News

UK Indie Taking Korean Format ‘Battle In The Box’ To U.S.

Interstellar, the UK indie that made the British version of Something Special’s format Battle in the Box in the UK, is to take the Korean format into the U.S. The format, initially from Nmedia for Mbn in Korea, sees two celebrity teams enter an empty box for 24 hours divided by a moveable wall and armed with just a toothbrush. They earn space and luxuries by conquering mental and physical challenges. Interstellar made the UK version of the show for BBC Studios-owned network U&Dave, with comedian Jimmy Carr the host. The company will now take the format to the U.S. after striking a deal with Something Special, which has the international distribution rights. “We cannot wait to take everything we’ve learned about this groundbreaking reality and gameshow format and apply it to a...

Distribution veteran Wendy Lidell will depart Kino Lorber as SVP of theatrical acquisitions and distribution at the end of June after eight years to pursue a new, undisclosed, chapter.

Kino Lorber chairman and CEO Richard Lorber made the announcement on Friday and hailed Lidell as “the rarest amalgam of smart cinephile and canny business executive”.

Kino Lorber chief revenue officer Lisa Schwartz will oversee theatrical distribution and acquisitions in the interim and continue to report to Klmg president Ed Carroll.

Lidell joined the company in 2016. During her tenure she shepherded three documentaries to Oscar nominations – Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire At Sea,...

Exclusive: Kino Lorber SVP of Theatrical Acquisitions & Distribution Wendy Lidell will depart the company at the end of June following a great eight year run at the indie distributor.

The company’s Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Schwartz will oversee theatrical distribution and acquisitions in the interim and will continue to report to President Ed Carroll. Reporting to Schwartz will be SVP Marketing and Communications Nicholas Kemp, VP Press and Publicity Kate Patterson, VP Theatrical Distribution & Repertory Acquisitions George Schmalz, and Director Theatrical Distribution Maxwell Wolkin.

Schwartz and Carroll, former top executives at AMC Networks, joined Kino Lorber in early 2023.

Lidell has been at Kino Lorber since 2016, overseeing all theatrical acquisitions and distribution efforts and shepherding three documentaries to Oscar nominations – Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, Talal Derki’s Of Fathers and Sons most recently Kaouther Ben Hania’s decorated Four Daughters.

Other theatrical releases on her watch include Long Day’s Journey Into Night,...

German director Volker Schlöndorff, who won the Cannes’ Palme d’Or and an Oscar for his 1979 drama “The Tin Drum,” is set to direct a film about how Antonio Vivaldi — the 18th-century Italian composer of “The Four Seasons” — formed what is touted as the world’s first all-female orchestra.

Schlöndorff’s still-untitled depiction of this lesser-known aspect of Vivaldi’s career is based on a book by German writer Peter Schneider, which has been adapted for the big screen by Italian scribe Francesco Piccolo (“My Brilliant Friend”) along with the director.

The plan is for cameras to start rolling later this year on the film, which will mark the first foray into Italian-language cinema by Schlöndorff, who is a fluent speaker. It will be shot entirely in Italy. Casting is still being decided, and sales are likely to be launched at the Cannes market in May.

Schlöndorff’s new project...

Por segundo año consecutivo, Filmin distribuirá en España la ganadora del prestigioso Oso de Oro del Festival de Berlín 2024. © Filmin

Filmin se ha hecho con los derechos de distribución en España del documental “Dahomey”, dirigido por la actriz y cineasta Mati Diop, que ha sido galardonado este fin de semana con el Oso de Oro a la Mejor Película en el Festival de Berlín. El jurado de la Sección Oficial, presidido por Lupita Nyong’o y del que también formaba parte el director español Albert Serra, ha reconocido así el mérito de una película que aborda la descolonización de los museos occidentales y que documenta el viaje de vuelta al antiguo Reino de Dahomey (la actual Benín) de 26 obras de arte expoliadas por Francia y que hasta ahora se conservaban en Museo Quai Branly de París. En el foco de la película se pone a una de las piezas, una especie de deidad,...

The awards ceremony for the 74th Berlin International Film Festival kicks off Saturday night, where this year’s jury, headed by 12 Years a Slave and Black Panther actress Lupita Nyong’o, will hand out the coveted Gold and Silver Bears.

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s Iranian drama My Favourite Cake is being given good odds for an award this year. The drama, about a 70-year-old widow and her tentative attempts at romance with an age-appropriate taxi driver, was a critical fave. A win for the film would also send a political message after the Iranian government banned the directors from attending Berlin. If the jury picks out Cake for the Golden Bear it would be the third time in 10 years —following Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015) and There Is No Evil (2020) from Mohammad Rasoulof —that Berlin has given its top honor to Iranian directors in absentia. World sales for My...

Matteo Garrone presented his film Io Capitano, Italy’s contender for the 2024 best international feature Oscar, to a packed theater of European parliamentarians and attendees on Nov. 15, for an event titled “Europe Seen by Others.”

The refugee drama, which follows two Senegalese men who travel across Africa and the Mediterranean in an effort to reach Europe, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where star Seydou Sarr won the Silver Lion award for best young actor. Garrone and his Io Capitano co-writers Fofana Amara and Mamadou Kouassi — whose real-life trials were the basis for the film’s story — attended the parliamentary screening. The 600 spectators gave the film a long-standing ovation after the screening.

The members of European Parliament (MEPs) were impressed, with several taking to social media to praise the film and its message. “[Io Capitano is] a tremendously important and powerful work that should be screened in all schools across the continent,...

Independent film distributor Kino Lorber has officially unveiled streaming service Kino Film Collection, available via Prime Video here.

The Kino Film Collection will be launched in the U.S. on the Amazon Service via Prime Video Channels for $5.99 per month. The Collection will feature new Kino releases fresh from theaters, along with hundreds of films from its expansive library of more than 4,000 titles, with many now streaming for the first time.

New 4K restorations of films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi,” Todd Haynes’ “Poison,” Tran Anh Hung’s “The Scent of Green Papaya,” Ana Lily Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night,” and Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin” are among highlights of the first offerings from Kino Film Collection.

Kino canon films like Fritz Lang’s historic “Metropolis,” F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,...

Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s fortnightly strand in which we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track… So, we’re going to do the hard work for you.

This week we’re featuring Matteo Garrone’s gritty Venice Silver Lion-winning migrant drama, Io Capitano. Italy’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, it boasts a stunning performance from new talent Seydou Sarr and is drawing audiences in its home country ahead of international rollout later this year.

Name: Io Capitano

Country: Italy

Producers: Archimede, Tarantula, Rai Cinema, Pathé Films

Distributor: Pathé Films

For fans of: Lion, Slumdog Millionaire, Fire at Sea

Veteran Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone’s stock...

Matteo Garrone’s talent for weaving stories out of the fabric of real events––especially those involving desperate or violent people––gets another airing in Io Capitano, an engrossing, visceral portrait of one young man’s brutal journey from Senegal to the coast of Italy. The director won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2008 for Gomorrah, his defining, excoriating portrait of the Camorra crime syndicate, and he performed the trick again ten years later in Dogman, inspired by a gruesome gangland murder in Rome. He’s also had success in comedies (Reality) and fantasy (Tale of Tales), but his new film is an epic embracing the defining issue of Italian politics right now––the flow of refugees crossing the Mediterranean heading for Europe––making a potentially abstract, no-less-urgent topic tactile and approachable.

The migrant crisis is having a moment this year in European cinema, with Agnieszka Holland’s recent Green Border,...

Though it’s become a convenient catch-all term for journalists covering the subject, the phrase “European migrant crisis” can’t help but leave a sour taste in the mouth — implying as it does that Europe, the destination for so many hard-up voyagers from variously ailing or hostile countries, is the disadvantaged party in all this. That bias carries through to the bulk of well-intended films on the matter, which tend to pick up migrants’ stories, however sympathetically, on European turf. Breaking from such Italian titles as Jonas Carpignano’s “Mediterranea,” Emmanuele Crialese’s “Terraferma” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea,” Matteo Garrone’s stirring “Io Capitano” instead takes Europe not as its setting but as a near-mythic objective, tracing one Senegalese teen’s vast journey from Dakar to Tripoli to overloaded migrant boat in gripping, sometimes agonizing detail.

For Garrone, this proves an energizing shift in focus, yielding his most robust,...

Pope Francis, only a few days after leaving the hospital, is presiding over religious observances during the holiest week in the Roman Catholic faith. As part of Good Friday services today, he took part in a celebration of the Passion of the Lord at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

On Easter Sunday he will preside over mass at the basilica, after which he will deliver the traditional “urbi et orbi” blessing from the central balcony of St. Peter’s. One hundred thousand or more people are expected to crowd St. Peter’s Square for the blessing, a testament not only to the spiritual importance of the occasion but to the popularity of this pope.

Pope Francis leads the Passion of the Lord on Good Friday at St. Peter’s Basilica on April 7, 2023.

Among the admirers of Francis is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose new documentary In Viaggio...

Gianfranco Rosi’s intimate new documentary In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis follows the pontiff as he confronts contentious issues around the world

A lot is said during the quiet moments in Gianfranco Rosi’s In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, when the holy figure takes a pause from giving hopeful or apologetic speeches to stare into the abyss, lost in his own thoughts and prayers. Those are opportunities for Rosi, the documentary film-maker behind Fire at Sea and Notturno, to invite the audience into contemplation and leave room for skepticism and ambivalence.

“The silence for me is more important than the notes itself,” Rosi tells the Guardian over a Zoom call from Manhattan. “My own interpretation as a film-maker is to give space to silence. Sometimes words aren’t even enough.”...

By Glenn Dunks

I will be honest with you. I initially had no real desire to watch In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis. I believe my words were “because of the whole pope thing”, which I personally think is entirely fair. Especially after another European filmmaker, Wim Wenders, had his own Pope Francis doc not too long ago. It does, however, prove to be a much more interesting than initial perceptions would have suggested. And, to be honest, director Gainfranco Rosi—a director whose work only seems to be getting better and better (which is saying quite a lot)—deserves better than a ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ After all, I don’t think any other filmmaker can claim both a Golden Bear and a Golden Lion for works of non-fiction.

Rosi’s film is not the immersive experience that recent works like Notturno and Fire at Sea were, but...

The 73rd Berlin Film Festival (also known as Berlinale locally) has wrapped its 2023 run following two weeks of screenings, with a big ceremony again in Berlin on Saturday evening, announcing the winner of the Golden Bear (Goldener Bär) for Best Film. That top prize from this year was given to a French documentary titled Sur l'Adamant (or On the Adamant), about a mental health facility located in a boat on the Seine in Paris. The film is directed by a 72-year-old French doc filmmaker named Nicolas Philibert, winning his very first Golden Bear. It's an interesting pick, similar to when the doc Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) won in 2016. Once again, it seems like a political pick, not winning for artistry. The festival overall this year wasn't exactly very exciting, with a lot of bad films and a few good ones. I was expecting Celine Song's Past Lives to win following its Sundance premiere,...

The documentary “On the Adamant” has been named the best film of the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin organizers announced on Saturday.

The film from director Nicolas Philibert follows life in a daycare center located on the Seine in Paris for adults with mental disorders. It is the first documentary to win the festival’s top prize since “Fire at Sea” in 2016.

German director Christian Petzold won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, essentially the runner-up award, for his drama “Afire,” while Philippe Garrel won the directing award for “The Plough.” The gender-neutral acting prizes went to Sofia Otero for “20,000 Species of Bees” in the leading performance category and Thea Ehre for “Till the End of the Night” in the supporting category.

The jury president was actress Kristen Stewart. The other jurors were actress Goldshifteh Farahani, directors Valeska Grisebach, Radu Jude and Carla Simón and Johnnie To and casting director Francine Maisler.

"If you give the best of yourself, you will help the world become a different place." Magnolia Pictures has revealed an official US trailer for the documentary In Viaggio, which translates in Italian to En Route, the latest from acclaimed Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi (best known for Fire at Sea and Notturno). He follows the travels of Pope Francis all around the world as he meets with everyday people. In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made a total of 37 trips to 53 different countries, focusing on his most important issues: poverty, migration, environment, solidarity and war. Intrigued by the fact that two of Francis's trips, the very first to the refugees landing in Lampedusa and another one in 2021 to the Middle East, mirror the itineraries of his most recent films, Rosi follows the Pope's Stations of the Cross, sees what he sees, hears what he says and...

Following his acclaimed trio of documentaries Sacro Gra, Fire at Sea, and Notturno, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi pivots a bit with next feature, this time focusing on a single figure––and perhaps one of the most well-known across the entire globe. In Viaggio, which has now added the subtitle of The Travels of Pope Francis after its Venice premiere last year, follows the Bishop of Rome during his vast travels. In fact, in the first nine years on the gig, he ventured to over 50 countries, to have a face-to-face interaction with this following him. Now set for a March 31 release, the new trailer has arrived from Magnolia Pictures.

David Katz said in his review, “Following The Young Pope, The New Pope, and The Two Popes, the time has officially come for the Woke Pope. In Viaggio, Gianfranco Rosi’s fascinating Rorschach test of a documentary, is also something of a...

Pope Francis has established himself as one of the most consequential popes in recent memory due to his constant attempts to modernize the Catholic Church. Many have credited his willingness to break from tradition, and the adoption of progressive positions on homosexuality and women’s issues with making the 2,000-year-old institution seem more approachable to a new generation.

Now, in another unprecedented move, the pope will be the subject of a documentary from Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea” director Gianfranco Rosi. Titled “In Viaggo: The Travels of Pope Francis,” the upcoming film pulls from nine years of archival footage to document the pope’s travels around the world and his encounters with various Catholics. Spanning 53 countries, the film promises to be an intimate portrait of Pope Francis that lifts the veil of Catholic pageantry in favor of focusing on the issues that animate him, namely poverty and environmental causes.

“Travel is...

At first glance, Cynthia Erivo’s Sundance drama “Drift” appears to be the latest in a long line of call-to-action refugee stories, set in Europe and focused on those who’ve left Africa, only to encounter resistance once they reach unfamiliar shores. Turns out, while there are certainly overlaps with recent films like “Mediterranea” and “Fire at Sea” — which are deserving social-issue movies to be sure — “Drift” doesn’t have anything like the same agenda.

Rather than serving to indict European indifference, as refugee films so often do, Singaporean director Anthony Chen’s moving feature uses the fictional journey of Erivo’s character, Jacqueline, as an unlikely ode to healing and human connection. That’s an ambitious gamble, since Europe’s real-world immigration troubles are serious enough that inventing a story purely for metaphorical purposes — the way co-writer Alexander Maksik did in his original novel, “A Marker to Measure Drift” — might have seemed tacky.

Master documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose “Sacro Gra” won the Venice Golden Lion in 2013, is back on the Lido with “In Viaggio,” a doc about Pope Francis’ travels in which the director creates a counterpoint between archival footage and images that Rosi shot himself.

In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his key issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war.

Intrigued by the fact that two of Francis’ trips – the first to the refugees landing in the Sicilian island of Lampedusa; the second in 2021 to the Middle East – so closely mirrored the itineraries of the director’s “Fire at Sea” (2016) and “Notturno” (2020), Rosi decided to delve into hundreds of hours of footage of papal travels with the intention of providing through them a “map of the human condition,” he says.

How did you first intersect with Pope Francis?

My first...

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

Rosi was inspired by the fact that two of Francis’ trips mirrored his own, for the films Fuocoammare and Notturno (2020). The documentarian includes his own footage with that of news archives, but Pope Francis’ voice is the main one throughout the film. While reporters and followers are occasionally heard, the emphasis is on Francis, creating a singular tone. His softly-spoken messages combine with classical, often choral music to hypnotic effect.

We see him visit women’s and men’s prisons, where he preaches about dignity and dreams. We see him speaking about the power of collaborating with other religions,...

One doesn’t need to be religious to feel the impact of the words uttered by Pope Francis to never-ending crowds of faithful followers, a concept deeply understood by Gianfranco Rossi with “In Viaggio,” a decade-long chronicling of the travels of the head of the Catholic church across all corners of the world. Composed entirely of archival footage, the film grants rare access to the public life of the pontifical, not only from the elevated security of a pulpit but from the more democratic grounds of unpaved streets and vast public avenues.

The film opens with the following disclaimer: “In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his most important issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war.” These very same issues guide the work of Rossi, whose two latest documentaries – 2016’s Golden Bear-winning “Fire at Sea” and 2020’s “Notturno” – deal with...

Master documentary filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose “Sacro Gra” won the Venice Golden Lion in 2013, is back on the Lido with “In Viaggio,” a doc about Pope Francis’ travels in which the director creates a counterpoint between archival footage and images that Rosi shot himself. Variety has been given access to an exclusive clip (above) from the film, which premieres in Venice on Sept. 5.

In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips visiting 53 countries, focusing on his key issues: poverty, migration, the environment, solidarity and war.

Intrigued by the fact that two of Francis’s trips – the first to the refugees landing in the Sicilian island of Lampedusa; the second in 2021 to the Middle East – so closely mirrored the itineraries of the director’s “Fuocoammare” and “Notturno” (2020), Rosi follows the Pope’s Stations of the Cross. “He sees what he sees, hears what he says,” the press notes point out,...

Unfolding just a couple of weeks after this year’s all-virtual Sundance — and a couple of weeks before the in-person return of SXSW — the 2022 edition of the Berlin International Film Festival arrived at a particularly strange moment of the pandemic, and suffered a bit for the ambivalence that surrounded it. Buzz was muted despite a star-studded competition jury led by M. Night Shyamalan and world premieres from major auteurs such as Claire Denis and Bertrand Bonello (“Coma”), both of whom came to the festival with films that explicitly responded to a Covid crisis that cast a pall over almost every title in the lineup even when the virus didn’t factor into the plot (Peter Strickland’s excellent IFC acquisition “Flux Gourmet” being a prime example).

And yet, for all of the unique difficulties that confronted this year’s Berlinale, the fest remains one of the world’s biggest and...

Dubai-based sales agent Cercamon is launching a dedicated documentary feature label and will unveil its first slate of titles at this year’s European Film Market, including Constantin Wulff’s Berlinale Forum selection “For the Many – The Vienna Chamber of Labor.”

The company plans to handle 8 to 10 documentaries per year across all markets, with former Doc & Film International and Mediawan Rights exec Suzanne Nodale tapped to oversee all acquisitions and sales of the slate.

A specialist in documentary sales, Nodale has worked on titles such as Gianfranco Rosi’s Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea,” Gregory Monro’s International Emmy Award winner “Kubrick by Kubrick” and “Banksy Most Wanted,” a Tribeca Film Festival selection from directors Aurelia Rouvier and Seamus Haley.

“I am thrilled to have Suzanne joining the team to expand the reach of Cercamon,” said the company’s CEO, Sebastien Chesneau. “I have known her since she first stepped...

The pop-up initiative showcases independent cinema within the framework of the Diriyah Biennale.

Burgeoning Saudi exhibitor Muvi Cinemas and content production and distribution company Telfaz11 have launched joint pop-up venture Wadi Cinema aimed at fostering arthouse cinema-going in the country.

Unfolding within Saudi Arabia’s first-ever art biennale, running in the historic city of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh from December 16 to March 11, the initiative consists of a temporary cinema and a programme of recent arthouse titles.

It opens on Thursday (December 23) with a screening of Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania,...

Also opening: Disney’s ‘Encanto’, ‘Bad Luck Banging’.

Ridley Scott’s House Of Gucci and Reggie Yates’ Pirates head the openers at the UK-Ireland box office, in another bumper week of 17 theatrical debuts.

House Of Gucci is Scott’s second film to arrive in cinemas in six weeks, after medieval epic The Last Duel in mid-October.

Like that title, House Of Gucci tells a true story and boasts a stellar cast, led by Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani, an ambitious woman who marries fashion heir Maurizio Gucci, played by Adam Driver. She pushes him to take over the family business,...

France’s Les Films d’Ici has has issued a letter of interest to board as a co-producer on “Luis Mariano, All the Colors of the Rainbow,” a new feature-length biographical documentary from Spain to be highlighted at this week’s Conecta Fiction in the Pitch Euroregion Naen series section.

Vet Spanish producer Jose María Lara at Basque label Lumiere Produkzioak is participating in this year’s pitchings, dedicated to projects from the emerging Euroregion Naen, taking in Nouvelle Aquitaine in France and the Basque Country and Navarre in Spain.

A Lumiere Produkzioak-Films d’Ici co-production is exactly the kind of result that Pitch Euroregion Series was established to facilitate: Geographically and culturally similar, border-crossing regional partnerships.

A Naen partnership matches the film’s subject as well. Luis Mariano was born on the border between the three Euro-Regions of Naen and is likely the most famous person from there in the 20th century,...

A version of this story about “Collective” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

The Oscar category of Best Documentary was once a reliable safe haven for homegrown American films, but in recent years it has gone international. Since 2015, there have been at least one, and often two, non-English-language titles among the nominees. Films like Italy’s “Fire at Sea,” France’s “Faces Places,” and Brazil’s “The Edge of Democracy” have told stories not with an outsider’s eye, but from within the counties and cultures in which they take place.

But no film had ever been nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film) until North Macedonia’s “Honeyland” turned that trick last year. This year the doubleheader occurred again with Alexander Nanau’s “Collective,” an accomplishment that was even more notable considering...

Franco-Egyptian filmmaker Namir Abdel Messeeh has teamed with Paris-based production outfit Les Films d’Ici for his next feature, the autobiographical hybrid-doc “Life After Siham.”

Building on themes he developed in his award-winning 2011 doc “The Virgin, the Copts and Me,” a self-reflexive exploration of family and identity that played in Cannes, Berlin and Copenhagen, among others, the filmmaker will once again take center stage in this follow-up, which will find the director grieving his mother’s passing and dealing with a creative impasse as he leads a writing workshop in Egypt.

Currently in pre-production and presented as part of the Visions du Réel project pitch session, the film will follow two parallel tracks, mixing family footage the director shot before and after his mother’s passing against the fictional backdrop of a creative retreat set at the late Egyptian director Youssef Chahine’s one-time residence.

With the spirits of Messeeh’s mother,...

Several award-winning filmmakers to pitch latest projects at industry platform, which has added three new cash prizes.

Swiss documentary festival Visions de Réel has revealed the industry projects that will be pitched and presented at its 2021 edition, including new features from UK director Mark Cousins and Oscar-nominated US filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon.

In total, 29 projects will participate across the VdR-Pitching, VdR-Work in Progress and VdR-Rough Cut Lab. Industry activity will take place from April 14-22 both online and physically in Nyon, subject to pandemic restrictions.

Full list of projects below

The work in progress strand will include the latest...

Gianfranco Rosi's Notturno is exclusively showing in many countries starting March 5, 2021 in Mubi's Luminaries series.Nonfiction films tend to exhibit anxiety over their subjective engagement with the factual world. It’s a tension that makers often feel compelled to resolve, or assuage. Some lean into a journalistic tone or style, gathering witnesses and evidence, telling a cogent story and presenting it soberly, burying or at least deemphasizing subjective choices. Others signal or admit their own interventions by including themselves in the frame, or by embracing an unconventional, conspicuous formal approach, eager to wriggle free from outsized expectations of objectivity. Either way the work is, at least in part, defined by this dialectic. Accepting that subjectivity is not only a given but a necessity, the very source of an artist’s power and mandate, the tension shifts to what the artist chooses to emphasize—what he or she is drawn to,...

Sales agent M-Appeal has closed further territory deals for Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which just won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Benelux rights have gone to September Film, and StraDa Films has picked the film up in Greece. September Film plans to release the title theatrically post pandemic. StraDa Films is planning a theatrical release “when the situation allows.”

M-Appeal previously closed deals for France to Diaphana, which plans a theatrical release in the second semester of 2021, with 80 to 150 prints; Portugal to Leopardo Filmes, which plans a theatrical release in November 2021; Korea to GreenNarae Media, which is planning to release the film in theaters in fall or early winter of 2021, “ideally on 100 screens or more if the pandemic situation allows”; and Taiwan to Andrews Films, which is planning a theatrical release in fall or winter 2021.

M-Appeal is in...

The winners for the virtual 2021 Berlin International Film Festival have been revealed, and Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s satire “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” received the Golden Bear for best film. The competition jury celebrated the film as “a rare and essential quality of a lasting art work,” adding in a statement, “It captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence.”

This year’s Berlinale competition jury was made up of six former winners of the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear: “There is No Evil” director Mohammad Rasoulof, “Synonyms” filmmaker Nadav Lapid, “Touch Me Not” helmer Adina Pintilie, “On Body and Soul” director Ildiko Enyedi, “Fire at Sea” filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, and “Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams” director Jasmila Zbanic.

The Silver Bear...

Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary depicts a Middle East emerging from trauma, but it is self-conscious at times

Documentary film-maker Gianfranco Rosi has created a very characteristic cine-poem of sadness, about the Middle East as it emerges from Isis terror, but remaining scarred by the intervention of western powers who had promised so much. It’s an intensely considered curation of scenes: glimpses, perhaps, into a collective mind or soul. Rosi has assembled this from years of filming in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It’s similar in its observational procedures to films such as Sacro Gra, his 2013 study of those who live on the periphery of Rome, near the “Gra” ring road, and also his masterly Fire at Sea from 2016, about the lives of desperate migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, Sicily, and the locals who are coming to terms with them.

The title means “night...

Of the many types of documentary films, Oscar-nominated director Gianfranco Rosi has identified one genre he describes as “complaining and explaining.”

“There’s someone complaining,” Rosi observes, “and then there’s someone explaining to you why they’re complaining.”

That’s not his school. When Rosi settles on a theme for a film, he leaves the rest to chance—traveling to a place and then meeting people who capture his attention. Such was the case with his latest documentary, the Oscar-shortlisted Notturno. Rosi spent three years on the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon and Syria to gain a distinct experience of the Middle East.

“I wanted the film to be a film of encounter,” Rosi tells Deadline. “I wanted the film to start where the reportage stopped and to follow the patterns of the borders—those borders that for years were somehow dominated by violence, by fear, and yet the borders,...

Netflix has dominated the Oscar documentary race the last few years, winning Documentary Feature in 2020 and 2018, but the release of the Academy shortlists Tuesday confirms it faces a battle this time around, from a rival streamer.

Amazon Studios landed two films on the feature shortlist—Time, directed by Garrett Bradley, and All In: The Fight for Democracy, directed by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés. Time, which touches on mass incarceration through the experience of one Black family in Louisiana, must be considered a solid favorite in the Oscar race, having tied for the Gotham Award and amassing multiple critics’ prizes.

Netflix made the Oscar shortlist, as expected, with its top two contenders—Crip Camp, directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht, and Dick Johnson Is Dead, from director Kirsten Johnson. It also muscled in with mollusk-themed My Octopus Teacher, ensnaring in its tentacles a fifth of the 15 shortlist slots. But...

Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary is also nominated at the BIFAs and Critics Choice Documentary Awards.

The Match Factory has secured an additional sale for Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, with Madman Entertainment coming on board to distribute in Australia and New Zealand.

The distributor joins previously announced deals for the documentary including the US (Neon’s Super Ltd label), India, UK, Latin America and Turkey (Mubi), Austria (Filmladen), Benelux (Cineart), ex-Yugoslavia (Demiurg), Japan (Bitters End), Portugal (Leopardo), Switzerland (Xenix), Taiwan (Joint Entertainment) and Poland (New Horizons).

Notturno is Italy’s submission for the international feature award at the 2021 Oscars, with the...

On February 9, the documentary branch of the academy will announce the 15 films that made the shortlist for their Best Documentary Feature award. This is the branch’s first step in narrowing down the 238 documentary features that qualified for Oscar consideration before the final five nominees are unveiled along with all the other Academy Award categories on March 15.

In order to determine the 15-title short list, members of the academy’s documentary branch have been working their way through eligible films via a virtual screening room. While the more than 500 members of the branch are encouraged to watch as many titles as possible, one fifth of them are assigned to each title. By now they’ve all compiled and submitted a preferential ballot of their top 15 choices.

Once these ballots are collated to determine the 15 and the short list has been announced, branch members will then be encouraged to watch the...

One of the darkest contenders for this year’s Best International Film Oscar is “Notturno,” a documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, who sets the audience down in the Middle East chaos by watching it unfold through the terrified eyes of those who have suffered the most.

For Rosi, who spoke with TheWrap for its Awards Screening Series, “Notturno” is his follow-up to the acclaimed “Fire at Sea,” which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016 for its unflinching look at the unfolding migrant crisis in Europe. Now Rosi has turned his attention to the wars that have forced millions of migrants across the Mediterranean.

“What I always felt was missing in [‘Fire At Sea’] was going close to the people I was meeting on this island. This was the gate of Europe and where somehow politics and...

The Berlin International Film Festival has unveiled an unusual jury format for this year’s unusual edition, with six former Golden Bear winners (the festival’s top prize) set to convene during the March event to decide on its awards.

As previously announced, the fest is taking place in two stages, an ‘Industry Event’ March 1-5 which will include the European Film Market as well as the presentation of the event’s festival program to industry delegates. This will be followed by an audience-focused festival from June 9-20.

The jury will convene in Berlin during the first event in March and will watch the film’s in the Competition program on the big screen, with the awards announced that week. The plan is for a physical ceremony to follow in June where the winners can be honored.

The six members of the jury are below. No president has been appointed this year.

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the International Jury for its 71st edition. All the jury members are winners of Berlin’s Golden Bear for best film.

The jury will comprise Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, Israeli director Nadav Lapid, Romania director Adina Pintilie, Hungary director Ildikó Enyedi, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi and Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić. There will be no jury president this year. The jury will view the competition films in a movie theater in Berlin.

Rasoulof won the Golden Bear for “There Is No Evil” in 2020; Lapid for “Synonyms” in 2019; Pintilie for “Touch Me Not” in 2018; Enyedi for “On Body and Soul” in 2017; Rosi for “Fire at Sea” in 2016; and Žbanić for “Grbavica” in 2006.

Artistic director Carlo Chatrian said: “I’m happy and honored that six filmmakers I admire a great deal have enthusiastically accepted our invitation to take part in this unique edition. They express not only...

Festival also reveals details of Summer Special event, which is set to include physical screenings and an awards ceremony.

The international jury of the 71st Berlinale will comprise six former Golden Bear winners: Mohammad Rasoulof, Nadav Lapid, Adina Pintilie, Ildikó Enyedi, Gianfranco Rosi and Jasmila Žbanić.

The long-awaiting selection of films that will make up this year’s online-only edition will be announced next week from February 8-11.

While the selection would usually be announced by the end of January, the unusual nature of this edition will see the Retrospective and Generation named on February 8; the Berlinale Shorts, Forum and...

Six former winners of the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear for best film will make up the jury for this year’s event.

Berlin on Monday unveiled the six jurors: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, last year’s winner for There is No Evil; Nadav Lapid from Israel, whose Synonyms won top honors in 2019; Romanian filmmaker Adina Pintilie, director of controversial 2018 winner Touch Me Not; Hungary’s Ildiko Enyedi, Golden Bear winner for On Body and Soul (2017); Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose refugee documentary Fire at Sea took Berlin’s top prize in 2016; and Bosnia director Jasmila Zbanic, winner for ...

Six former winners of the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear for best film will make up the jury for this year’s event.

Berlin on Monday unveiled the six jurors: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, last year’s winner for There is No Evil; Nadav Lapid from Israel, whose Synonyms won top honors in 2019; Romanian filmmaker Adina Pintilie, director of controversial 2018 winner Touch Me Not; Hungary’s Ildiko Enyedi, Golden Bear winner for On Body and Soul (2017); Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, whose refugee documentary Fire at Sea took Berlin’s top prize in 2016; and Bosnia director Jasmila Zbanic, winner for ...

For the past two years, the Oscar race for international feature hasn’t been a race at all. With Mexico’s “Roma” and South Korea’s “Parasite” heavyweight contenders for best picture, the lower-profile award became a done deal. Disappointingly, early buzz doesn’t point to any equivalent crossover between the two categories this year. The flip side of that, however, is as excitingly competitive an international field as the Oscars have seen in years, while a pandemic-disrupted festival and arthouse scene has made for fewer advance-hyped contenders than usual.

In these topsy-turvy circumstances then, it remains to be seen whether members of the Academy’s international feature branch cleave to the familiar, or delve into the relatively unknown. If old habits prevail, look for Europe to dominate the field: the continent accounted for eight of last year’s 10 shortlisted titles. Over a third of this year’s 93 submissions, meanwhile,...

If you are looking to stir emotions and grab some tissues this weekend Our Friend has got you covered.

Based on Matthew Teague’s book The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word, Gabriela Cowperthwaite directs this heartfelt drama adapted by Brad Ingelsby that follows journalist Matt (Casey Affleck), his wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and their two young daughters as their lives are turned upside down when Nicole is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Matt becomes overwhelmed with being a caretaker and a parent so he calls on the couple’s best friend Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel) to help out. As Dane puts his life on hold to stay with his friends, the impact of this life decision changes all of their lives in the most profound way.

Our Friend is based on the true story of the Teague family and went by the title The Friend when it made...

Gianfranco Rosi, the documentarian behind such astonishing work as Sacro Gra and Fire at Sea, returns with a biting and enormously affecting documentary on people living on the periphery of modern Middle-East conflicts. Culling from footage shot in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon for three years, Rosi patches together the impact that years of carnage and violence has had on inhabitants of the region, especially on children. But in Notturno, as the title implies, night precedes daybreak. Hopefully, this affected generation can break the vicious cycle and move forward. Notturno starts with grieving mothers paying a pilgrimage to a now empty prison building where their sons were tortured and killed. One of the mothers touches the walls, saying that she feels her son's spirit. She wails again as she feels...

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Darkest Nocturne Before the Dawn: Rosi’s Vision of War-Torn Lives

Filmed on the borders of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Kurdistan over the past three years, Notturno offers breathtaking tableaux of the war-torn Middle East. Like Gianfranco Rosi’s previous award-winning docs, Sacro Gra and Fire at Sea, Notturno opts for art-as-journalism, sharing narrative glimpses through painterly frames as opposed to interviews or narration. Rosi’s visuals are indeed gorgeous—with cleverly manipulated audio for added flavor—but his message is more opaque than in previous films. Here, his hyper-aesthetic restraint delivers powerful moments that feel both fragmented and confounding. amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "ioncinema03-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B06W2M7T45"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "c4958da55fdbe753638831f1ced43f27";

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