News

Three women live a quiet life amongst the luscious trees of the Canary Islands in the first trailer for Macu Machín’s Berlinale Forum entry “The Undergrowth.” Croatia’s Splitscreen is handling sales on the title.

The title also represents the latest from Tenerife-based El Viaje Films, quickly building as one of the Canary Islands top fiction producers, having co-produced Theo Court’s Chilean Oscar entry “White on White.”

It was also recently behind titles such as Venice-selected “They Carry Death” and Locarno prize-winning “Dead Slow Ahead.”

Machín’s feature debut is a personal affair, with the filmmaker chronicling the routine of her mother and two aunts as they finally try to settle the distribution of their family inheritance after years of debate. In the background to the family dispute, nature seeps in, the documentary juxtaposing the lulling rhythms of the island with the eruption of long-held grievances between the sisters.

Rojas Valencia’s third film following ‘Roots’ and ‘A Place Called Dignity’ is based on the 1960 novel by Chilean writer Carlos Droguett

Chilean star Alfredo Castro will play the lead role in the third film by Rojas Valencia, Patas de Perro (which translates to ‘dogs legs’)

The project is a co-production between Chile’s Horamágica and A Simple Vista Producciones and Brazil’s Centauro. Horamágica’s Úrsula Budnik also produced Sebastian Lelio’s early works The Sacred Family (2005) and Christmas (2009).

The film is an adaptation of the 1960 novel by prominent Chilean writer Carlos Droguett. Droguett was a member of the...

Alfredo Castro, an absolute lead or co-star in seven Pablo Larraín films and one of the highest-regarded of actors in Latin America, is set to head the choral cast of “Three Dark Nights” (“Tres noches negras”), the third feature from Spanish-Chilean Theo Court.

“Three Dark Nights” follows up Court’s “White on White,” also starring Castro, an actor described by Variety as “reliably superb,” which won a best director and Fipresci Prize at 2019’s Venice Horizons. It went on to become Chile’s submission for the international feature Oscar, establishing Court as a talent to track.

In further news, Samuel M. Delgado, co-writer and co-director of “They Carry Death” and a writer with Court of “White on White,” has been brought on board as script consultant.

“Three Dark Nights” is one of the highest-profile of 15 projects which will be brought to market at September’s Europe-Latin American Co-Production Forum.

Like “White on White,...

Latin America has submitted 15 contenders in the Academy Awards’ international feature category this time, not quite as big a haul as last year’s tally of 18.

Leading the hopefuls is Mexico’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” the fiction debut of Tatiana Huezo, one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2022. Her tale follows three girls as they come of age in a remote village afflicted by the drug trade and human trafficking. The Cannes Un Certain Regard winner is now streaming on Netflix, which is putting all its promotional heft behind it. The film’s producers are Jim Stark (“Coffee and Cigarettes”) and Nicolas Celis, the latter a key producer of Mexico’s first-ever international feature Oscar winner, “Roma,” by Alfonso Cuarón.

Huezo’s 2016 documentary, “Tempestad,” represented Mexico at the 90th Academy Awards. Since 1957, when Mexico started participating in the Oscars, 10 of its entries have been nominated, culminating in “Roma’s” win in 2019.

Chile,...

“Spencer” director Pablo Larraín has thrown his weight behind Chilean Oscar entry “White on White” (“Blanco en Blanco”), hailing it as a “really interesting, strange and highly violent film.”

“White on White” also addresses issues that are “highly unsettling and complex and which haven’t been resolved or at least discussed at sufficient length,” Larraín adds.

His words come from a conversation, which he moderates, with “White on White’s” director Théo Court and star Alfredo Castro that forms the latest Academy Awards Edition of CinemaChile Talks.

Some sort of sympathy for “White and White” may be inevitable.

Larraín was once a student of Castro’s, a notable theater director who has acted in six of Larraín’s nine films, starring in four: “Tony Manero,” Larrain’s 2008 breakout; 2010’s “Post Mortem”; 2012’s Oscar-nominated “No,” playing opposite Gael García Bernal; and 2015 Berlin Grand Jury Prize winner “The Club,” which persuaded Natalie Portman...

Starring Pablo Larraín regular Alfredo Castro, Chilean-Spanish writer-director Theo Court’s “White on White” (“Blanco en Blanco”) has been acquired for distribution in North America by Outsider Pictures.

The deal follows on the film’s world premiere this September at the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons sidebar, where Court won a Silver Lion for the section’s best director and a film writers’ Fipresci Prize. “White on White” was selected earlier this month as Chile’s submission for 2022’s Academy Awards in the international best feature film category.

Starring in Pablo Larrain’s 2008 breakthrough, “Tony Manero,” as well as his 2015 Berlin Grand Jury Prize winner “The Club,” Castro also headed Lorenzo Vigas’ 2015 Venice Golden Lion laureate “From Afar.”

It takes an actor of his stature to tease out the contradictions of his character, Pedro, in “White and White.” Set in the late 19th century, it begins with a portrait photographer,...

These are the submissions for the international film Oscar by country. The deadline for entries was Nov. 1. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced Dec. 21 and the nominations will come out Feb 8. The 94th Academy Awards will take place on March 27 at the Dolby Theatre. The Academy has not yet released a final list of entries; Variety compiled this list from individual country’s announcements.

Albania

Two Lions Heading to Venice

Dir. Jonid Jorji

Key cast: Vasjan Lami, Alessandra Bonarotta

Logline: A pair of filmmakers heading to the Venice festival are sidetracked from their destination after meeting two adult film actors.

Prodco: Bajo Films

Algeria

Heliopolis

Dir. Djaafar Gacem

Key cast: Souhila Mallem, Mehdi Ramdani, Cesar Duminil

Logline: True story of an uprising in the Algerian town of Guelma that was violently put down by the colonial French rulers.

Prodco: Hewes Pictures

Argentina

The Intruder

Dir. Natalia Meta

Key cast: Guillermo Arengo,...

The U.K. has submitted Chloë Fairweather’s “Dying to Divorce” as its official entry into the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film category.

Filmed over five years, the feature-length documentary examines the issues of femicide and domestic violence in Turkey, where one in three women have experienced domestic violence, the highest proportion amid the world’s economically developed countries.

The feature follows lawyer Ipek Bozkurt and fellow activists whose mission is to put abusive men behind bars against the backdrop of a biased legal system and increasingly oppressive government. Survivors of domestic violence are also included in the film, such as Arzu, whose husband shot her seven times when she asked for a divorce, causing her to lose her legs and the use of her arms, and Kubra, who was attacked by her husband two days after giving birth, causing a brain haemorrhage which has impacted her ability to speak and walk.

This year’s crop of young outstanding talent has been nurtured at the Tabakalera’s various areas, including the post-graduate film school Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (Eqze) and the Ikusmira Berriak Residency Program.

Marina Palacio (San Sebastian)

The San Sebastian native is a Fine Arts graduate whose short film “Ya no Duermo” was created at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola and premiered in the Zabaltegi Tabakalera section of the Zinemaldia. It has competed in more than thirty international festivals, where it has clinched several awards including ‘Best Fiction Short’ at the Malaga Film Festival. She is currently filming her debut feature film: the docu-fiction hybrid drama, “Y así seguirán las cosas.”

Mikel Gurrea (San Sebastian)

Gurrea holds degrees from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University and the London Film School. His latest short, “Heltzear,” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti sidebar, and later screens at San Sebastian’s Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section.

Not bad for a feature debut. “They Carry Death” (“Eles Transportan a Morte”), from first-time Spanish film directors Helena Girón y Samuel M. Delgado, is participating in two prominent film festivals back to back.

After its world premiere at the Venice Festival’s 36th Critics Week sidebar, it competes in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section of Spain’s most important film festival, San Sebastian.

Delgado is no stranger to Venice. He co-wrote Theo Court’s “Blanco en Blanco,” which won best director and Fipresci awards at Venice’s Horizons section in 2019.

Described as a classic adventure story tempered with a critical discourse on the perils of colonization, “They Carry Death” is inspired by Italian born feminist scholar Silvia Federici’s 2004 essay “Caliban and the Witch: Women, Body and Primitive Accumulation” in which she pointed out that the wealth amassed during the colonization of America funded the repressive apparatus of the Inquisition as...

Théo Court's White on White is exclusively showing on Mubi in many countries in the series Debuts.The inspiration behind the film Blanco en Blanco came from coming across, and later researching, a series of photographs, by an anonymous photographer, which chronicled and staged the massacres of the Selknam people, perpetuated by Julius Popper, a Romanian colonizer, and his entourage, at the end of the 19th century in Tierra del Fuego. These images, and their historical context, led me to ask myself a series of questions that resonated with deeper themes that I wished to interrogate in my film. Shortly after I came across another series of photographs, this time those of the writer Lewis Carroll who staged photos of various young girls, all framed in an erotic setting. This parallel between a gaze that captures the horrors of colonialism on the one hand, and an obsession to capture a...

What started last October as a students’ protest regarding the rise in public transportation rates in Santiago de Chile has now blown up into a nationwide social demonstration that brings attention to a system that has drained and condemned people throughout the country’s history. The problems have always been present, but with the introduction of a savage, liberal economic system in the ‘80s (during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship), they’ve only become more apparent–with a mostly privatized health system and pension funds, as well as a practically non-existent public apparatus to help the lower classes.

The protests led to repression, and repression led to violence. There are over 400 cases of people with ocular damage, as well as over 20 people dying as a direct or indirect result of police and military actions. It’s hell out there, sometimes even literally: metro stations, private buildings, and even an arthouse cinema have all caught fire,...

The 2019 Venice International Film Festival has wrapped, and this year’s edition has announced its award winners. The Golden Lion, the festival’s top laureate, went to “Joker,” which is a strong statement from this year’s competition jury led by Lucrecia Martel. See the complete list of this year’s winners below.

In recent years, the Venice Golden Lion has gone to films that went on to have legs in the awards-season conversation stateside. Last year’s Lion went to Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” which won three Academy Awards for Netflix but lost Best Picture to “Green Book.” The year prior, the Golden Lion went to Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” which won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2018.

In a surprise upset over Joaquin Phoenix in hot competition title “Joker” (until it carried off with the Golden Lion), Best Actor went to Luca Marinelli for...

The Fipresci (International Federation of Film Critics) has handed out its prize in the 76th Venice International Film Festival’s competition to Roman Polanski’s “An Officer and a Spy,” which wraps its 2019 edition on September 7.

Originally titled “J’accuse,” the French drama about the Dreyfus affair, scripted by Polanski and Robert Harris, is based on Harris’ 2013 novel of the same name. It tells the true story of Georges Picquart, the 19th-century French army officer and Minister of War, as he struggles to expose the truth about the doctored evidence that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer of Jewish ancestry convicted in 1894 of treason, to Devil’s Island. The French penal colony operated in the 19th and 20th century in the Islands of French Guiana, located in South America.

Starring as Georges Picquart is French actor Jean Dujardin, who leaped to international fame with his performance as George Valentin...