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Playtime has acquired international sales rights to Leyla Bouzid’s family drama In A Whisper about three generations of women in Tunisia, and Evi Kalogiropoulou’s Gorgonà about women rising up against the patriarchy at a Greek oil refinery.

Both films are in post-production and Playtime, part of European joint venture Vuelta Group, is launching sales at the EFM.

In A Whisper stars Eya Bouteraa, Hiam Abbass and Marion Barbeau and is about a woman living in Paris who returns home to Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral and sets out to uncover the truth behind his sudden death.

It...

Laure Calamy, the Cesar prizewinning star of “My Lover, My Donkey & I,” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” actor Laurent Lafitte lead the ensemble cast of “The Party’s Over,” a satirical comedy which has been boarded by France TV Distribution ahead of the EFM.

Directed by Antony Cordier (“Gaspard at the Wedding”) the movie also stars Ramzy Bedia (“Asterix & Obelix : The Middle Kingdom”), Élodie Bouchez (“Beating Hearts”), Sami Outalbali (“A Tale of Love and Desire”) and Noée Abita (“Sink or Swim”).

This film is produced by Cheyenne Federation, a well-established banner whose credits include Julien Leclercq’s remake of “The Wage of Fear” which was a hit on Netflix.

The movie revolves around Mehdi, 25, who is invited to spend a quiet summer with his girlfriend Garance and his in-laws in the south of France, and sees their trip turn into chaos after a conflict breaks out between Garance’s...

Cairo-based Mad Distribution has acquired Jonathan Millet’s Critics’ Week opener Ghost Trail from mk2 Films, Somali director Mo Harawe’s Un Certain Regard drama The Village Next To Paradise from Totem Films and Anne-Marie Jacir’s upcoming All Before You for release in the Middle East and North Africa.

They are three of 30 titles secured by Mad Distribution for Mena territories, which also include Saif Hammash’s Palestinian short Deer’s Tooth, selected for La Cinef, and Rayane Mcirdi’s Algerian-French short After The Sun, which plays in Directors’ Fortnight.

The distribution arm of indie studio Mad Solutions plans...

Kaouther Ben Hania will make history for her native Tunisia on Sunday with its first Academy Award if her hotly tipped nominated work Four Daughters triumphs in the Best Documentary category on Sunday.

The director belongs to a generation of Tunisian filmmakers who emerged in the wake of their country’s so-called Jasmine Revolution, which ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early 2011.

Habib Attia, who is one of the original producers on Four Daughters, has been an integral part of this movement too.

The Tunis-based producer has cinema in his blood as the son of late producer Ahmed Bahaeddine Attia, whose credits included Moufida Tlatli’s 1994 breakout The Silences of the Palace, starring Tunisian-Egyptian star Hend Sabry in her first major big screen role.

On finishing his high school studies, Attia headed to his mother’s native Italy to study engineering in Milan, rather than immediately following in his father’s footsteps.

A rare flagship indie producer left on the French market, Bruno Nahon’s Paris-based company Unité is preparing to conquer international audiences with “Rematch,” a period psychological thriller chronicling the historical battle between world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and Ibm’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997.

The sprawling show, directed by Yan England (“The Red Band Society”) and co-created with Nahon and André Gulluni (“Sam”), was commissioned by Arte in France and has already been sold by Federation Studios to major outlets around the world, including HBO Europe for Spain, Portugal, the Nordics, Iceland, Baltics, Central Europe, Greece and the Netherlands. Disney+ has bought first-window rights for the U.K. and will air the show in France after the Arte broadcast.

Nahon, who created Unité a decade ago, has been making bold shows and movies exploring social, religious and political aspects of societies, and has often captured the zeitgeist in the process.

Cairo-based film marketing and distribution outfit Mad Solutions has acquired rights for Arab territories to three films that celebrated their premieres this year at the Cannes and Venice film festivals.

The deals include Fyzal Boulifa’s “The Damned Don’t Cry,” which bowed in the Venice Days sidebar at the Italian fest and will have its Middle East and North Africa premiere at Marrakech before traveling to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival. Also acquired was Rachid Hami’s “For My Country,” a Venice Horizons selection that will have its regional premiere at the Cairo Film Festival.

The company also picked up the rights to Clément Cogitore’s “Sons of Ramses,” which had its world premiere in the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week strand.

“We are delighted to have acquired the distribution rights to three artistically distinguished films in 2022, which is considered the climax of our efforts in...

The Filmonomics course will be led by director of Birds’ Eye View Melanie Iredale and training manager Simone Glover,

Birds’ Eye View, a UK organisation that campaigns to support women and non-binary people in all aspects of film, has named the writers, directors and producers who will take part in the 2022-2023 Filmonomics programme, as part of the Reclaim the Frame x International project.

The UK version of the Filmonomics business training programme for filmmakers from marginalised genders has undergone six iterations under Birds’ Eye View’s leadership. The training is aimed at up-and-coming filmmakers and balances the creative and...

Netflix is launching an incubator to help foster female screenwriters in Egypt.

The U.S. streaming giant has partnered with Sard, a dedicated hub for screenwriters in the Arab world on a writing program called Because She Created.

Its stated goal is training twenty women from outside Cairo and to “expose untapped talent to the creative tools and industry insight needed to advance their creative and professional development,” Netflix said in a statement.

The program is financed by the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity.

Sard was founded by award-winning writer Mariam Naoum in 2016 as a space for aspiring screenwriters to improve their writing skills and unleash their creative potential.

Naoum is a prominent Egyptian screenwriter and social activist whose credits include Kamla Abou Zekry’s Cairo-set ensemble film “One/Zero”; and the TV series “A Girl named Zat,” “Heat Wave” and “The Women’s Prison,” a scathing exploration of the Egyptian prison system,...

At last count, Pyramide is selling the most films (6) which are showing in the Festival and its satellites. Four are in the Official Selections of the Cannes International Film Festival (Cannes Ff Premiere, Cannes Ff Special Screening, and Cannes Ff Un Certain Regard); one is in Critics’ Week / La Semaine de la critique and one is in Directors’ Fortnight/ Quinzaine des realisateurs.

Throughout the festival, we will watch not only their films to report on, but will keep an eye on the sales to some 60 international territories.

Pyramide International is part of the Pyramide Group which is also a domestic distribution company in France (Pyramide Distribution) and a French production company (Pyramide Productions). The company was founded in 1989 by Claudie Cheval, Fabienne Vonier, Francis Boespflug, Louis Malle and Michel Seydoux. Claudie also founded Ace which is still going strong today. (see current blog on Ace in Cannes).

Claudie brought Eric Lagesse into Pyramide International as a young man and, typically for everyone who is involved with Pyramide, he continues to work with them today as their CEO. Claudie was one of the most wonderful, warm and creative women in the business and unfortunately for us all, she died much too soon, on July 30, 1999 at age 48. Claudie set a tone of willing cooperation and support among the French film business colleagues. One can see at a glance when entering the Unifrance umbrella offices how the French international sales agents at the markets cooperate with each other. When reading how films in the Cannes Film Festival and the sidebars seem to be apportioned out to them when the titles are announced and there is no international sales agent attached yet, one surmises that there is a special kind of sharing going on among them.

Pyramide is one of the oldest and most respected of some 450 interntional sales agents. Last year they represented one of my favorite films of the festival, the Critics’ Week film A Tale of Love and Desire. Please read my blog about it here. The French government support of film as a cultural heritage allows the French sales agents to serve as the best examples of agents for the 7th Art to all other countries. As a world sales agent, Pyramide International has deliberately focused on the “film d’auteur” and promotes international sales of young directors.

As distributors in France itself as well as international sales agents, they also can boast of one of the top acquisitions executive in the business, Christine Ravet buys the films the French public lines up to see at their theaters as well as those that are sold internationally.

This year’s Cannes titles are described here:

Cannes Ff Premiere Dodo directed by Panos H. Koutras is a coproduction of Greece, France, and Belgium.

Dodo directed by Panos H. Koutras

Cannes Ff Special Screenings My Imaginary Country/ Mi país imaginario directed by Patricio Guzmán is a production of Chile. Sales have already been made for UK and Ireland to New Wave; Benelux to Cineart; Italy to I Wonder, Ex-Yugo to Discovery.

My Imaginary Country/ Mi país imaginario directed by Patricio Guzmán

Cannes Ff Un Certain Regard Metronom is eligible for the Camera d’Or as it is the third film, but the first fiction feature of director Alexandru Belc of Romania.

Metronom is eligible for the Camera d’Or as it is the third film, but first fiction feature of director Alexandru Belc

Cannes Ff Un Certain Regard The Worst Ones/Les pires is also eligible for the Camera d’Or. It is directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret of France.

Directors’ Fortnight Harkis/ Les Harkis directed by Philippe Faucon of France tells the story set during the Algerian War 1954–1962, when impoverished young Algerian men known as “Harkis” volunteered to join the French Army.

Critics’ Week in Competition The Pack/ La jauría directed by Colombian Andrés Ramírez Pulido is a coproduction of Colombia and France. It tells of a country boy, Eliú, incarcerated́ in an experimental juvenile correction center in the heart of the Colombian jungle after he committed a crime with his friend El Mono. Ordered to perform manual labour and undergo intensive group therapy, Eliú discovers that El Mono has been transferred to the same center, bringing with him a past that Eliú is trying to escape.Pulido’s feature directorial debut follows a distinguished track record in short films that saw Damiana premiere in Competition in Cannes in 2017 a year after El Edén played in the Berlinale.

And in the Marche: I Love Greece. And who doesn’t?...

“Peaceful,” Emmanuelle Bercot’s Cesar-winning melodrama which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has landed domestic distribution with New York-based banner Distrib US.

Sold by Studiocanal, the movie is headlined by Benoit Magimel and Catherine Deneuve (pictured). Magimel, who won the Cesar Award for best actor — beating fellow nominee Adam Driver — stars as a man dying of cancer. “Peaceful” world premiered out of competition at Cannes where it earn warm reviews.

Distrib US has also acquired “A Tale of Love and Desire” and “Les Inde Galantes,” which are both screening this week at the Film at Lincoln Center as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in New York. The event is being co-organized by Unifrance, the French film and TV advocacy org.

“Les Inde Galantes,” directed by Philippe Béziat, is a documentary following 30 dancers reprising Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque masterpiece on the stage of Paris’s legendary Opéra Bastille.

Update: Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions) leads nominations for the 2022 César Awards, France’s equivalent to the Oscar. The Venice premiere scored 15 mentions, followed by Leos Carax’s Annette, which opened the Cannes Film Festival last year and has 11 nominations. They are followed by Valérie Lemercier’s Aline, the musical dramedy inspired by the life of Céline Dion which also debuted in Cannes and has 10 nods. (Scroll down for the full list of nominations.)

Interestingly, the three films that France shortlisted for the International Feature Academy Award race came in on the lower end. Cédric Jiminez’s Bac Nord (The Stronghold) took seven nominations, while Audrey Diwan’s Venice Golden Lion winner Happening settles for four, tying Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane.

The latter was France’s eventual entry to the Oscars, but did not make the shortlist. It was also shut out of the Best Film category at the Césars today.

Throughout the pandemic that has ravaged Central America, the region’s most prominent film event, the Panama International Film Festival (Iff Panama), has forged on virtually in its continued bid to bolster local projects and talent.

To mark its 10th anniversary this year, a smaller hybrid edition kicks off on Dec. 3 with “Plaza Catedral,” Panama’s submission to the Oscars, and wraps Dec. 5 with Michel Franco’s “Sundown,” starring Tim Roth, which competed for the Golden Lion at Venice.

“We couldn’t pass up celebrating our 10th anniversary, even if it were on a smaller scale this year,” said festival director Pituka Ortega Heilbron, who cites encouragement from the international and local industry as key reasons to push onward, notwithstanding the setbacks from the pandemic.

“We’re still very much in the mind of the industry, especially Central America,” she asserted, pointing out that two films spawned by the festival’s rough cuts sidebar,...

Blue Monday Productions has boarded “Cora,” the feature directorial debut of visual artist and filmmaker Evi Kalogiropoulou, which was awarded at the Rotterdam Film Festival’s CineMart and the Cannes Cinefondation’s Atelier earlier this year.

“Cora” is the story of two working-class women fighting for freedom and their own identity against a dystopian patriarchal society. It follows the director’s short film, “Motorway 65,” which played in competition in Cannes last year.

Speaking to Variety at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Kalogiropoulou said she drew inspiration for her feature debut during an artistic residency in the working-class town of Elefsina, where local women shared stories about the struggles they faced, especially as recent waves of immigration altered the social dynamic of the community. “For me the biggest question to explore is how it feels for a woman to be working and living in an area with so much contradiction and struggle,...

The first experience of lust often forms the basis of a coming-of-age story. Given that it’s a subgenre that is hardly underpopulated, in any given year, we tend to see quite a few of those awkward first fumblings, those early embarrassments, those clumsy hormonal attempts at seduction. But rarely are they outlined with the same sincerity and sweetness as in as the cooling influence of his reserve and cultural values meets the incoming weather front of a hot new passion.

The first thunderclap happens the moment Ahmed (“Sex Education’s” Sami Outalbali in a beautifully soulful performance) lays eyes on Farah (Zbeida Belhajamor) in the halls of the Sorbonne, where both are taking a course in comparative literature. It doesn’t help that the reading for the class, taught by Professor Morel (Aurélia Petit), is almost exclusively early Arabic erotic poetry, in which Ahmed, the French-born son of Algerian immigrants,...

Colcoa Classics to stage Bertrand Tavernier tribute.

The North American Premiere of Emmanuel Carrère’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight opener Between Two Worlds starring Juliette Binoche will open the in-person 25th Colcoa French film and series festival on November 1.

The event runs until November 7 and will screen 55 films and series at the DGA Theatre in Hollywood with a Colcoa Classics tribute to Bertrand Tavernier.

The closing films are Xavier Giannoli’s recent Venice Film Festival Lost Illusions and Arthur Harari’s 2021 Cannes Un Certain Regard opener Onoda, 10,000 Nights In The Jungle.

The feature line-up includes Leyla Bouzid’s A Tale Of Love And Desire...

Emmanuel Carrère’s Ouistreham (Between Two Worlds) has been set as the opening film of the 25th Colcoa French Film and Series Festival. The anniversary edition of the City of Lights, City of Angels fest kicks off on November 1 with the Juliette Binoche-starrer that opened Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last July before winning the Audience Award at San Sebastian. Cohen Media Group releases in the U.S. in 2022.

Colcoa is running as a live week-long event taking place at the DGA Theater Complex from November 1-7. This year’s edition is dedicated to late filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier and will pay homage to him in the Classics section. The full program will include 55 films and series, as well as 19 shorts. Thirty of the films will compete for the Colcoa Cinema Awards and the Colcoa High School Screenings program will also return, welcoming 3,000 high school students from across Southern California.

Two...

“A Tale of Love and Desire” is the story of a young Arab man in Paris whose first love is accompanied by the discovery of a very different Arab culture than the one he knows, one that is sensual and liberating.

The film screens as part of the Zurich Film Festival’s New World View section, which this year is celebrating a new generation of Tunisian filmmakers.

In making her sophomore feature, Leyla Bouzid says she wanted to tell the story of a young man experiencing his first love and first sexual experience. The idea, she says, was “to propose another vision of masculinity, another kind of story that has not been presented in other films. It’s something that is absent from our cinema.”

Simply broaching the subject is difficult due to modern social customs. “Filming the body of a young Arab man, even if he’s French, how that is seen by others,...

The German festival opens today and will host in-person guests including Kenneth Branagh and Andrea Arnold

The German film industry is poised to come together at the 29th edition of Filmfest Hamburg which opens today, Thursday September 30, with Sebastian Meise’s Un Certain Regard winner Great Freedom. It will close on October 9 with Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District.

The accompanying industry programme will be addressing issues as diverse as German cinema’s international standing and measures to foster greater inclusion and diversity before rounding off with the second edition of the Explorer Conference which will focus on producing for cinema,...

The German festival opens today and will host ini-person guests including Kenneth Branagh and Andrea Arnold

The German film industry is poised to come together at the 29th edition of Filmfest Hamburg which opens today, Thursday September 30, with Sebastian Meise’s Un Certain Regard winner Great Freedom,. It will close on October 9 with Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District.

The accompanying industry programme will be addressing issues as diverse as German cinema’s international standing and measures to foster greater inclusion and diversity before rounding off with the second edition of the Explorer Conference which will focus on producing for cinema,...

A Tale of Love and Desire was the closing film of the Critics’ Week and surprisingly has not yet been picked up for North America. It is a beautiful example of cross cultural understanding and misunderstanding taking place in a boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl story, told with such subtle reminders of how cultures and foregone conclusions are so different in fact from what we initially believe.

Continue reading on SydneysBuzz The Blog »...

Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Jacques Audiard and rising director Léa Mysius reminisce about presenting their respective debut features, “See How They Fall” and “Ava,” at Cannes’ Critics’ Week in an exclusive video celebrating the 60th anniversary of the sidebar.

Under the helm of Charles Tesson since 2011, Critics’ Week, which is dedicated to first and second films, has showcased more dozens of emerging filmmakers over the years. Some of them will have their latest movies unspool in competition at the festival. These include Audiard with “Paris, 13th District” which was co-written with Mysius and Celine Sciamma, as well as Julia Ducournau (“Raw”) with “Titane,” and Nadav Lapid (“The Kindergarten Teacher”) with “Ahed’s Knee.”

Audiard and Mysius are two of the 60 talents and artists who have shared testimonies about Critics’ Week brought to their lives and careers through videos and letters. Critics’ Week is unveiling these tributes throughout the month of June.

Selected titles to screen for buyers in Australia, Mexico, China, South Korea and Japan.

Cannes’ Marché du Film is to host physical screenings of titles from the festival’s Official Selection for industry in five key territories, all outside Europe.

With travel restrictions still in place as a result of the ongoing pandemic, the market has organised screenings in Melbourne, Mexico City, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo.

They will be reserved for buyers, distributors, streaming platforms and festival programmers and will take place on July 8, 9 and from July 12-16, the day after their official screening in Cannes.

More than 20 titles have...