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French filmmaker Jonathan Millet’s thriller Ghost Trail won El Gouna Film Festival’s $50,000 Golden Star award for best narrative film. The festival ran October 24-November 1.

Lead Adam Bessa also won best actor for his performance as a young man on a mission to track Syrian regime leaders in France, where he must confront his former torturer. The film world premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week sidebar.

The $25,000 Silver Star award went to Julien Colonna’s war drama The Kingdom, while Indian romantic drama Girls Will be Girls by Shuchi Talati won the $15,000 Bronze Star and the Fipresci award.

The latter...

Gints Zilbalodis’ animated feature Flow, Latvia’s submission for the Oscars, won the €2,000 Golden Athena award for best film at the Athens International Film Festival (October 2-14).

The film, which also collected the audience award, premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section earlier this year and has since won prizes at Annecy, Melbourne, and Guadalajara, and has been shortlisted for the upcoming European film awards.

It centres on a cat who teams up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog after a flood destroys his home. Local theatrical distributor and platform Cinobo picked up Greek rights.

The...

Warner Bros.’ “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” maintained its grip on the U.K. and Ireland box office for the fourth consecutive weekend, generating £1.8 million ($2.4 million) for a cumulative total of £21 million ($27.9 million), per numbers from Comscore.

Universal’s “Speak No Evil” held steady in second place with £813,890, pushing its three-week total to just under £4 million. Studiocanal’s “The Outrun” debuted at No. 3 with £449,590, followed closely by Dreamz Entertainment’s “Devara Part 1” at £440,626. Mubi’s “The Substance” rounded out the top five in its second frame with £421,242 for a total of £1.4 million.

Studiocanal’s “Lee” landed at sixth place collecting £453,921 in its third weekend for a £2.7 million total, while Entertainment Film Distributors’ “Megalopolis” opened at seventh with £357,190. Universal’s “Despicable Me 4” continued its strong run at eighth, adding £351,007 in its 12th weekend for a total of £47.4 million. The 20th-anniversary re-release of “Shaun of the Dead,” also from Universal, opened at No.

Peter Murimi on filming the semi-nomadic pastoralists: 'It takes patience but also understanding this is the way of life' With The Battle For Laikipia, documentarians Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi carefully navigate the frictions between the indigenous, semi-nomadic pastoralists, who use the area of Kenya for grazing, and white owners of ranches and wildlife conservancies. The latter are a product of the colonial era, which brings its own tensions that have been exacerbated by climate change and drought. The Greek director and her Kenyan counterpart followed the story for several years from 2017, observing the conflict in the present while setting it within the context of the past. The film, which premiered at Sundance, will be released in UK cinemas by metfilm this Friday and we caught up with them to chat about the difficulties and importance of maintaining balance and shooting on the hoof and the advantages of working together.

International documentary filmmakers and industry reps are gathering at Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. at a moment of political tumult in Europe. British voters head to the polls for a general election on July 4; in France, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections after a French ultranationalist party surged in voting for the European Parliament. Germany’s far-right AfD party also scored substantial gains in that European Parliament vote. Overall, the center held — more or less.

If there’s anything the documentary community is used to dealing with it’s turbulence, whether at the macro level of major change in the business itself, or at the micro level of getting a film production off the ground. The message to DocFest attendees this week has been to insist on solidarity – to support each other — in the face of geopolitical and economic uncertainty.

Patrizia Mancini, Head of...

Canada’s Hot Docs documentary festival has wrapped its 31st edition in Toronto (May 5) and named Yintah the winner of its Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary.

The award, whose winner is determined by an audience poll, comes with a cash prize of Cad 50,000.

Directed by Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell and Michael Toledano, Yintah is about the efforts of the Canadian First Nation Wet’suwet’en people to resist the construction of pipelines across their territory.

On Friday evening (May 3) Hot Docs announced the prize winners from its official competition line-up (full list below).

The festival’s Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award,...

Two new Australian films, both enjoying their world premiere, are among the first titles confirmed to play at the Sydney Film Festival in June.

“In Vitro,” a sci-fi mystery thriller set on a remote cattle farm in the near future, hails from directors Will Howarth and Tom McKeith (“Beast”) and stars Ashley Zukerman (“Succession”).

With “The Pool,” director Ian Darling (“The Final Quarter”) paints a cinematic portrait of a year in the life of the iconic Bondi Icebergs, the pool and the people who cherish it.

They will be joined by New Zealand actor Rachel House (“Hunt for the Wilderpeople”), who makes her feature directorial debut with “The Mountain,” which centers on three children discovering friendship’s healing power through the spirit of adventure as they trek through spectacular New Zealand landscapes. It is executive produced by Taika Waititi and will be eligible for Sydney’s recently announced First Nations Award,...

Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Cph:Dox) has unveiled the line-ups for its five competitive sections for its 2024 edition. All films in the main Dox:Award competition are world premieres for the second successive year.

Scroll down for the full list of competition titles

Titles in that section include Alessandra Celesia’s The Flats, a France-uk-Ireland-Belgium co-production about Belfast youngsters accessing their memories of the Troubles. Belfast-based Italian filmmaker Celesia has previously made documentaries including 2017’s Anatomy Of A Miracle, which played at Locarno.

The 12-strong Dox:Award competition also includes Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter’s UK title Two Strangers Trying Not To Kill Each Other,...

When film composer and multi-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch got the call to work on the new Sundance documentary, “The Battle for Laikipia,” he remembers his first reaction. 20 to 24 cues in two and a half weeks. Wow. But after watching the film, it was a no-brainer. “I’ll figure out the how,” he said.

Co-directed by Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi, “The Battle for Laikipia” follows the story of Indigenous pastoralists — farmers who breed and care for animals in the wildlife conservation haven of Laikipia, Kenya — as they struggle to overcome conflicts with landowners and the impact of colonialism.

“It’s just take-your-breath away, raw, arresting humanity, done so exquisitely well,” says Fritch.

Fritch says his admiration for the film’s crew made it an easy decision to join the sprint to finish the production in time for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

“I knew they were extraordinarily thoughtful, ethical documentarians,” says Fritch.

Sundance announced its winners on Friday morning, with Alessandra Lacorazza’s In The Summers took the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and Brendan Bellomo’s Porcelain War the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary.

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s A New Kind Of Wilderness won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, while Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez earned the corresponding world cinema dramatic prize for Sujo.

The pair collaborated as writers on the 2020 World Cinema – Dramatic prize winner Identifying Features directed by Valadez.

The Festival Favorite Award went to Daughters by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, whose film also...

Exclusive: The Ford Foundation is coming through for documentary filmmakers in a big way.

Today, the nonprofit philanthropic institution announced its latest round of grants under the foundation’s JustFilms division — $4.2 million that will go to support “59 innovative film projects centered on social justice globally and in the United States.”

Among the recipients are Union, the film directed by Stephen Maing and Brett Story that just held its world premiere at Sundance, and fellow Sundance premiere The Battle for Laikipia, directed by Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi. Union, about the battle to unionize an Amazon facility on Staten Island, New York, is in U.S. Documentary Competition at Sundance. The Battle for Laikipia, in World Cinema Documentary Competition at the festival, examines “a generations-old conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven.” Roger Ross Williams and Toni Kamau are among the producers of Laikipia.

One of the biggest challenges of the Sundance Film Festival is trying to fit it all in and be everywhere all at once in Park City. On Sunday morning at The Park, a group of festival insiders stayed in one place for about two hours to take in a keynote from Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Oscar-winning producer Jonathan Wang and witness two producers being singled out with awards and $10,000 grants.

It all went down as part of a producers award collaboration between the Sundance Institute and Amazon MGM Studios. The prizes — one for fiction, one for nonfiction — were awarded to producers Brad Becker-Parton of Stress Positions and Toni Kamau of The Battle for Laikipia, two films that premiered in this year’s lineup.

Becker-Parton’s other credits include Tina Satter’s Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney, and Mariama Diallo’s Master, starring Regina Hall, a Sundance selection released by...

On Sunday, January 21, festival attendees gathered to celebrate the unique triumphs and struggles of independent film producers at the Sundance Producers Celebration. In addition to honoring the producers of the films in this year’s festival, the event featured a keynote address from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” producer and frequent Daniels collaborator Jonathan Wang and presented the 2024 Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Awards.

Brad Becker-Parton (“Stress Positions”) received the Amazon Studios Fiction Producers Award, while Toni Kamau (“The Battle for Laikipia”) received the Amazon Studios Nonfiction Producers Award. IndieWire shares Wang’s keynote exclusively below.

Jonathan Wang: In 2015, I attended Sundance for the first time with an interactive short film called “Possibilia.” It was made by some unknown music-video nerds working under the pretentious pseudonym ‘Daniels.’ All of three people watched the film, two were Daniel Scheinert’s parents, and the third was probably a glitch in the tech.