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The 15th Beijing International Film Festival has revealed that acclaimed Chinese director and actor Jiang Wen will preside over the Tiantian competition jury, with celebrated Chinese-American actor and filmmaker Joan Chen joining the panel.

The seven-member international jury brings together a cross-section of global film talent, including British director David Yates, Chinese actor Ni Ni, Finnish director Teemu Nikki, Swiss director and actor Vincent Perez, and Hong Kong art director Tim Yip.

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr will lead the jury for the festival’s Forward Future strand.

The main competition lineup features a diverse slate of films vying for the award, including Hao Ming and Li Peiran’s “Better Me, Better You,” Li Yongyi’s “Deep in the Mountains” and Zhang Qi’s “Trapped,” all from China, and Emine Yildirim’s “Apollon by Day Athena by Night” (Turkey), Sora Hokimoto’s “Baus: The Ship’s Voyage Continues” (Japan), Maria Brendle...

Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Let the Bullets Fly) will serve as the head of the main competition jury at the 15th Beijing International Film Festival, which will hand out its Tiantan Award.

The jury will also include Chinese American director and actor Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), British director David Yates (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), Chinese actor Ni Ni, Finnish director Teemu Nikki, Swiss director and actor Vincent Perez, and art director Tim Yip from Hong Kong. The panel will select the winners across 10 award categories, including best feature film, best director and best screenplay.

The festival also unveiled its 15 main competition films, with organizers saying they received a record 1,794 feature film submissions from 103 countries and regions, marking a 19 percent increase over last year.

The three Chinese films in the main competition lineup are Hao Ming and Li Peiran’s Better Me,...

The collection "Rewind and Play: Music Documentaries" is now showing exclusively on Mubi.Cinema is a principle part of our sensory education. Its images, sounds, and music intertwine in our memory, often to the point that we can no longer separate them.In the third season of Mubi Podcast: Voci Italiane Contemporanee, the journalist, music critic, author, and sound selector Giulia Cavaliere takes us through five conversations to investigate the points of contact between what we see and what we hear.In this first episode, Giulia Cavaliere talks with Jacopo Incani, alias Iosonouncane, one of the most innovative artists on the Italian music scene, supervisor of soundtracks for films such as The Great Ambition (2024) and The Last Days of Humanity (2022).Through personal stories and anecdotes, they reflect on the importance of music in cinema and in life, from John Williams to Ennio Morricone, in understanding the world and ourselves. Their...

Arsa, directed by Masbedo, a pair of visual and moving image artists comprising Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni, premiered in the Freestyle section of the Rome Film Festival.

The film is about an introverted young woman called Arsa,, played by Gala Zohar Martinucci, who lives alone on the edge of an island. Three men arrive on the island and rent a holiday home. One, Andrea, becomes in thrall to the enigmatic woman. Jacopo Olmo Antinori co-stars.

Masbedo have worked together since 1999 and live in Milan and Piacenza. Their work spans video, installation, cinema, performance, avant-garde theatre and sound design. It...

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Mamma Mia!

A trip to the Barberini: Deadline was in Italy this week, as top players from European and North American film and TV descended on the annual Mia Market conference. October is a busy month for Rome, with the film festival also kicking off on Wednesday with a premiere screening of Andrea Segre’s La Grande Ambizione at the Auditorium della Musica. Over at the Cinema Barberini, Mia got underway on Monday with Jesse interviewing Among Us showrunner Owen Dennis on stage about the creative process of turning the Covid-19 pandemic’s favorite mobile game into a comedy-horror animation for CBS Studios. “The game can be unsettling,” Dennis told us in a pre-interview. “You’re walking around what is mostly...

Andrea Segre’s The Great Ambition, the opening film of the Rome Film Festival, tells the story of how the Italian Communist Party came close to governing Italy.

It focuses on Italian politician Enrico Berlinguer, who ran the Communist Party when it reached its peak of popularity in the 1970s. His great ambition was to achieve a democratic path to communism, which meant severing his Party’s ties with Moscow.

Leading the film as Berlinguer is Elio Germano, winner of the best actor prize at the 2020 Berlinale for Hidden Away and at Cannes in 2010 for Our Life. The Great Ambition...

Paola Malanga is the artistic director of the Rome Film Festival which kicks off tomorrow (October 16) with the world premiere of Andrea Segre’s political drama The Great Ambition.

It is Malanga’s third edition at the helm of the festival, having joined in 2022 from Rai Cinema where she was deputy director of its product division spanning production and acquisition. She has also been a journalist, film critic and author throughout her career.

Among the world premieres in Rome’s main Progressive Cinema competition are dark comedy The Trainer by American History X director Tony Kaye and Eran Ricklis’ Reading Lolita In Tehran.

The Rome Film Festival has unveiled the line-up for its 19th edition, which takes place from October 16-27.

Rome will present a lifetime achievement award to Johnny Depp, who will present Modi - Three Days on the Wing of Madness, about Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, at the festival.

Viggo Mortensen will also receive a lifetime achievement award, and will present The Dead Don’t Hurt, which he wrote, directed and stars in.

Francis Ford Coppola will also be in Rome for a special ‘pre-opening’ festival presentation of the Italian premiere of Megalopolis at Cinecittà Studios – the Rome studio that hosted him...