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Exclusive: French-Iranian filmmaker Emily Atef is attached to direct an untitled feature film project centered on the life of Farah Pahlavi, Empress of Iran, who was married to the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for 20 years before he died in exile in Egypt in 1980.

As Deadline announced last summer that under a newly formed collaboration with Women of the Movement producers Serendipity Group and John Powers Middleton, who Her Majesty authorized her life rights to, a documentary and a scripted project were in the works. The doc was in production in Washington, DC at the time of announcement and was expected to continue through the end of 2024 and resume in March. The scripted project being developed simultaneously is now known as the Untitled Farah Pahlavi Film Project with Atef directing.

The film will explore the life of Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, focusing on the resilience of a woman who,...

Feature film projects from The Blue Caftan filmmaker Maryam Touzani and Four Daughters director Kaouther Ben Hania are among 24 titles that have received a combined €6.78m in the latest session of Council of Europe co-production fund Eurimages.

The 24 feature films backed by Eurimages include four documentaries and one animation. 16 are to be directed or co-directed by women, representing over 75% of the total funding awarded.

Morrocan filmmaker Maryam Touzani’s Spanish language Calle Malaga was awarded €500,000. It’s the story of a 74-year old woman who belongs to the Spanish community of Tangier who has to leave her home but unexpectedly...

Goodbye, First Love: Atef Explores Pangs of Passion Amidst Detached Reunification

For her sixth feature film, Germany’s Emily Atef returns to themes of circumstance keeping lovers (and loved ones) apart with the languorously titled Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen). Set on an idyllic farm located on the recently evaporated border between East and West Germany in 1990, a teen girl comes of age through a tempestuous affair with an older man, an experience akin to the passionate whirlwinds from the classic literature she reads.

Although her situation is unique, including Atef revisiting the invisible thaw in Germany which created more economic and personal upheavals, Atef’s script, co-written by Daniela Krien is beautifully bucolic but a surprisingly flat plateau.…...

French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s Mercy received €450,000, the biggest slice of funding

Six projects by women filmmakers including Emily Atef, Hafsia Herzi and Lucile Hadzhihalović have received support from the German-French Funding Commission’s Minitraité co-production fund.

The largest single amount of production funding - €450,000 - was awarded to French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s English-language Mercy, an adaptation of Lara Santoro’s eponymous novel. Set in 1997, it is the story of a friendship between a US correspondent in Kenya and a local woman from the slums joining forces to combat the AIDS crisis in the country.

Earlier this year, Atef...

Hüller’s character is inspired by numerous accounts of women disguised as men in European history.

The Match Factory has acquired international rights to Austrian writer and director Markus Schleinzer’s new film Rose, with Sandra Hüller cast in the lead role.

A 17th-century drama set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, the film sees Hüller play the titular Rose, an enigmatic soldier who surfaces in an isolated Protestant village, purporting to be the heir to a long-deserted estate. While attempting to integrate into the village society and pondering an arranged marriage with a local farmer’s daughter,...

Prolific German director Jo Baier has officially signed on to write and direct the thriller “Life Through a Dead Man’s Eyes,” about an aging Nazi war criminal on the run from prosecution.

The film, produced by Berlin-based Films In Motion in co-production with Banijay’s Nl Film in Amsterdam, tells the haunting story of a former Nazi SS death camp guard who tries to evade prosecution by U.S. authorities. In the face of death, he finds himself falling ever deeper into a nightmare that exceeds his worst fears.

“Life Through a Dead Man’s Eyes” is set to star Matthias Habich (“Narcissus and Goldmund”) as the former SS henchman and Herbert Knaup (“Sarah Kohr”) as the Nazi hunter on his trail. Also attached is Silke Bodenbender (“One Day We’ll Tell Each Other Everything”).

Speaking to Variety, Baier says the dark historical aspect of the tale in particular piqued his interest.

Strand Releasing has bought all North American rights to Emily Atef’s last two movies, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” which competed at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as her Cannes entry “More Than Ever.” Both films are represented in international markets by The Match Factory.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“More Than Ever,” meanwhile, premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard. It stars Vicky Krieps and late French actor Gaspard Ulliel as a couple whose bond is tested when one...

"Let go of all of that anger that's holding you back... from truly living your life." Good advice!! With the 2023 Berlin Film Festival wrapped up, it's time to look back and highlight a few of the films playing in the line-up. Below is a small but mighty collection of trailers currently out for films that premiered at this year's Berlinale - including Golden Bear winner Sur l'Adamant, the doc Hello Dankness about America, animated film The Siren, Norwegian drama Dancing Queen, Hungarian sci-fi White Plastic Sky, and plenty of others - a mix of documentaries and narrative features. Dive in and discover something that you've never heard of!! We already posted a few other trailers before the fest began: Seneca with John Malkovich, Christian Petzold's Afire, Korean film Kill Boksoon, The Echo (a terrific doc), and German film Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything. Aside from those, this trailer...

The 2023 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival has come and gone (we got plenty more to insert here), but here are some of the reviews and future interviews for a huge swath of films from the prestigious film fest.

20,000 Species of Bees (read review)

Afire (Roter Himmel) (read review)

Bad Living (read review)

The Beast in the Jungle (read review)

BlackBerry (read review)

Disco Boy (read review)

Le grand chariot (The Plough) (read review)

Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert (read review)

Limbo (read review)

Living Bad (Viver Mal) (read review)

Manodrome (read review)

Music (read review)

Past Lives (read review)

The Shadowless Tower (read review)

She Came to Me (read review)

Silver Haze (read review)

Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (read review)

The Survival of Kindness (read review)

The Teachers’ Lounge (read review)

Till the End of the Night (read review)

Tótem (read review)…

Continue reading.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

Continue reading ‘Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’ Review: Emily Atef’s Latest is a Sensual Yet Exhausting Misfire [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...

’Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’, ’The Survival Of Kindness’ and ’BlackBerry’ land with middling scores.

Emily Atef’s Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, Rolf de Heer’s The Survival Of Kindness and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry are the first titles to land on Screen’s Berlin 2023 Competition jury grid.

De Heer’s film leads with an average of 2.4, followed closely by the other two titles on 2.3.

Click top left to expand

Seven critics are taking part in this year’s jury grid and will mark all 19 films playing in competition.

The Survival Of Kindness received four three-star ratings...

Roughly three quarters of the way into Superpower, the documentary about the war in Ukraine directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman, the Oscar-winning actor displays a fixed-blade knife while traveling by car through the embattled country. He jokes to the camera, “All of Ukraine should feel safe now that I’m armed.” He adds, holding up fists clenched like a boxer’s, “Plus, I’ve got these.”

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It’s a rare moment of levity in a film that otherwise unfolds with deadly seriousness, for appropriate reasons: for...

Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks. That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.

Indeed, what’s most interesting about German-born filmmaker Atef’s return to her home turf — after a directing stint on TV’s “Killing Eve” and last year’s predominantly French romance “More Than Ever,” with Vicky Krieps and the...

Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire.

While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

The series was created and penned by Jose Caltagirone (“Les Combattantes”) and Valentine Milville (“The Bureau”), and will star a high-profile French ensemble cast, including Lambert Wilson (“Benedetta”), Carole Bouquet (“En Therapie...

Emily Atef’s latest feature is something of a curate’s egg, a well-made foray into high-end romantic lit that’s saddled with some off-putting baggage about the reunification of Germany post-1989. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry is clearly personal to the novel’s writer, Daniela Krien, who was born, mid-’70s into the former Gdr, and it does offer a layer of quirky detail, such as an unnerving car crash involving what looks to be Trabant. But for a film that shows a lot of naked flesh and spends a lot of time documenting a young woman’s complicated sexual awakening, the political table-talk can be distracting and even wearying, notably on the occasion when a whole (recently reunited) family bursts into “The Song of The Peat Bog Soldiers.“

The year is 1990, and the young woman in question is 18-year-old Maria (Marlene Burow), who has moved away from...

Germany’s reunification as a backdrop for two attractive bodies uniting over and over again is one way to sum up Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, which director Emily Atef (3 Days in Quiberon) adapted from Daniela Krien’s popular 2011 novel.

The problem with this handsomely made, well-acted and overwrought rural drama is precisely that: What’s interesting is not the doomed love affair between a beautiful 19-year-old girl and a strapping farmer more than twice her age, in a story that’s plays out like Lady Chatterley’s Lover meets Fifty Shades of Gray in the former Ddr. It’s whatever the film has to say about the struggling family and farming community that serves as its setting, during a period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, Atef gives short shrift to the latter in favor of the former, in a movie that starts off rather promisingly...

Emily Atef, the outspoken French-German filmmaker, may have stepped into a minefield with her latest movie, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” which looks to be one of the Berlinale’s most divisive movies in competition. With such a cute title, one might expect a flowery romance drama, but the movie goes far to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“Making this film would have been like a suicide if I was a man. I would have been lynched,” Atef tells Variety ahead of...

Row Pictures is the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything.

Karsten Stöter’s Germany-based Row Pictures, the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, has unveiled a slate of features from Natja Brunckhorst, Markus Schleinzer and Eliza Petkova.

Brunckhorst’s second feature, Zwei zu Eins, is set to go into production this summer at locations in Central Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia. It will be co-produced by the Lübeck-based arm of zischlermann filmproduktion with backing from broadcasters Zdf and Arte as well as Mdm, the Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw and Bkm.

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,...

Cologne-based sales company The Match Factory has expanded and restructured its acquisition and development team.

Former head of sales, Thania Dimitrakopoulou, has been promoted to vice president of acquisitions and sales. Claudia Solano comes on board as senior manager of acquisitions, and Cécile Tollu-Polonowski, a long-time partner with the company, has been appointed as head of development.

Dimitrakopoulou, who joined The Match Factory in 2007, will now be heading up all acquisitions activities and manage the sales team, reporting to Michael Weber, managing director.

Solano joins The Match Factory from the distributor Koch Media in Italy where she worked as sales and acquisitions manager. Solano has held various positions in acquisitions in companies such as Videa and Good Films. During her career, she has introduced several high profile directors to the Italian market, including Xavier Dolan and Yorgos Lanthimos.

The Match Factory has appointed long-standing partner Tollu-Polonowski to lead the development team for the company.

Human histories and romantic tales are full of forbidden love stories, an intense desire for a partner against the wishes of extremely strong forces and circumstances. Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, and set in the summer of 1990 in former East Germany, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, directed by Emily Atef, has debuted its trailer. The Match Factory and Pandora Film are telling a tale we all know, however, with an entirely different and gripping storyline.

"He can have her one more time." The Match Factory has also unveiled a festival promo trailer for another new German film premiering soon at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival kicking off this week. Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything is the latest film from filmmaker Emily Atef, following her Cannes 2022 feature More Than Ever. Set in a warm summer in 1990 in former East Germany, it follows a young woman who begins a passionate sexual relationship with a charismatic farmer who is twice her age. That's pretty much the entire story here, as it plays itself out. The film stars Marlene Burow, Felix Kramer, Cedric Eich, Silke Bodenbender, and Florian Panzner. The fest adds: "Rarely has an adaptation of a vibrant literary text been able to create such energy, and even more rarely has it been able to revitalise virtues (in the truest sense of the word) which some might find old-fashioned.

The trailer for “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” French-Iranian filmmaker Emily Atef’s tale of forbidden love, which premieres in Berlinale Competition, has debuted (below). The Match Factory is looking after the film’s international sales, and Pandora Film is handling German distribution.

The film, based on Daniela Krien’s novel, is set in the summer of 1990 in the countryside around Thuringia, in former East Germany.

Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend Johannes on his parents’ farm and would rather lose herself in books than focus on graduating. There is a sense of a new era dawning with the reunification of Germany.

When she bumps into Henner, the farmer living next door, one touch is all it takes to ignite an all-consuming passion between Maria and the headstrong, charismatic man twice her age. In an atmosphere buzzing with possibilities, love is born: a secret passion...