooting during the pandemic era. Greek writer-director Christos Passalis is better known internationally for his acting career, first in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth and more recently in Syllas Tzoumerkas’ Homeland as well as in his latest film The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea. Passalis is also a noted stage director. The Dragon Has Come is his debut feature as director, and the first Greek film to be shot during the pandemic era and to have wrapped after the end of the quarantine. The film follows an unusual and touching love story between Aris and Anna, who meet and fall in love in a dream-like town but soon realize they have more in common than they initially thought. However, the reason why they were reunited in this place remains unclear. The screenplay was co-penned by Passalis and Eleni.

Biopic of celebrated Greek songwriter Eftyhia Papagianopoulou wins eight awards.

Eftyhia, a biopic of celebrated Greek songwriter Eftyhia Papagianopoulou, scooped eight awards including best film at the at the Iris Hellenic Film Academy (Helfiac) awards last night (April 14).

The ceremony was conducted online, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and broadcast by public TV network Ert.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Directed by Angelos Frantzis, Eftyhia went into the night with 13 nominations and picked up awards including best actor for Pygmalion Dadakaridis, supporting actress for Katia Goulioni and supporting actor for Thanos Tokakis.

The film, produced by Donysis Samiotis for Athens-based Tanweer Productions,...

More than 5,000 people watched Curzon’s first in a new series of live-streamed Q&As.

Curzon has revealed that Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is now it’s most successful title to date on its streaming platform as UK audiences flock online in the wake of cinema closures.

Celine Sciamma’s romantic drama had been performing strongly in theatres for Curzon, grossing £557,000 at the UK box office, before theatres closed their doors amid the coronavirus crisis.

It has now become the most purchased title on Curzon Home Cinema (Chc), which overall recorded a 27% increase on premium VOD week-on-week from...

Syllas Tzoumerkas's The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea is showing February and March, 2020 on Mubi as part of the series Direct from the Berlinale. Above: Youla Boudali as Rita“Bitch Town, You Wrecked Me!”“Bitch town, you wrecked me!” yells failed Euro-pop singer Manolis (Christos Passalis) midway through the film, in his on-stage outburst against his audience of regulars in the small provincial nightclub he sings in night after night.Manolis and everyone else in Sargasso are all the children of this very photogenic swampland of Western Greece, the wildly poor province that surrounds a shitty little town: Missolonghi—relic of the 19th century adored by the Romantics for its inhabitants’ suicidal fight against the Ottomans, and the deathbed of a lord with the name Byron. Bred from this land, or thrown in it for a sufficient amount of time, all characters here are sunk waist-down and stuck in the dark,...

As the Thessaloniki Intl. Film Festival celebrates its 60th edition, what began as a small-scale celebration called Greek Cinema Week has evolved into a vital platform for filmmakers from Greece and around the region, finding a natural home in this historical crossroads that has at various points been under Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman rule.

“We are in the middle of southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, so I think Thessaloniki is the key town to introduce the huge neighborhood from the south bank of the Danube to the Adriatic, from the Black Sea until the Nile,” says festival artistic director Orestis Andreadakis.

For this year’s edition, which takes place from Oct. 31-Nov. 10, the fest unspools an ambitious slate of festival darlings, provocative premieres and Greek cinema classics.

Competition section Meet the Neighbors will launch with a focus on first and second features by emerging filmmakers from the region. And...

Syllas Tzoumerkas, one of the filmmakers who formed part of the Greek New Wave, believes young filmmakers should remain defiant against norms and conformity when developing a film language unique to themselves.

Speaking during a masterclass at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival entitled “A Very Certain Defiance,” Tzoumerkas told his young audience, participants of European Film Promotion’s Future Frames program, “The word ‘defiance’ can create a path for you in surviving the film industry.”

The director, whose films include 2010 Venice Critics’ Week pic “Homeland,” 2014 Locarno competition film “A Blast,” and this year’s Berlin Panorama player “The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea,” advised them: “You are going to have to create a core – an inner strength – that is non-negotiable because this is what is going to feed you; this what is going to create content.”

He added: “Be defiant against all the sea of opinion, norms, conformity… be defiant against yourself.

Now in its fifth year, European Film Promotion’s Future Frames is a next-generation showcase comprising short works by students and recent graduates of European film schools, curated by the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival in cooperation with the Efp.

The program has already established itself as an important platform for discovering European talent; this year’s program, which includes two student Academy Award winners, promises to be especially exciting. Participants will take part in a master class led by Greek helmer Syllas Tzoumerkas (“The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea”) and meet with industry experts from various fields in order to build up their international networks.

The selected directors and their films will be introduced to the public, press and industry at the festival over June 30-July 3. The program is supported by the Creative Europe — Media Program of the European Union and the respective Efp member organizations. AMC Networks and...

“The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea” takes place far from the eponymous body of water, and in its actual swampy locale — a glum eel-fishing community in western Greece — miracles are in distinctly short supply. But the title’s metaphorical implications of disorientation and immurement are felt in a stylish, many-stranded mystery that often casts viewers adrift in clashing tides of dark genre convention, nightmarish surrealism and fevered close-up character study. Greek writer-director Syllas Tzoumerkas’ third feature unreels and obscurely entangles the stories of two unconnected women, a dissolute female police chief and an abused eel-factory worker, in murky depths of small-town sin. The fishy stew that results maintains the antic, scratchy energy of Tzoumerkas’s striking 2014 festival favorite “A Blast,” though overplotting muddles its impact.

“Sargasso Sea” is assured further festival play following its premiere in Berlin’s Panorama strand, though it’s a challenging sales prospect: Its commercial fortunes...

After a sudden suicide turns a small eel-farming town upside down, an investigation unearths troubling secrets about the town’s past. Those discoveries will bring together two women trapped in solitary lives, offering each a chance to find salvation.

“The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea” is the third feature by Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas. Starring frequent Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Angeliki Papoulia and Youla Boudali (“In the Fade”), the film will world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama section.

Taking its name from the mysterious region of the North Atlantic, a swirling gyre of deep-blue water bounded by four ocean currents, “The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea” is the story of two women dreaming of escape.

Their arduous emotional journey echoes a remarkable natural phenomenon, when eels in Europe and North America reaching sexual maturity leave their habitats and swim hundreds of miles to lay their eggs in the Sargasso.

The destinies of two very different women in the Greek boondocks slowly intertwine in The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (To thavma tis thalassas ton Sargasson). Part psychodrama and part Greek tragedy, this is an uneven but always intriguing look at life in rural western Greece, where an eel farm is practically the only local industry left keeping the entire community from going under. Though the film’s ambitions are at times a bit too grandiose — the eel metaphor to which the title also refers, for example, feels rather overstretched — there’s no denying that by the closing ...

The destinies of two very different women in the Greek boondocks slowly intertwine in The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (To thavma tis thalassas ton Sargasson). Part psychodrama and part Greek tragedy, this is an uneven but always intriguing look at life in rural western Greece, where an eel farm is practically the only local industry left keeping the entire community from going under. Though the film’s ambitions are at times a bit too grandiose — the eel metaphor to which the title also refers, for example, feels rather overstretched — there’s no denying that by the closing ...

The first trailer to The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, the new drama from Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas (Homeland, A Blast), dropped Monday, whetting auteur appetites ahead of the film's world premiere at the Berlin film festival next month.

The drama reteams Tzoumerkas with his Homeland actresses Angeliki Papoulia and Youla Boudali, here playing two very different women caught in a small eel fishing town in rural Greece.

Papoulia, a darling of fellow Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (of The Favourite fame), plays Elisabeth, a once ambitious policewoman who reluctantly relocates from Athens back to the dead-end town where she grew up. There, a ...

The first trailer to The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, the new drama from Greek director Syllas Tzoumerkas (Homeland, A Blast), dropped Monday, whetting auteur appetites ahead of the film's world premiere at the Berlin film festival next month.

The drama reteams Tzoumerkas with his Homeland actresses Angeliki Papoulia and Youla Boudali, here playing two very different women caught in a small eel fishing town in rural Greece.

Papoulia, a darling of fellow Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (of The Favourite fame), plays Elisabeth, a once ambitious policewoman who reluctantly relocates from Athens back to the dead-end town where she grew up. There, a ...

Near record levels of inward investment are boosting the local industry.

As the Dutch film industry comes together at International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr), there is much to be optimistic about in 2019.

The local industry is experiencing near record levels of inward investment as a location and post-production hub and Dutch co-production is blossoming. There may have been a slight - 0.8% - decline in admissions to 35.7 million cinema visitors in the Netherlands in 2018 but box office revenue has risen due to an increase in ticket prices.

Dutch market share for local films has remained broadly stable: it fell slightly from...

Kea (Mony Ros), Chakra (Sarm Heng) and Rom Ran (Thanawut Kasro) in ‘Buoyancy’ © 2019 Causeway Films, photo credit: Rafael Winer.

Writer-director Rodd Rathjen’s debut feature Buoyancy, a drama set in rural Cambodia that follows Chakra, a 14-year-old boy enslaved on a fishing trawler, will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Produced by Causeway Films’ Sam Jennings, Kristina Ceyton and Rita Walsh in association with Cambodia’s Anupheap Productions and Melbourne-based Definition Films, the film will screen in the Panorama section among 45 titles from 38 countries.

It is said to be the first feature film to shine a light on the crisis of trafficking and slavery in the fishing industries of South-East Asia.

As If reported, Damon Gameau’s feature doc 2040 will have its world premiere in Berlin’s Generation Kplus section.

Showcasing 29 features, 16 documentary formats and 19 directorial debuts, Panorama 2019 will present a controversial, political, and provocative program,...

Casey Affleck-directed drama Light Of My Life, starring Affleck, Elisabeth Moss and newcomer Anna Pniowsky, will get its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama section. The dystopian drama, about a father and his young daughter who are trapped in the woods, is one of a raft of additions to the Panorama lineup. Scroll down for the lineup in full.

A total of 45 films from 38 countries, including 34 world premieres, will screen in the section. Panorama’s opening film will be Flatland by Jenna Bass, in which a bride and her pregnant friend make a liberating getaway across South Africa.

Among the strand’s highlights are Affleck’s first narrative feature as director, which is produced by The Imitation Game outfit Black Bear Pictures; Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul follow-up Tremblores (Tremors), about a father who tries to break free from his past after breaking the silence about...