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Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson, Jr. are back for more cops-and-criminals action in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” the sequel to the 2018 heist thriller that’s opening January 10 and now has an official trailer you can watch below.

For cinephiles, you can expect more muscular filmmaking from director Christian Gudegast and more odd slips of Butler’s Scottish brogue into random lines of dialogue. And this time with Salvatore Esposito, star of the “Gomorrah” series who “Fargo” fans will also remember as a Fascist thug on Season 4 of the FX show. is tracking down Donnie Wilson (Jackson), who escaped to Europe and is planning another heist.”)

You can also expect something else: Because this “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” trailer has been released, German arthouse auteur Christian Petzold, director of such moving, thoughtful festival hits as “Phoenix,” “Undine,” and “Afire,” is probably very happy right now.

He’s an avowed...

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Oscar hopeful The Seed of the Sacred Fig has won the sixth edition of the Arab Critics‘ Award for European Films, a joint initiative between European Film Promotion (Efp) and the Arab Cinema Center (Acc).

The drama, produced by Germany’s Run Way Pictures in co-production with Parallel45, Arte France Cinéma, was among 22 European-produced films in the running for the award, voted on by 89 critics from 15 Arab countries,

Taking inspiration from Iran’s Woman Life Freedom protests, the film revolves around a devout man who is promoted to the position of investigating judge at the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, just as his daughters become swept up in the pro-equal rights and democracy movement.

The award was announced on the fringes of Egypt’s El Gouna International Film Festival. Rasoulof could not attend in person, but sent greetings via a video message, while producer Mani Tilgner...

Disney may have made waves with last year's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, but the entertainment juggernaut isn't the only one obsessed with lovestruck creatures of the sea. Before Halle Bailey mesmerized audiences with her dazzling performance in the story that jumpstarted Disney's animated renaissance of the 90s, acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold delivered his own fairy tale romance with 2020's Undine. An adaptation of the popular myth by the same name, the film follows a sea nymph in contemporary Berlin who must love a man to become human but also kill that man if he is unfaithful, resulting in a far darker, more realistic take on the classic mermaid storyline.

Christian Petzold’s latest feature marks another collaboration with actress Paula Beer. It’s their fourth film together.

Petzold will direct “Miroirs No. 3,” which just began production in Germany. The film centers on an aspiring pianist, Laura (Beer), whose life is upended when her boyfriend is killed in a car crash. Laura, who was also in the wreck, wanders into the house (and life) of a family of strangers who offer to take care of her. Their motivations turn out to not be as simple as they first appear.

Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, and Enno Trebs co-star.

Metrograph Pictures is distributing the feature in the U.S. The Match Factory negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers and is handling worldwide sales.

“We could not be more excited to be working on this film and collaborating with Christian Petzold, a truly incredible and one-of-a-kind filmmaker,” David Laub, head of Metrograph Pictures,...

Christian Petzold’s new drama Miroirs No. 3 has struck a North American distribution deal with Metrograph Pictures just ahead of its production start in Germany.

Marking the fourth feature collaboration for the renowned German filmmaker and actress Paula Beer, the film will be released next year. The Match Factory negotiated the deal on behalf of the filmmakers and is handling worldwide sales.

Miroirs No. 3 centers on the aspiring pianist, Laura (Beer), whose life is upended when she is in a car crash with her boyfriend who is killed. Laura subsequently wanders into the house and life of a family of strangers, who offer to take care of her, but their motivations turn out to not be as simple as they first appear.

Also starring Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs, the film is produced by Schramm Film Koerner Weber Kaiser, in co-production with Zdf and Arte. Its financiers included Filmförderungsanstalt,...

On a streak like few other directors working today, Christian Petzold’s mesmerizing, humorous Rohmer-esque drama Afire was the finest film of last year. The German director is now swiftly beginning his next project, set to kick off production this spring.

Miroirs No. 3 will mark Petzold’s fourth collaboration with Paula Beer following Transit, Undine, and Afire. Beer will play “a young music student who has to restructure her life when her boyfriend dies in a car crash in the countryside,” Screen Daily notes in an update that it’s received funding from Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, while also receiving backing from the state ministry for culture and media (Bkm) and script funding from the German Federal Film Board (Ffa).

The feature’s produced by Petzold’s production company Schramm Film Koerner Weber Kaiser. We also dug up an expanded, translated synopsis: “The young piano student Emily from Berlin is...

Christian Petzold’s anticipated Miroirs No.3 and Kaouther Ben Hania’s epic love story Mimesi are among the 19 projects awarded a total funding of almost €3.5m by Germany’s Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) at the second funding session of 2024.

Miroirs No.3 will star Paula Beer in her fourth collaboration with Petzold after Transit, Undine and Afire. She will play a young music student who has to restructure her life when her boyfriend dies in a car crash in the countryside.

The film, which is being produced by Petzold’s production company Schramm Film Koerner Weber Kaiser, received €500,000 in production funding from Mbb.

Mermaid fairy tales have enjoyed lasting popularity since Andersen's “The Little Sea Maid” and La Motte-Fouqué's “Undine”. Recent (unequal) reboots can further attest to this enduring appeal. Nothing surprising when considering the universality of these legendary creatures across civilizations and times. As for Japanese folklore, the Ningyo has gained a significant prominence not long ago through Miyazaki's “Ponyo” (2008). Just a decade later, the director of the celebrated “Mind Game” (2004), Masaaki Yuasa, developed his own rendition, this time in the form of a coming-of-age narrative.

on Amazon by clicking on the image below

Kai Ashimoto, a taciturn and disillusioned middle school student, is raised in a small coastal town by a single father in the handcrafted umbrella shop of his grandfather, a retired fisherman. After being exposed for posting music demos online, he agrees to join his classmates, the wannabe Yuho and the carefree Kunio, in a rock band named Seiren,...

[Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Passages.”]

Franz Rogowski’s intense and offbeat appeal gets its purest expression in the despairing polycule at the center of Ira Sachs’ “Passages.” In the Euro-chic romantic drama that recalls Mike Nichols’ “Closer” through the unsentimental lens of a Maurice Pialat film, the German dancer-turned-actor plays solipsistic, emotionally arrested filmmaker Tomas Freibur. On the eve of wrapping his latest film, he strays from his taciturn husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) and into the arms of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who, when Tomas later tells her he’s in love with her, replies, “You must say that a lot.”

Rogowski is a physically striking performer, here in great shape in this film after withering as a gay prisoner post-World War II for his European Film Award-nominated turn in 2021’s “Great Freedom.” His filmography has acquainted him closely with the world’s great filmmakers, from Michael Haneke to Terrence Malick (“A Hidden Life”) and Christian Petzold...

Kilian Riedhof’s “Stella. A Life.,” which has its world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival, tells the tragic, fact-based story of Stella Goldschlag, a young Jewish woman in Berlin who, in order to survive, cooperates with the Gestapo to betray other Jews.

The film stars Paula Beer, who won the awards for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival and the European Film Awards for “Undine” in 2020, as well as the award for best young actor or actress at Venice in 2016 for “Frantz.”

Riedhof came across Goldschlag’s story around 20 years ago in a newspaper: “The photo of a blond, beautiful woman, very lively, on Kurfürstendamm in the middle of Berlin – for me it was a very modern woman.”

Headlined “The Blond Poison,” the article told the story of Goldschlag’s role as a Gestapo informant who betrayed hundreds of people, including friends and acquaintances.

“Though I was deeply shocked,...

“Stella. A Life.,” which stars Berlinale best actress award-winner Paula Beer, has been sold to France, Scandinavia and Australia. The film will have a market screening at Toronto Film Festival, and will have its world premiere with a Gala Screening at the Zurich Film Festival.

Kinovista has taken distribution rights in France, with a theatrical release set for Jan. 17, in a deal negotiated by sales agency Global Screen. Further deals were closed with Mis. Label for Scandinavia and Moving Story for Australia.

The film had previously been sold to Spain (Twelve Oaks Pictures), Portugal (Films 4 You), Latin America (Cdi), Japan (The Klockworx), South Korea (Mediasoft) and Taiwan (Eagle Intl.), as well as for worldwide inflight rights.

Set in Berlin during World War II and inspired by a true story, the film focuses on Stella Goldschlag, who dreams of a career as a jazz singer. When the Gestapo arrests her,...

When Franz Rogowski tries to pinpoint the moment he went from being a struggling unknown to an in-demand art house star — the 37-year-old German actor is still basking in critical acclaim for his performances in Ira Sachs’ Passages alongside Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well

as Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin festival sleeper Disco Boy and will be walking the Lido red carpet with Giorgio Diritti’s Venice competition title Lubo — he goes back to Berlin 2018.

“That was the year I had a double pack: Two films in competition, with [Christian Petzold’s] Transit and [Thomas Stuber’s] In the Aisles,” says Rogowski, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via a shaky Zoom connection from France, where he’s spending a few days after wrapping his latest, Bird from American Honey director Andrea Arnold.

“I was also one of the European Shooting Stars that year. So it was a bit of a turning point.

Words like "sexy," "realistic," and "heart-wrenching" come to mind when thinking about American filmmaker Ira Sachs' new Paris-set drama Passages, featuring powerhouse performances by Ben Whishaw (No Time to Die), Adèle Exarchopoulos (so memorable in the LGBTQ+ hit Blue Is the Warmest Color), and Franz Rogowski (Undine). Without giving away too much, this beast of a love-triangle drama will subvert your expectations and leave you wanting more by the film's conclusion — and that's a good thing.

We recently caught up with Sachs, who dished about injecting cinema-vérité components into his new film, and what it was like working with Hollywood heavyweights like Whishaw. There's a lot to analyze and unpack in Passages, so it was a delight getting the inside scoop on the film's production behind-the-scenes.

A Film About Transition

Filmmaker Tomas (Rogowski) and artist Martin (Whishaw) are married and living in Paris. Isn't that the dream? However, when one...

Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on “Not a Word,” which will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. The cast is led by Maren Eggert, who won the best acting award at the Berlin Film Festival for “I’m Your Man.”

The film is written and directed by Hanna Slak, whose credits include the Slovenian Oscar entry “The Miner,” and was lensed by Claire Mathon, the cinematographer of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “Saint-Omer,” “Stranger by the Lake” and “Spencer.”

Eggert plays ambitious musician and conductor Nina. When her teenage son, Lars, has a strange accident at school, she decides to take a break from city life and together they head to their vacation home on an island on the rugged Atlantic coast. Bound in silence, their already brittle relationship is pushed to the edge.

Jona Levin Nicolai co-stars as the provocative teenage son while Maryam Zaree,...

Gaspar Noé, the French director known for his provocative and experimental films, has announced his next project. The film, which is still untitled, will star Cate Blanchett and Franz Rogowski as the lead actors. The film is currently in pre-production and Noé is scouting locations in Putignano, Italy.

Noé is one of the most acclaimed and controversial filmmakers of his generation. His films, such as “Irreversible”, “Enter the Void” and “Climax”, have explored themes of violence, sexuality, death and transcendence with a distinctive visual style and narrative structure. His latest film, “Vortex”, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, was a departure from his previous works. It focused on an elderly couple facing their mortality in a realistic and intimate way.

Casper Noe DVD Picks

Blanchett and Rogowski are both versatile and talented actors who have worked with some of the best directors in the world. Blanchett is a...

Update: Unfortunately, we’ve heard from Gaspar Noé that the casting update is incorrect. We’ll stay tuned for official updates on his next project.

After exploring sex, drugs, and death in his three previous features, where Gaspar Noé will head next is unknown. However, today we’ve learned he’ll likely be doing it with two of the greatest actors working today.

Following up 2021’s Vortex, the Paris-based Argentine director is now scouting for his next project in Putignano, Italy and, if one of his friends is to be believed, he has cast the formidably fierce pairing of Cate Blanchett and Franz Rogowski to star in the film.

While no other details have been unveiled, it will mark the first time the thespians from the school of Malick will work together as Blanchett comes off some of the best notices of her career following Tár and Rogowski is on...

Love in the time of...forest fires? How's that for a unique spin on Gabriel García Márquez's classic novel? Here we're talking about Christian Petzold's acclaimed new film, Afire, about two couples who fall in love during a summer getaway along the Baltic Sea's coast as Mother Nature slowly scorches the earth around them. Afire succeeds on many levels, so it's no wonder why the film took home the Grand Jury prize at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

We recently caught up veteran filmmaker Petzold, who also wrote Afire in addition to directing it. He discussed the story's unique origins, teaming up with actress Paula Beer for multiple projects, and what else he's working on.

Ditching Dystopia, Going with Summertime

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc across the world. They say you should "write what you know," so it's no wonder these tough times have led to...

Few directors boast the consistent excellence of German auteur Christian Petzold. The puckish filmmaker got on Zoom from New York to unwind some of the surprises in Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner “Afire,” his tenth feature and third to star Paula Beer.

It started out being called “The Lucky Ones.” “I love this title,” he told IndieWire during a recent interview. “But it was forbidden, because there was a wave of copyright problems.” When he came up with “The Red Sky,” referring to the film’s wildfire encroaching on his trio of Baltic Sea vacationers, “This was also forbidden for use. They said the word ‘afire’ and I said, ‘it sounds good.'”

Petzold was working on adapting a dystopian novel during the pandemic, but when he contracted Covid, he put it aside. “To erase-delete, to delete it out of my mind, this was the hard work on ‘Afire,...

“Do you see anything that’s happening around you?” urges Paula Beer’s Nadja to Thomas Schubert’s frustrated writer Leon in writer-director Christian Petzold’s Afire. As he strives and struggles to complete his second novel, which bears the ludicrous name Club Sandwich, Leon puts on his blinders to both the interpersonal dynamics of the youthful coterie assembled at a Baltic Sea cabin as well as to the forest fires raging inland. If there’s any temptation to conflate Leon’s writer’s block with Petzold’s own position outside the film, Nadja’s exhortation ought to clear up some of the confusion.

Petzold has long stood at the vanguard of the loose filmmaking collective known as the Berlin School. Along with his academically minded peers, he seeks to look at how Germany’s turbulent history ripples through contemporary German life. Rather than craft cinematic fantasies, flattening those tensions...

Few movies this year will be as quietly sizzling as German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” a novelistic and sophisticated character study that kindles inside a chamber piece, as languid as a relaxed summer day and as heartbreaking as the end of a short-lived summer love.

The unhurried, romantic undertones of “Afire” are elements we came to expect from Petzold’s recent cinema, through the likes of “Barbara,” “Phoenix,” “Transit,” and “Undine” where affecting melancholy runs freely and cinematically alongside a dose of tragedy. This vibe is more or less the atmosphere of “Afire,” which follows two friends—Thomas Schubert’s grumpily petty novelist Leon and Langston Uibel’s chipper photographer/artist Felix—as they head to Felix’s family summer home by the Baltic coast for a seaside break, and maybe for some inspiration and light work on the side.

You could be forgiven to think you’re perhaps...

Afire.Paula Beer has said that she wants to avoid any clear overlaps with her personal life as she’s preparing a character. To her credit, there’s something about her acting that eschews biographical readings: she invites us into the present as her characters are experiencing it. Beer, who was born in Mainz, Germany, has been acting since she was a child; she was 14 when she stepped onto the set of her first movie, Chris Kraus’s The Poll Diaries (2010). Just a few years later, she won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for her turn as a young widow in François Ozon’s World War I drama Frantz (2016)—a performance that showed how, even in the framework of a fairly traditional romantic drama, Beer could hint subtly at her character’s interiority beyond what was on the page.From there, it was a quick jump to the cycle of films...

Christian Petzold’s latest feature, “Afire,” takes a blacklight to the artistic ego and to the trope of the manic pixie dream girls who supposedly enshrine it.

The invigorated spin on what is typically that sort of character in a movie like “Afire” is realized in this deceptively light, Eric Rohmer-esque affair by Paula Beer. The German director Petzold discovered the 28-year-old German actress with her performance in French filmmaker Francois Ozon’s black-and-white World War I-era drama “Frantz,” for which Petzold supplied German translation services. They’ve since collaborated on postmodern World War II drama “Transit,” water nymph allegory “Undine,” and now this moving and bitterly hilarious film about an insecure, pretentious fiction writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert) and the alluring woman Nadja whom he’s sharing a summer vacation home with.

With Petzold and his former creative partner Nina Hoss on an indefinite and mysterious hiatus as...

Pleasure to Burn: Petzold Stokes the Flames in Diffident Drama

A fragile male ego finds itself dismantled in Afire (Roter Himmel), the second chapter in Christian Petzold’s elemental themed trilogy, following the aquatic infused Undine (2020). Smaller in scale, though not necessarily substance, than Petzold’s greatest hits, he also reunites for the third time with Paula Beer, assuming the centrifugal focal point previously occupied by Nina Hoss in the majority of his earlier works.

There’s also an expression of the experimental this time around, focusing on a trio of intelligent creatives who are at a specific transitional precipice during one quiet summer soon to be consumed by a raging forest fire.…...

I admitted upfront, still adjusting my seat in Criterion’s New York office, that I don’t really know how to interview actors––what their processes and points are, how they make decisions, what vocabulary puts it all into place. But the person I’m admitting it to is Paula Beer, perhaps the world’s most exciting actress. Certainly the greatest under-30 performer, someone who’s impressed so much in such short time.

It’d be easy to suggest Christian Petzold––her director on Transit, Undine, and most recently Afire––as key reason, but the filmmaker’s collaborative process has allowed Beer opportunity to imprint an authorial voice. This interview thus suggested opportunity to find what makes her, only an occasional interview subject, tick: her professional background, Afire‘s more sensitive stretches, and the peril of making career-based choices.

The Film Stage: I’ve spoken to Petzold a couple times...

It’s February morning in Berlin. “I’m a little out of consciousness,” Christian Petzold explains, a tad frazzled but keen to talk––and Petzold likes to talk. His latest film Afire had premiered the night before and the party had slipped into the wee hours. “There’s Thomas, he was at the party till 6 a.m.,” Petzold explains as his leading man shuffles by, fresh from a round of junkets and looking just a little shellshocked.

That look is one that viewers will soon be familiar with when Afire is released this week. Taking place in a secluded house by the Baltic Sea, it shows Petzold at his most sultry and melodramatic. The drama stars Thomas Schubert as Leon, a writer struggling to follow up on the success of his first novel. He travels with a friend for a summer getaway but becomes infatuated with a woman who shares the house with them.

Christian Petzold, the director of the well-timed summer movie Afire with Anne-Katrin Titze: “I’m really sure that we don’t have summer movies. The Americans have summer movies, the French have summer movies.”

Christian Petzold’s slow-burning Afire, shot by Hans Fromm, stars Paula Beer, Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt.

Nadja (Paula Beer) with Devid (Enno Trebs), Felix (Langston Uibel), and Leon (Thomas Schubert) in Afire

A scene in Leo McCarey’s An Affair To Remember (with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr); Sophie Calle’s Voir La Mer and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs; Astrid Lindgren; a Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre touch; Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob and Margarethe von Trotta’s Jahrestage series; Johan Wolfgang von Goethe; a Nanni Moretti quote; meeting Paul Dano’s Wildlife cinematographer Diego García (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery Of Splendor) in Tel Aviv; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak,...

Christian Petzold finds himself somewhere between the lands of late Éric Rohmer and vintage Noah Baumbach with his new romantic drama, “Afire.”

The German director of serious war-historical films like “Transit” and “Phoenix,” which bent time both in terms of their cinematic references and their manipulations of stylistic anachronisms, gets less serious with this film about four people vacationing, swapping beds, and surrounded by forest fires. Sideshow and Janus Films release “Afire” this summer on July 14 — it’s a perfectly lovely, summer kind of thing despite its tragic underpinnings. Watch the trailer for “Afire” below.

Petzold conceived of “Afire” during the pandemic — though he shot afterward on-location in Germany — after feeling weary of bad news and so postponing another darker project for this deceptively lighter one instead. The film centers on a seaside vacation, when longtime best friends Leon (Thomas Schubert), a pretentious fiction writer struggling to crank out his new book,...

Christian Petzold’s Silver Bear winner “Afire” has received a new trailer.

The drama follows writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) who are surprised by a mysterious young woman named Nadja (Paula Beer) staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home by the Baltic Sea.

Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and, with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. As Nadja and Leon grow closer, an encroaching forest fire threatens the group. Meanwhile, tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.

The movie stars Thomas Schubet, Paula Beer, Enno Trebs, Langston Uibel and Matthias Brandt.

“Afire” won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where it also garnered solid reviews. The film is being released Stateside by Sideshow and Janus Films — which also released “Drive My Car...

With Cannes done and dusted and the heavy-hitting autumn quartet of Venice, Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF still a few months off, what’s a film festival fan to do during the dog days of summer? With New York City’s own Tribeca Festival now firmly ensconced in the summer months after moving off its traditional spring dates in 2021, movie lovers both in the city and beyond can enjoy the annual event’s prodigious programming, thanks to a combination of in-person and virtual programming.

The 2023 edition will kick off June 7 with the North American premiere of “Kiss the Future,” a documentary following the story of a community of underground musicians and creatives throughout the nearly four-year-long siege of Sarajevo, as well as the 1997 U2 concert celebrating the liberation of the Bosnian capital.

A special 30th-anniversary screening of “A Bronx Tale” will close the fest on June 17. After the movie, the film...

It’s based on a true story, set in Germany’s Weimar Republic in 1933.

UK production, financing and sales studio Anton is launching world sales at Cannes on Niels Arden Oplev’s upcoming thriller, Thirty Three.

Danish filmmaker Oplev, who directed the original version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as well TV series Vikings: Valhalla and Mr Robot, will helm the feature with a cast including Mark Strong and Paula Beer, who won the Berlianle Silver Bear for her role in Christian Petzold’s Undine. The screenplay is by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford.

It is is based...

John C. Reilly will preside over the Un Certain Regard Jury at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, running May 16-27.

He will be joined by French director and screenwriter Alice Winocour, German actress Paula Beer, French-Cambodian director and producer Davy Chou and Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne.

“I have had so many life changing moments at the Festival de Cannes, from my miraculous first trip with Paul Thomas Anderson to celebrating my 50th birthday from the Palais stage! So to be chosen as the President of Un Certain Regard Jury is truly such an incredible honor,” said Reilly.

“Many of the films I have been lucky to appear in have been selected by the Festival over these many years and nothing feels as special as being invited to this amazing annual gathering of the very best cinema has to offer the world. I look forward to helping launch another generation of...

French director and writer Audrey Diwan, who won the Venice Golden Lion in 2021 for her second feature Happening, has been announced as jury president for this year’s edition of Cannes Critics’ Week.

The parallel Cannes section devoted to emerging talents and first and second features will unfold from May 17 to 25 this year.

“Born in 1980, she belongs to this new generation of female filmmakers whose sharpness and formal freedom are reinventing the codes and redefining the boundaries of international cinema,” Cannes Critics’ Week said of the director.

Diwan will be joined on the jury by Portuguese director of photography Rui Poças (Tabu, Zama, Will-o’-the-Wisp), German actor, choreographer and dancer Franz Rogowski (A Hidden Life, Undine, Disco Boy).

Further jury members comprise Indian journalist, curator and advisor to the programming of the Berlin Film Festival, Meenakshi Shedde as well as American film programmer Kim Yutani, Sundance’s Film Festival programming director.

Arianna Bocco, IFC Films President, is out at the distributor, Deadline has confirmed.

The shocking news to the NYC indie world comes within days after the 17-year IFC vet was feted at the New York Women in Film & Television (Nywift)’s flagship fundraising event, the annual Muse Awards gala.

Bocco will be replaced in the interim by IFC Head of Acquisitions Scott Shooman. The Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group and CBS Films vet joined last year. The search for a new long-term replacement is underway. Talk about a revolving door at IFC.

We’re still sorting through what went down here. In the meantime, Bocco posted the following statement on social media, “I have big news to share! After much thought, I have stepped down from my post as President of IFC Films to pursue other opportunities. I’m so proud of the IFC Films team I’ve worked...

Afire (2023).In February, Christian Petzold’s new film Afire premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it received the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. Set on the Baltic coast of Germany, the story follows novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert), who has escaped the city with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), intending to put the finishing touches on his second book. Instead, the two become romantically enmeshed with Nadja (Paula Beer), a literary scholar who spends the summer selling ice cream, and the local lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs). Unlike the others, Leon cannot embrace the season’s lighthearted self-abandonment and wanders sleeplessly through blue nights without darkness. All the while, forest fires blaze in the distance. At first, they only reach the protagonists as rumors, sounds of helicopters, and glowing red skies (the German title of the film means “Red Sky”), until the threat finally encroaches upon the immediate forests.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights for German director Christian Petzold’s new film Afire, following its award-winning world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

The work was feted with Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize on Sunday evening (Feb 25) by an international jury led by Kristen Stewart.

The comedy-drama revolves around four very different young people who are thrown together unexpectedly in a remote holiday home by the Baltic Sea.

In the rainless, heat of the summer, sparks begin to fly among the group as the parched forests surrounding the house also start to ignite.

News of the acquisition comes hot on the heels of the announcement by Sideshow and Janus Films on Tuesday that they had taken North American rights for the Mexican competition title Tótem.

The New York-based distribution partners said of Afire: “Christian Petzold has consistently been one of the most thrilling and surprising filmmakers.

Exclusive: The Match Factory has unveiled a slew of deals for German director Christian Petzold’s Berlin Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner Afire.

The summertime comedy-drama, which world premiered in Berlin’s main competition, revolves around a disparate group of people thrown together in a holiday home on Germany’s Baltic coast against a backdrop of advancing forest fires.

European deals include France (Les Films du Losange), Italy (Wanted), Spain (Filmin), Benelux (September Film), Switzerland (Filmcoopi), Austria (Stadtkino), Scandinavia (Future Film), Poland (Aurora Films), Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia (Vertigo), Ex-Yugoslavia (Demiurg), Romania (Independenta), Baltics (A-One).

Outside of Europe, the picture has been snapped up for South Korea (M&m International), Taiwan (Light Year Images), Turkey (Bir Film), Brazil (Imovision) and Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (Ifa Cinema).

A North American distribution deal is also closed and due to be announced soon. Further territories are currently in negotiation.

Sometimes, the gap between new releases and current cinema can look quite wide. For this week’s column, I don’t have a hot take on “Cocaine Bear,” except to say that when movies like this drive so much hype, it sure makes everything else look like a tough sell. Beyond that B-movie opening, this week also marks one month since the Sundance Film Festival, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the buzziest titles still don’t have distribution.

This might sound like a broken record, but the problem goes well beyond reticent buyers, as the way these movies get made plays an even more critical role in what happens to them. In this case, the slew of Sundance stragglers should be a wakeup call for a smarter approach to making mid-sized American cinema.

Part of the current hesitation around Sundance premieres stems from the...

Writing recently about the introduction of video umpires in baseball, of all things, Zach Helfand was skeptical: “accuracy is not the same as enjoyment,” he wrote, “baseball is meant to kill time, not maximize it.” The best films of German director Christian Petzold do both, though you sense his heart might belong to the latter. Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. It stars Thomas Schubert as a struggling writer who travels with a friend to a secluded house near the Baltic Sea. Their car breaks down. They encounter a beautiful woman. Somewhere in the distance, a forest fire rages. Soon, inevitably, another burns inside.

Petzold might be the best director of melodramas working today. At their best, his films are about the closest thing to a guarantee of mystery and romance that contemporary cinema has to offer. And though their pleasures are perfectly enjoyable al fresco,...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Sideshow and Janus Films releases the film in select theaters on Friday, July 14, with further expansion to follow.

“Something is wrong,” says tortured author Leon (Thomas Schubert) in an uncommon bout of observation. Say what you will about this blinkered sourpuss, but his assessment, in the opening moments to Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” is right on target. Seconds later, a car battery will explode, stranding the young novelist and his travel mate Felix (Langston Uibel) in a coastal forest beset by fires, echoing in animal howls, and ever-so far from the family home where the pair intend to spend a quiet artistic retreat. So credit to Leon for this early feat of recognition — he’ll never be so perceptive again.

Gently dunking on a writer of near-apocalyptic pomposity over the course of a languid seaside vacation, Petzold...

If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny, many-layered new film “Afire,” is the latest in a long line of onscreen scribes to learn that lesson. But over the course of a hot, rainless summer by the Baltic coastline, the elusiveness of his imagined masterwork turns out to be far from his greatest problem: Writer’s block spills over into bitter social paralysis, exposing every facet of life he doesn’t yet know how to live, let alone write about. All the while, the surrounding woodsy landscape wilts and scorches, the threat of natural disaster lending an urgent pull to this dry, elegant comedy of manners — so dry,...

Leaving behind the fairy-tale enigma of his last film, Undine, Christian Petzold returns in Afire to the unembellished realism more characteristic of his work, even when he has flirted with genre, from noir to melodrama to Hitchcockian thriller. The German auteur also departs from the densely populated cities that have chiefly been his canvas, dropping his characters into the seemingly tranquil setting of a sleepy beach town on the Baltic Sea and a summer home in idyllic woodlands. But the skies are turning red as forest fires loom closer, ash is raining down and wildlife is fleeing.

The anxiety caused by natural disaster is echoed by the festering self-doubt of the central character, Leon (Thomas Schubert), who has escaped Berlin to work on the manuscript of his new novel, his spirits dampened by the tepid response of his publisher. He’s accompanied by Felix (Langston Uibel), whose family owns the...

Billed as the second installment of an elemental triptych, “Afire” comes after Christian Petzold’s 2020 film “Undine” where Paula Beer gave a Silver Bear-winning performance at Berlinale as the titular character, an urban historian and a mythical water spirit. As if the transition between them needed any smoothing out, the new film also relies on aquatic imagery to reinforce the claustrophobic premonition of smothering fires. Shot on the “German Riviera” (Warnemünde/Rostock on the Baltic coast), Petzold’s latest offering enacts a summer holiday at an idyllic cottage closer to the beach than to any populated dwelling, with sirens wailing, fire engines, and helicopters signaling the impending spread of forest fires.

Continue reading ‘Afire’ Review: Christian Petzold Delivers A Cinematic Miracle Between The Burning Forest & The Sea [Berlin] at The Playlist.

German cinema looks set for a major boom this year with a strong lineup of diverse works that span historical dramas, coming-of-age tales, high-octane nostalgia, animation and sci-fi fun.

The Berlin Film Festival is bowing a muscular selection of local titles, among them “Afire,” by Berlinale mainstay Christian Petzold (“Undine”), screening in competition. The films centers on a group of young people staying at a holiday house near the Baltic Sea during a hot, dry summer, exploring volatile emotions that start to sizzle when a wildfire spreads through the surrounding forest.

Likewise vying for the Golden Bear is Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic “Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey Into the Desert,” starring Vicky Krieps (“Corsage”) as the radical Austrian author. The film examines her relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch and her 1964 journey of self-discovery through the Egyptian desert.

“Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” by Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”) and...

Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski, is “certainly a dream come true.”

But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.

A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.

“I realized that beyond their apparent contradiction, these two worlds had a lot in common, especially when it comes to classical ballet,” the director said, citing “the extreme physical exertion and discipline that they both involve.”

That chance meeting was just a starting point for the film’s complex narrative, which Abbruzese developed at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefondation and during a Clermont-Ferrand Festival residency.

But then the film took 10 years to make.

Kirsten Stewart looked confident, and downright snazzy, as she strode to the platform for her first press conference as jury president of the 2023 Berlin International Festival.

But, stylishly-attired in a tweed Chanel pantsuit with wide trousers and jacket and no shirt underneath, the Twilight and Spencer star confessed that she was nervous of the task ahead.

“Full transparency, I’m kind of shaking,” she said. “I feel, not buckling under [the weight], but I can’t wait who we all ahead at the end of this experience. I’m just ready to be changed by all the films and by all the people around us.”

Stewart said it wasn’t her decision to come to Berlin. “I was shocked they called me,” she said. “[But] it is an enormous opportunity to highlight beautiful things at a time when that is hard to hold.”

Fellow Berlinale juror, actress Golshifteh Farahani, said, so much political upheaval in the world,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSKristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016).The next film directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead) will star Kristen Stewart as…Susan Sontag. Based on Ben Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life, the project will have some hybrid-doc elements, as we might expect from Johnson: according to Screen Daily, Johnson will film an interview with the actress about her preparation for the role at the Berlinale, where Stewart is jury president.Richard Ayoade will direct and star in an adaptation of George Saunders’s The Semplica Girl Diaries, with casting currently underway.New Spanish Cinema luminary Carlos Saura died last week aged 91. His best-known films depicted and critiqued life under the Franco dictatorship, like La Caza...

The movie year has already unleashed a lot of memorable work, from Sundance breakouts to “M3GAN.” But things are about to get a lot more global. Even as a new Marvel movie opens in theaters worldwide, the Berlin International Film Festival begins on Wednesday to offer a whole lot more. Nestled in between Sundance and SXSW, Berlin is like a firehose of international cinema.

More than 200 films from around the world will premiere at the festival this week, many of which are potential discoveries. Berlin premieres sometimes creep into awards consider (this year’s Oscar nominee “The Quiet Girl” premiered there last year) but can also deliver major new works from rising filmmaker talent. Some of the more promising titles from this year’s lineup speak to its versatility. It’s also a valuable European launchpad for Sundance highlights: The festival’s hit “Past Lives” plays in competition.

From its...

Christian Petzold returns to the Berlinale this year with Afire, the second installment of his elemental trilogy following 2020’s water-inspired Undine and preceding a forthcoming film about earth. Afire will reunite Petzold with his frequent collaborator Paula Beer, who will star alongside Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt. The first trailer arrives today from Matchbox Films ahead of Afire‘s Berlin premiere. Per the film’s official synopsis: “Leon and Felix’s plan was to spend the summer together in a holiday home on the Baltic coast. They wanted to be there as friends but also to work—one on his […]

The post Trailer Watch: Christian Petzold’s Afire first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Christian Petzold returns to the Berlinale this year with Afire, the second installment of his elemental trilogy following 2020’s water-inspired Undine and preceding a forthcoming film about earth. Afire will reunite Petzold with his frequent collaborator Paula Beer, who will star alongside Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt. The first trailer arrives today from Matchbox Films ahead of Afire‘s Berlin premiere. Per the film’s official synopsis: “Leon and Felix’s plan was to spend the summer together in a holiday home on the Baltic coast. They wanted to be there as friends but also to work—one on his […]

The post Trailer Watch: Christian Petzold’s Afire first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

"Why is she worried?" "Because of the forest fires." The Match Factory has revealed the first promo trailer for the German romantic drama Afire, the latest movie made by acclaimed German filmmaker Christian Petzold. He is best known for his films Jerichow, Barbara, Phoenix, Transit, and Undine previously, and his latest is also premiering at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival starting this week (hence the new trailer). Afire, also known as Roter Himmel (or Red Sky) in Germany, is about a group of friends staying at a holiday home by the Baltic Sea where emotions run high as the parched forest around them catches fire. It's obviously a love story about Paula Beer, as it seems every single guy in this trailer is madly in love with her. Natürlich. The main cast also includes Thomas Schubert, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs, and Matthias Brandt. Another earnest romantic film about the power of love from Petzold.