News

Loco Films Paris has closed a raft of sales deals in key territories for Veit Helmer’s German kids and family feature “Akiko – the Flying Monkey,” which will participate in this year’s Kids Screenings at the Locarno Film Festival.

The film has been sold in over 40 territories, including Germany, Austria, and dozens of Mena, Cis, and African countries. In Germany, the film’s domestic market, Farbfilm Verleih will handle distribution.

Loco Films is hosting ongoing discussions with distributors in other European countries, which will be furthered at Locarno. Although the Swiss festival often acts as a showcase for auteur-driven arthouse titles, its Kids section routinely proves to be one of its most important in commercial terms. Last year, one of the event’s biggest bidding wars was over the Finnish kids and family title “Snot & Splash,” which eventually went to FilmSharks.

“Akiko – The Flying Monkey” kicks off inside a German zoo,...

Italy’s Coccinelle Film Sales has acquired world rights to German director Veit Helmer’s poetic love story “Gondola,” which will world premiere at the upcoming Tokyo International Film Festival.

Helmer is well known on the international festival circuit for funny, fable-like films with little or no dialogue such as “Tuvalu”; the Azerbaijan-set “Absurdistan,” which went to Sundance in 2008; and “The Bra,” that launched from Tokyo in 2018.

“Gondola,” the tale of two cable car attendants who fall in love as they face each other going up and down the remote mountains of Georgia, is also told without dialogue.

“There are a few places on earth where you don’t hop on the bus in the morning, but on the cable car [instead],” Helmer said in his director’s statement. He added that “such a place in Georgia inspired me to write a story about two cable car conductors who always meet...

All-rightey. If you're still with me, "Holy Motors" is the latest from Leos Carax, who did the segment "Merde" in the anthology "Tokyo!", and re-teams him with Denis Lavant, a thirty-year veteran of French cinema and television and one of the country's most daring and expressive actors. If you don't know Lavant from the likes of "Beau Travail" or "Tuvalu", you may recognize him as the vagrant in the video for "Rabbit in Your Headlights" who stops a car with nothing but his outstretched body. In "Motors", Lavant's Mr. Oscar is a businessman who spends every day jutting from one appointment to another. Only Mr. Oscar is a not your typical businessman, and the appointments aren't very typical, either. His first is to change into a cripple's dirty rags and beg for change on the sidewalk. His second is to enter a visual fx studio, don a mo-cap suit and...

Absurdistan

Directed by Veit Helmer

2008, 90 minutes, In Russian with English subtitles

First Run Features Heterosexually speaking, one of the greatest manipulative powers women have had over men since perhaps the dawn of time is the ability to withhold sex. From Aristophanes' ancient comedy Lysistrata (about a battle between the sexes that erupts after the women of Greece lock up their chastity belts in protest of the Peloponnesian War) to the Kenyan women's activist groups who even got prostitutes to take part in a sex strike this past April, this practice has long been effective, and deftly illustrates how foolish and base we men can be. While Veit Helmer's bawdy burlesque Absurdistan seems, at first glance, like a fanciful folktale reimagining of Lysistrata, it's actually based upon a real-life Turkish incident that the Tuvalu director had read about in a 2001 newspaper article. Continued reading DVD Of The Week: Absurdistan.

The mistake that people have made about John Cassavetes, both those who fall swooning at the altar of his films and those who find them overwrought, irritating and indulgent, is in considering him as a realist. A mere realist. Cassavetes' work may look realistic, spontaneous and controlled in the moment by emotional typhoons, but this is not your Italian granddaddy's neo-realist peasant drama or anything like the new-ish introverted realism coming in thick bolts out of the global cameras of the Dardennes, Jia, Tsai, Reygadas, Costa, etc. The only Cassavetes movie that was truly improvised was his first, "Shadows" (1959); after that, the scripts were fleshed out in grueling detail through rehearsals, and what grumpy Hollywood turks like Sean Penn and Vincent Gallo have seen as letting the actor's id run free in a psychodramatic hothouse of booze and childish regression -- cutting through the bullshit and getting to the reality...

• What do these films have in common?         They were past recipients of the award handed out by the Sundance Institute. This yearâ€.s crop sees filmmakers from all over the world (a couple of worthy candidates that I've had the chance to see). The twelve finalists for the 2006 Sundance/Nhk International Filmmakers Awards are: Europe: Veit Helmer / Azerbaijan Dream (Germany)â€. When a remote village loses its water supply, two young lovers find themselves caught in a battle of the sexes. Their hope to consummate their love is thwarted as the women of the town declare a â€.no sex strikeâ€. until their water supply returns. Born in Hanover in 1968, Veit Helmer began making award-winning short films as a teenager. After attending the Academy of Television & Film in Munich, he set up his production company in Berlin and made his first feature Tuvalu in 1998, which received the Fipresci prize

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