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Paris-based Totem Films has acquired world sales rights, excluding Canada, to Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz’s “Measures for a Funeral” in advance of the film’s world premiere in the Toronto Film Festival’s Centrepiece program.

Margot Hervée, Totem’s head of sales and acquisitions, first encountered Bohdanowicz’s work a few years ago. “It immediately resonated with me,” she told Variety. “We’re thrilled to now have her as part of the Totem family and to represent her latest film.”

Vortex Media is the film’s Canadian distributor.

As part of today’s announcement, Totem has shared with Variety a first teaser for “Measures,” which stars Deragh Campbell as Audrey Benac — a “family detective” character she has played in previous Bohdanowicz films, including the feature “Ms Slavic 7,” which premiered in Berlin in 2019 and also screened in Toronto.

Filmed in Canada, the U.K. and Norway, “Measures”— which won the...

★★★★☆ Jem Cohen paints an arresting and mesmeric drama in his first narrative feature, Museum Hours (2012). Comparable to the literature of Italo Calvino in the way Cohen has managed to produce a potent portrait of both the physical and the emotional, it effortlessly glides through art history, wrapped in the warm drama of a chance encounter. Unashamedly intellectual, Cohen has crafted a masterful piece of graceful cinema set amidst the halls of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. We follow Johann (Bobby Sommer) as he whiles away his days looking after the portraits and landscapes that adorn the walls.

Circumstances lead Johann to cross paths with Janet (Mary Margaret O'Hara), who has travelled from America after discovering that her cousin has been taken seriously ill and now lies in a coma in hospital. After Johann provides Janet with directions to the hospital, the two become friends and begin to explore both the museum and the city together.

The Great Beauty | About Time | Riddick | Ain't Them Bodies Saints | Museum Hours | Pieta | The Stuart Hall Project | The Great Hip Hop Hoax | No One Lives | More Than Honey | Jadoo | Any Day Now

The Great Beauty (15)

(Paolo Sorrentino, 2013, Ita/Fra) Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, 141 mins

Sorrentino proves himself a worthy successor to Fellini here, tracking modern Roman decadence with staggering exuberance and an eye for the stylishly surreal. Filling the Marcello Mastroianni role is Servillo's world-weary writer and socialite, who stalks the city's elite demi-monde of hedonistic parties, pretentious art, cynical grotesques and faded glories – but finds reveries and regrets around every corner.

About Time (12A)

(Richard Curtis, 2013, UK) Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams. 123 mins

A sci-fi element reinvigorates Curtis's trademarked romcom formula, but there's still a feeling of deja vu to this middle-class love story, in which Gleeson uses his inherited time-travelling powers to woo McAdams – albeit at a cost.

Hard to explain what kind of film this is, other than a deeply beguiling one. Director Jem Cohen has overlaid a civilised art-history essay with a story of random connections and the comfort of strangers. Johann (Bobby Sommer), a security guard at Vienna's grand Kunsthistorisches Museum, reflects on life and art in gentle voiceover; he once managed rock bands, now he's keen on some peace and quiet. By chance he gets talking to Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara), a Canadian who's in Vienna to visit a cousin she hasn't seen in years, now in a coma.

Jem Cohen's left-of-centre treatise on art history and the pleasure of looking might just change the way you see the world

Jem Cohen's quiet, strange and compelling hybrid film uses a brief encounter between wizened souls – Johann (Bobby Sommer), a genial guard at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, and Anne (singer Mary Margaret O'Hara), a Canadian tourist – to frame an inquiry into art history and the pleasures of looking. Inspired by Brueghel's busy tableaux, Cohen is drawn to museum minutiae: a canvas's unnoticed details, yawning schoolchildren, cigarette butts gathering outside the entrance. As the relationship progresses, he ends up cataloguing Vienna itself, transforming even its banal or throwaway features into a kind of art. It sounds impossibly rarefied, but the leads map out something unforced and charming between them, and Cohen's left-of-centre perspectives, juxtapositions and sight gags really do grow on you. Like José Luis Guerín's brilliant 2007 curio In the City of Sylvia,...

Check out the poster for Jem Cohen's Museum Hours, starring Mary Margaret O'Hara, Bobby Sommer and Ela Piplits. The film from Cinema Guild opens June 28, 2013 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza in New York, followed by a national release. Museum Hours is a mesmerizing tale of two adrift strangers who find refuge in Vienna’s grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum. Johann, a museum guard, spends his days silently observing both the art and the visitors. Anne, suddenly called to Vienna from overseas, has been wandering the city in a state of limbo. A chance meeting sparks a deepening connection that draws them through the halls of the museum...

Son of Rogue's Gallery, a compilation of songs from the seafaring tradition, will feature a grizzled crew including Keith Richards, Michael Stipe, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan

Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Tom Waits and the Pogues' Shane MacGowan are among the contributors to a new compilation of pirate ballads. The grizzled, A-list crew was assembled by Johnny Depp, who performs on the album, and the people behind the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

First, some more names. Among the hearties who are shivering timbers on Son of Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys: Tom Waits with Keith Richards, Michael Stipe with Courtney Love, Nick Cave, Broken Social Scene, Marianne Faithful with the McGarrigle sisters, Sissy Bounce with Akron/Family, Beth Orton, Macy Gray and Sean Lennon.

The two-disc set, due next year, is the sequel to a compilation from 2006. There too, Pirates producer Hal Willner manned the tiller.

This week's announcement that Olivier Père, former programmer of Cannes's Directors' Fortnight, will be stepping down from his post at the helm of the Festival del Film Locarno marks the end of brief but important era for this film festival, one of the longest-running in the world. In just three years, Père has helped to put the annual event back on the festival map, drawing an annual influx of celebrities and industry-types for red-carpet world premieres, jury prizes, and lifetime achievement awards. Perhaps more than ever in its sixty-six-year history, Locarno is an important station on the fall festival circuit, forecasting the slates of Toronto and New York and providing useful international gateway for cinema from all over the world.

This year's festival featured a characteristically dizzying mix of international festival ephemera, an Otto Preminger retrospective, and much-heralded appearances by the likes of Kylie Minogue, Alain Delon, and Harry Belafonte on the festival's main stage,...