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Normally, winning an Oscar can take an actor's career to the next level. They're likely to get the cream of the offers, at a higher price than others. For someone like Joaquin Phoenix, who was already established in Hollywood and in contention for the biggest gigs, the only remaining evolution was monetary. He was reportedly paid $20 million to return as the titular character in last year's Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to Joker, for which he won his first Academy Award. However, the film infamously tanked with both critics and audiences. To make matters worse, Phoenix was coming off of a string of flops; he needed Joker 2 to work. It didn't; nor has his latest, Eddington.

Released only a couple of weeks ago, the black comedy Western has lost most of its theaters at the domestic box office. In its third weekend, the movie was playing in only around 500 locations,...

Stellan Skarsgård is the star who will receive this year’s Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, organizers unveiled on Friday.

He will get to honor “in recognition of his exceptional contributions to the film industry and his remarkable acting career.”

Said the star: “The Sarajevo Film Festival remains unwavering and driven in its aim to highlight subjects of great consequence, underscored by an intense lust for life. I love going there.”

Skarsgård, “a longtime friend of the Sarajevo Film Festival, as well as a curator and one of the patrons of the Katrin Cartlidge Foundation – whose scholarships were awarded at the Sarajevo Film Festival – presented the foundation’s scholarship to Juanita Wilson at the festival’s 15th edition in 2009,” organizers highlighted.

Said Jovan Marjanovic, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival: “It is a true honor to present the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo to Stellan Skarsgård,...

Being a single mom and a successful painter is already a tough act to maintain. But doing so as an exile who escaped the Soviet bloc and suffered deep trauma for doing so, is even more distressing — especially when your past comes back to haunt you.

Such are the burdens faced by Perla, the titular heroine of Alexandra Makarova’s promising second feature, which screened in Karlovy Vary after premiering at Rotterdam back in January. Stark and tense, with an impressive eye for period detail, the film is at once a portrait of a rebellious female artist and a time capsule revealing lives torn apart by the Iron Curtain only a decade before it lifted.

Like a cross between Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, Perla shuffles between scenes of postmodern artistic creation and Soviet-era political strife, focusing on a Slovakian painter (Rebeka Polakova) trying to raise her daughter,...

The Eternal Daughter: Lenkiewicz Ladles the Milk of Sorrows

Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes her directorial debut with Hot Milk, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s comically menacing 2016 novel about a daughter tethered to a mysteriously ailing mother. Or, rather, it’s narrative about the point of un-tethering, fashioned a bit like the reverse situation of the Joseph Conrad novella The End of Tether (1902), wherein an aging sea captain lives solely for the happiness of his child. Having penned a number of high profile femme centered scripts, such as Disobedience (2017) for Sebastian Lelio and She Said (2022) for Maria Schrader, Lenkiewicz returns to a distilled, sinister sense of uneasiness which she mined so eloquently in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), where a relationship between women remains weighted down by a past they’ve been unable to articulate.…...

Lawmakers in California have approved the plan to more than double annual funding for the state’s tax credit programme to $750m, according to reports, though a formal vote is still a few days away.

The increase in annual funding from the current $330m was first proposed by state Governor Gavin Newsom last October, as a response to the continuing production slump that has affected the state since the 2023 Hollywood strikes.

But the $750m figure was not included in the 2025-2026 state budget that lawmakers approved earlier this week. Instead, the figure has had to be introduced in a ‘trailer bill’ to the budget.

Lawmakers in California have approved the plan to more than double annual funding for the state’s tax credit programme to $750m, according to reports, though a formal vote is still a few days away.

The increase in annual funding from the current $330m was first proposed by state Governor Gavin Newsom last October, as a response to the continuing production slump that has affected the state since the 2023 Hollywood strikes.

But the $750m figure was not included in the 2025-2026 state budget that lawmakers approved earlier this week. Instead, the figure has had to be introduced in a ‘trailer bill’ to the budget.

Films by Lukas Dhont, Pawel Pawlikowski, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Marie Kreutzer, Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Radu Jude are among 35 features to share €10.7m in Eurimages’s latest round of funding.

The 35 supported co-productions include five documentaries and two animations. 13 of the projects are to be directed or co-directed by women, representing 39.41% of the total funding awarded.

Scroll down for full list

Flemish director Dhont, who was Oscar nominated for his 2023 feature Close, received €500,000 forCoward. Dhont joins forces again with co-writer Angelo Tijssens for the film, for which plot details are not yet available.

The Reunion, the production company set up by Michiel and Lukas Dhont,...

Jim Jarmusch’s comedy drama Father Mother Sister Brother is headed to Venice competition, according to Mubi founder Efe Cakarel.

Cakarel revealed the film was to feature in competition during keynote speech today (June 6) at SXSW London, telling audiences it is “already confirmed”.

Jarmusch’s film, on which Mubi is a producer, is an anthology of three stories starring Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Vicky Krieps, which shot last year across the US, France and Ireland. It follows estranged siblings that reunite after years apart. The Match Factory represents sales.

Production companies are Saint Laurent Prods, Mubi and the Apartment...

“We have the new Jim Jarmusch film. We are a co-producer on that, and it’s already confirmed to be in competition at Venice,” Mubi CEO Efe Cakarel said this afternoon during a Q&a session at SXSW London.

The new film from Jarmusch is titled Father Mother Sister Brother and stars Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, and Luka Sabbat. We’d heard from many sources that the film was heading for the Lido, but this is the first time it has been confirmed publicly.

The official synopsis for Father Mother Sister Brother reads: Estranged siblings reunite after years apart, forced to confront unresolved tensions and reevaluate their strained relationships with their emotionally distant parents.

Elsewhere during this afternoon’s session, Cakarel told the SXSW crowd that Mubi has bought La grazia, the new film by Paolo Sorrentino, which he said...

Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is this year’s recipient of the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award to be bestowed upon him during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which will also feature a retrospective of his films that will be screened as part of the fest’s “tribute to” program.

The honor and tribute will be “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of cinema,” Sarajevo fest organizers said on Tuesday. Sorrentino will also hold a masterclass and “share his thoughts on contemporary art in a conversation with the audience,” they noted.

“I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious recognition and grateful for the attention given to my filmography,” said Sorrentino. “I look forward to being with you in Sarajevo. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The fest highlighted the effect the Italian director and screenwriter’s oeuvre has had on audiences. “Paolo...

Mubi has signed a three-year co-production, financing and distribution agreement with Italian production company Our Films.

Through the deal, Mubi will finance a slate of projects produced by Our Films, while Our Films will contribute additional equity investment.

Mubi will distribute the co-produced titles in key territories; and Mubi-owned The Match Factory will handle worldwide sales. The first title in the new partnership will be the next feature from Pawel Pawlikowski.

It is the latest collaboration between Mubi and producer Mieli, after Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, Pablo Larrain’s Maria and Luca Guadagnino’s Queer.

Mieli left The Apartment last...

Mubi has signed a three-year co-production, financing, and distribution agreement with Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli’s new company Our Films.

The deal builds on the creative relationship established between Mubi and Mieli, through their collaborations on Priscilla, Maria and Queer.

Under the terms of the agreement, Mubi will finance a slate of new projects produced by Our Films, while Our Films will contribute additional equity investment.

Mubi will also distribute the co-produced titles in key territories. The Match Factory will handle worldwide sales, ensuring global distribution and visibility for each project.

The first film to emerge from this new partnership will be the next feature from Oscar-winning director Paweł Pawlikowski.

Mubi, the global streamer, producer and distributor behind “The Substance,” has struck a major three-year co-production, financing and distribution agreement with Our Films, the new Rome-based company founded by prominent European producers Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli.

Our Films, which is part of Mediawan, was launched last year by Gianani and Mieli, and has already become a creative hub for world-class filmmakers from Europe, the U.S. and overseas. Mubi and Our Films share the same passion for artistically ambitious movies that resonate internationally. The agreement also underscores Mediawan’s drive to further strengthen their status as a leading prestige European film studio.

The first film to emerge from this strategic alliance will be the next feature from Paweł Pawlikowski, the Oscar-winning director of “Ida” and “Cold War.”

Mieli previously successfully collaborated with Mubi on three high-profile films: Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” starring Cailee Spaeny; Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” starring...

MK2 Films, which has six movies in competition at Cannes, will also be launching sales at the market on “The Revolution According to Kamo,” the next film by “Pieces of a Woman” director Kornél Mundruczó.

The film is penned by Paweł Pawlikovski, the Oscar-winning director of “Ida” and “Cold War, Ben Hopkins, and Kata Weber (“Pieces of a Woman”), from an idea by Pawlikovski. In the run up to Cannes, the project has also been boarded by French distribution company Le Pacte, as well as Arte.

“The Revolution According to Kamo” is set against the collapse of the Russian Empire, and revolves around the friendship between Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosyan, the future Bolshevik revolutionary known as Kamo, and his childhood friend Soso, who became the dictator Stalin.

“In the shadows of a crumbling world, two boys form a bond that will change the course of history. As they come of age,...

Brazilian director Walter Salles kicks off the 11th Doha Film Institute’s Qumra meeting this Friday, in one of his first international appearances since political drama I’m Still Here won the Best International Feature Film Academy Award on March 2.

Running from April 4 to 9 in Doha, and then online from April 12 to 14, annual talent and project incubator Qumra will host the directors and producers of 49 works supported by Qatar’s Doha Film Institute (Dfi) in various stages of development and production.

Salles is attending as a “Qumra Master” alongside Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, Iranian and French cinematographer Darius Khondji, Mexican costume designer Anna Terrazas and Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To.

In this role, they will each give a masterclass on their careers and lessons learned for the emerging filmmakers in the room and also mentor a...

We’ve put too much stock on the winners of the ASC prize in past years, like when we thought that Łukasz Żal’s cinematography for Cold War would persevere over Alfonso Cuarón’s for Roma on Oscar night. That particular pick was further justified by Paweł Pawlikowski’s nomination for his direction, as there’s a strong link between films winning in this category and their being nominated for directing and, especially, best picture.

Which is my way of saying that the only thing that was going to possibly prevent us from calling this race for Lol Crawley’s cinematography for The Brutalist was if the ASC went for Greig Fraser’s for Dune: Part Two, especially considering that Fraser won an Oscar for his work on the first Dune. But the ASC’s very ASC winner this year was Ed Lachman’s work on Maria, a result that...

Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Wes Anderson are among the signees of an appeal to stave off the impending threat that a substantial portion of Rome’s movie theaters could be converted into shopping centers and supermarkets under proposed regional legislation.

Alarm over the future of the Eternal City’s cinemas was prompted last month after asset management companies Colliers Global Investors and Wrm Capital won a Rome real estate bankruptcy auction and acquired nine movie theaters for a reported €50 million ($52 million).

Some of these venues, such as the city’s central Cinema Adriano multiplex, are fully operational, while others have long been shuttered. The person behind the fund is believed to be Italian-British financier Raffaele Mincione.

Meanwhile, a new regional piece of legislation is being drafted — and is up for approval this week — that would remove norms that currently prevent Rome movie theaters from being converted into any other...

Mubi has unveiled its lineup for next month’s streaming offerings, featuring Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Zhang Yimou’s Shadow, Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali!, along with El Planeta from Amalia Ulman, whose latest Sundance-premiering feature Magic Farm was picked up by the company. An additional highlight is Joanna Hogg’s new short Autobiography of a Handbag, which is also available to stream below.

Alistair Ryder said of Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali! in his review, “Despite casting several of France’s finest character actors as the famed Spaniard, this isn’t an I’m Not There-style tribute to the artist’s spirit attempting an unconventional work in vein like theirs. Dupieux clearly has no interest in those sub-genres of the biopic, either, even if he does have a clear reverence for his subject. Instead his madcap romp manages to blow up all biopic expectations in the most winningly stupid ways...

A vote is scheduled for next week in Italy that could turn cultural venues in Rome — including 50 movie theaters — into shopping malls and supermarkets. Martin Scorsese is among the filmmakers petitioning to save them.

Architect Renzo Piano has shared a letter whose appeal has now been endorsed by filmmakers and Hollywood luminaries including Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Ari Aster, Julie Taymor, Yorgos Lanthimos, J.J. Abrams, Josh Safdie, Todd Haynes, Judd Apatow, Damien Chazelle, Mark Cousins, Alfonso Cuarón, Willem Dafoe, Robert Eggers, Joanna Hogg, Dawn Hudson, Isabella Rossellini, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Schrader, Léa Seydoux, John Turturro, Thomas Vinterberg, Jeremy Thomas, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Debra Winger.

The government of the Lazio region, which hosts the Italian capital, is about to approve a law that will be voted on next week that would make 50 movie theaters, including Rome’s many historic and abandoned cinemas, vulnerable...

There are numerous first time directors at this year’s Berlinale, but few come with the sort of indie film credits on Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s resume.

The British playwright and screenwriter had worked on the script for Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning “Ida” alongside the director, on “Disobedience” with Sebastián Lelio and on “Colette” with Wash Westmoreland, before going it alone to turn Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about their industry-shaking Harvey Weinstein expose into the script that would become Maria Schrader’s “She Said” in 2022.

But with “Hot Milk,” which bowed at the Palaste on Friday, she moved closer to the camera and made it her directorial debut. Adapted (by Lenkiewicz) from Deborah Levy’s book and shot in Greece, the story is set under the hot Spanish summer and follows Sofia, a young woman (Emma Mackey) in a co-dependent relationship with her wheelchair-bound mother Rose (Fiona Shaw...

Mubi has added additional territories on Rebecca LenkiewIcz’s directorial debut Hot Milk, selected today for its world premiere in Competition at the Berlinale.

Mubi will now release the film in Germany, Austria and India. The distributor had previously acquired rights for UK-Ireland, Italy, Latin America and Turkey.

HanWay Films handles international sales on the film, with deals already in place for iFC Films in North America; Metropolitan Films in France; Caramel and Karma in Spain; The Searchers in Benelux; Nos in Portugal; Scanbox in Scandinavia; M2 in Eastern Europe; Front Row in the Middle East; Shaw in Singapore; and...

Jacques Audiard, Sean Baker, Edward Berger, Brady Corbet, and James Mangold are the 2025 Directors Guild Award nominees.

The Directors Guild announced the DGA Awards nominees on Wednesday, hours after the Screen Actors Guild Award revealed its 2025 nominations.

All nominees are first-time honorees at the Directors Guild. Audiard, a cherished French filmmaker, directed Netflix’s top awards contender, Emilia Pérez. Baker, a leading indie director of this era, helmed Neon’s wild comedy-thriller, Anora. Berger is recognized for the papal suspense film Conclave from Focus Features. Corbet, who recently won Best Director at the Golden Globes, is the 36-year-old auteur of the epic A24 release The Brutalist. Lastly, Mangold is the American veteran of the group, nominated here for A Complete Unknown, about Bob Dylan.

The Directors Guild is often a good barometer of future Oscar success — but it is rarely perfect. The last time the five DGA Awards matched the...

Jacques Audiard, Sean Baker, Edward Berger, Brady Corbet and James Mangold have been nominated as the best feature film directors of 2024 by the Directors Guild of America, which announced its movie nominations on Wednesday.

Audiard was nominated for “Emilia Pérez,” Baker for “Anora,” Berger for “Conclave,” Corbet for “The Brutalist” and Mangold for “A Complete Unknown.”

The nominations make “Anora,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave” and “Emilia Pérez” the only films to be nominated in the top category by both of the major guilds that announced on Wednesday, the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. “The Brutalist” was not nominated in SAG’s ensemble category, while “Wicked” was nominated for SAG’s cast award but not for director Jon M. Chu.

Other directors who didn’t make the DGA list include Coralie Fargeat for “The Substance” and Denis Villeneuve for “Dune: Part Two.”

In the category for first-time feature directors,...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

It is almost impossible, or so it seems to me, to have a conversation about the films of 2024 without first considering 2014. That year, many of us wondered where cinematic language was headed, especially given our recent experiences: Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), and the revolutionary Terrence Malick’s adventure The Tree of Life (2011). What more was there to be said, if anything at all? But then, Paweł Pawlikowski presented Ida, a quiet yet audacious black-and-white, 4:3-ratio, minimalist film, and we thought the possibilities for great cinema were infinite, and that we really could have a masterpiece every year.

Ida, in any case, was and still is, something more than a masterpiece: it’s a classic, and as such, a reminder that good cinema,...

Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic box office hit Touch marks the fifth time that the filmmaker has been chosen as the country’s representative in the International Feature Oscar category, but it also reps something of a departure for the multi-hyphenate who’s perhaps more associated outside of Iceland with action and adventure titles like 2 Guns and Everest.

A love story based on the bestselling novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, who co-wrote the script with Kormákur, Touch follows widower Kristofer (Egil Ólafsson), who, after receiving an early-stage dementia diagnosis at the outset of the pandemic, leaves behind his Reykjavik home hoping to solve the greatest mystery of his life. As a student in London five decades earlier, Kristofer had fallen in love with Miko, whose father owned the Japanese restaurant where they both worked. But at the height of their whirlwind affair, Miko abruptly vanished. As panic about the virus spreads around the world,...

Emily Blunt brought the star power to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Thursday, the first day of the fourth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival (Rsiff), discussing her career, including the Oppenheimer awards season run, a possible ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ sequel and working with her husband on A Quiet Place during an “In Conversation With” session.

The British actress, who has won a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well a nomination for an Academy Award and four BAFTA Film Awards nominations, entertained the crowd for more than an hour and provided deep industry insights.

Her actress mother had four kids and had to give up her acting dream to some degree, Blunt recalled. “The industry can be hard on people. You need a helmet for it,” the star emphasized.

She also shared that “I was quite a shy kid” with a stutter, but creative...

Jurors at the EnergaCamerimage cinematography fest say the Golden Frog main competition films have been remarkably varied and inspiring in the event’s 32nd edition.

The 12 competing films “were radically different from each other,” said “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, whose directorial debut, “Pedro Paramo,” is also screening at the fest. “I enjoyed that.”

The varied styles, approaches and storytellers, he added, defied easy categorization. “Happily, I didn’t notice trends, which I have noticed sometimes in the past in some festivals.”

Juror Anthony Dod Mantle, who won Golden Frogs in 2008 for his lensing of “Slumdog Millionaire” and in 2016 for “Snowden,” said, “I’ve been to this festival before and the overall collection of films and categories, I felt, was even wider. I feel slight absence of certain films from other ethnic backgrounds. They were different, these films, but they could be far more different.

Former mk2 films acquisition and sales agents Olivier Barbier and Ola Byszuk are joining forces with ex-Orange Studio exec Lenny Porte to create international sales company Lucky Number.

The trio, who have worked on hundreds of auteur titles between them, including Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist to name but a few – are currently building their slate for an early 2025 market launch.

Their aim is to handle 10 French and international auteur films a year, split roughly between two to three animated features, and seven to eight fiction films and docs, including work by new voices.

The trio want to offer a boutique service, which also involves financing and distribution strategies from the earliest stages of development, to ensure maximum impact on international markets.

“In an industry that has become increasingly complex both in terms of production and distribution,...

Governments and agencies across Asia are taking steps to expand and extend the cross-border film coproduction movement.

A seminar called ‘From Eurasia to Global Collaboration’ on Thursday, the third day of the Taiwan Creative Content Fest, represented a handy recap of funding and structural developments from four countries: The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey.

Alex Sihar, from Indonesia’s directorate of culture, part of the ministry of education, described an ongoing process intended to put the industry on a more professional footing.

“While we have a long history of filmmaking and a very diverse culture, our films until recently have had very little international exposure, there has been little knowledge transfer and no incentives for location shooting or co-production.”

Film policy was previously stretched across multiple ministries, but is now to be overseen by a film department under the education ministry, which is newly separated from educational matters.

Co-productions are...

Though the Criterion Collection may be taking their beloved closet on the road to celebrate their 40th anniversary, only the lucky few have been able to step foot in the actual hallowed space. Now, renaissance man Bill Hader can say he’s done so twice. The actor, writer, and director behind the hit HBO series “Barry” first entered the Criterion Closet in 2011. Dressed for the occasion with an orange shirt sporting the Kaibyō from the poster for the 1977 Japanese horror film “House,” Hader drew selections such as Federico Fellini’s “Amarcord” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s grotesque “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” which he referred to at the time as “a great date movie.”

Referencing this pick in his latest video, Hader displayed “Salò” once again and said, “It is not a good date movie. Just want to clear that up.”

After making a few jokes at the expense...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Exclusive: Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo, best known for titles like White God (2014) and Pieces of a Woman (2020), has signed with WME.

Mundruczo, who also founded the Budapest-based independent film production company Proton Cinema Kornél, will continue to be represented by Stuart Manashil of Novo.

Next, the filmmaker is set to direct At the Sea, a feature starring an ensemble cast including Amy Adams, Brett Goldstein, Murray Bartlett, Jenny Slate, Dan Levy, and Chloe East. Mundruczo has also signed on to direct The Revolution According to Kamo, a biopic about the friendship between Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosyan and his best childhood friend Soso who would go on to become Joseph Stalin. Mundrcuczo’s frequent collaborator Kata Weber has penned the screenplay, which is an adaption of an original script by Pawel Pawlikowski and Ben Hopkins.

After studying film and television at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Hungary, Mundruczó debuted his first film,...

Related Images invites readers behind the scenes and into the sketchbooks of working filmmakers to learn more about their creative processes.Ernst De Geer’s The Hypnosis is now showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries.We shot two scenes from the film three years before we did the actual feature, as part of the Wild Card initiative by the Swedish Film Institute and Svt. This was before we had even written the screenplay. The scenes were not to use in the final film, just to inform us in our process. We cast Herbert Nordrum and Asta Kamma August for it, so we got to work together for a lot longer than usual for a film.I wanted the process of making The Hypnosis to be more loose than was usual for me. I had made a lot of works in film school that were planned out and controlled, and...

The work of filmmaker Andrew De Zen has populated Dn’s pages for many years. He’s a filmmaker we keep coming back to because of his ability to tie together impactful imagery with emotionally driven storytelling. His latest short Let This Feeling Go is another example of this, an experimental dance short about a young woman who is primed to explode after she bottles up her emotions. As we follow her across her daily life, the music of Nina Simone is used to build an underlying tension that culminates in a powerful and cathartic expressive dance-driven finale. With the film now online, Dn caught up with De Zen once again to learn about the journey he went on with Let This Feeling Go, the decision to capture the film on large format 65mm film, and his inherent desire to steer away from the explicit and towards the abstract.

What...

Exclusive: Israel’s yes Studios has struck a deal with Jewish streamer ChaiFlicks for a suite of shows including award-winning pre-#MeToo era series Unsilenced.

ChaiFlicks has also taken on the upcoming fourth season of breakout comedy Checkout, while renewing its license for the prior three.

Starring Yaakov Zada Daniel (Fauda) and Avraham Shalom Levi (Shtisel), Israeli Television Academy Award-winning drama Unsilenced is based on novel The Confidante. It follows the newly elected Israeli president with rumors of sexual assault and rape of a staffer swirling around him. His top adviser realizes that if news of this leaks out, the scandal could destroy the President’s career and his own.

July August Productions’ Checkout, meanwhile, has been one of ChaiFlicks’ most-watched series since it debuted in 2021, according to the streamer. Created by Nadav Frishman and Yaniv Zohar, it takes place in the Yavne branch of a fictional supermarket and follows...

The ReportImage: Amazon

Even if it might be harder to navigate than any of its top-tier streaming peers, Amazon Prime Video still boasts a wide selection of films, including plenty of older movies that places like Netflix simply don’t care to host. That said, its turnover is frequent and subtle.

Kornel Mundruczo is to direct The Revolution According To Kamo, a historical drama exploring the youth of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin through the eyes of his closest friend, with filming set to begin in Georgia in 2025.

Kata Weber, a frequent collaborator of Mundruczo, has adapted an original screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski and Ben Hopkins. The script was developed with support from Film4.

The drama is a Georgian-language production spanning three decades, from 1891 to the death of Stalin’s friend Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosyan, aka Kamo, in 1922. The film follows their lives growing up together in Georgia, with Kamo finding himself drawn...

Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó (Pieces of a Woman, White God) has signed on to direct The Revolution According to Kamo, an ambitious biopic on the early life of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

The feature is based on a script by Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski and Ben Hopkins, co-writer of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Cannes competition entry Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie. The Revolution According to Kamo spans 30 years from 1891 to 1922, tracing the birth of one of history’s most murderous dictators as seen through the eyes of his devoted friend, ally, and henchman Kamo. The Georgian-language feature is being prepped for a 2025 shoot in Georgia.

“It’s less about a man being born evil, but about the mechanics of power and how one man rises to the top,” said Mundruczó. “But it’s also about a passionate friendship between these two men who knew each other since they were boys.

“Pieces of a Woman” filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó is set to direct “The Revolution According to Kamo,” an epic drama about the early life of Joseph Stalin. The Hungarian filmmaker’s last feature, “Pieces of a Woman,” earned an Oscar nomination for Vanessa Kirby.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski and scriptwriter Ben Hopkins (“Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie”) penned the original screenplay which was adapted by Kata Weber, a frequent Mundruczó collaborator.

“The Revolution According to Kamo” revolves around the friendship between the future Bolshevik revolutionary Simon Arshaki Ter-Petrosyan, also known as Kamo, and his childhood friend Soso, who would go on to become the dictator Stalin.

The film, which is scheduled for a 2025 shoot in the Republic of Georgia, is being produced by Mike Goodridge of Good Chaos, whose last film, “Santosh,” played in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Ilya Stewart of Hype Studios,...

Exclusive: Jewish streamer ChaiFlicks has struck its first deal for Yiddish programming including an oral history project with Leonard Nimoy.

The streamer will make documentary features and short films available via the partnership with the Yiddish Book Center, the Massachusetts-based non-profit dedicated to Yiddish literature and culture.

Starting today, ChaiFlicks will begin rolling out a variety of documentaries from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project including Star Trek icon Nimoy’s oral Yiddish history. He was interviewed by Christa Whitney in 2013 and parts of his interview are in Yiddish and subtitled in English.

Other projects comprising the deal are about musicians Peter Sokolow and Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, as well as Yiddish writers Avrom Sutzkever, Solomon Simon, Ida Maze, Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman and Alter Esselin.

“We are thrilled to partner with the Yiddish Book Center and continue their mission of disseminating and sharing the beauty of the rich...

Exclusive: Dubai-based management and production company 75East has signed Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, whose narrative feature debut To A Land Unknown is playing in Directors’ Fortnight this year.

75East, was launched last December by former Mister Smith sales executive Antone Saliba under the banner Untamed Talent with a focus on the Swana region (South West Asia and North Africa), and has recently rebranded.

The only Palestinian feature in Cannes this year, To A Land Unknown tells the story of the desperate attempts of two Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens to find a way to reach Germany.

Chatila and Reda are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens. When Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan, which involves them posing as smugglers and taking hostages in an effort to get him and his best friend out of their hopeless environment before it is too late.

That the name Limonov is pronounced “Lee-mwah-nov” is one of two main things that Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Limonov: The Ballad” teaches us about Eduard Limonov, the Russian radical, poet, dissident, emigré, returnee, detainee, bête noire and cause célèbre who in 1993 co-founded the ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party. The second is that, as imagined in this adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s 2015 fictionalized biography, for all the shifting identities and attitudes he assumed over the course of his controversial life, his persona as an aggravatingly self-aggrandizing solipsist never wavered.

A sharper film could have excavated his contradictions to illuminating effect — the rise of populist, crypto-fascist political movements and their self-ordained maverick leaders being a not-irrelevant phenomenon these days. But Serebrennikov, in love with the posture of the rebel that Limonov adopted without being terribly interested in what, at any given moment, he claimed to be rebelling against, mistakes the trappings for the substance...

Sex is politics and politics is sex in Kirill Serebrennikov’s recklessly beautiful, wildly entertaining English-language debut “Limonov: The Ballad.” This punk rock epic moves at the pace of a train coming off its tracks across Moscow, New York, Paris, and back to Russia again, starring Ben Whishaw in a career-crowning lead performance as the self-styled alternative poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov (who died in 2020). Based on French writer and journalist Emmanuel Carrère’s biographical novel, “Limonov” spans the 1960s to near present-day Siberia to tell with orgiastic excess the life story of the eventual founder of the National Bolshevik Party, which married a far-left youth movement to far-right fascist ideology. But while Limonov’s politics are inextricable from the libertine hedonist he was, Serebrennikov’s film is more a purely pleasurable romantic odyssey than political deep dive, radiating a countercultural energy that smacks of freewheeling ‘70s cinema more...

Reflecting the peculiarities and contradictions of the man who gives the film its title, Limonov: The Ballad is a strange, stilted, inventive, kaleidoscopic, challenging, imaginative and — above all, and perhaps entirely intentionally — irritating biopic of the Russian poet-punk-prisoner-gadfly-neo-Fascist Eduard Limonov (né Eduard Veniaminovich Savenko in 1948). To paraphrase the novelist Julian Barnes’ review of Emmanuel Carrere’s sort-of novel, sort-of biography on which this film is loosely based, Limonov: The Ballad is a work viewers may enjoy having seen more than they would enjoy seeing it.

It’s anybody’s guess how many will make the actual effort to watch this 138-minute ramshackle romp about a man who, before he died in 2020, applauded Russia’s annexation of Crimea and fought on the side of the invaders in Ukraine’s Donbas and Donetsk regions. Limonov’s unsavory sympathies would likely turn off most Western viewers, apart from the fearless fans of dramas about political monsters.

Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacurau”) is set to direct “The Secret Agent,” a gripping political thriller headlined by “Civil War” star Wagner Moura. The film is set in the late 1970s during the final years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

MK2 Films, the sales banner behind the Oscar-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” will introduce the project to buyers at the Cannes Film Market. Now in pre-production, “The Secret Agent” is being produced by Brazil’s Cinemascopio and Mk Productions, whose credits include Oscar-nominated films such as Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” and Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War.”

Moura, who broke through internationally with his Golden Globe-nominated performance as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series “Narcos,” will star as Marcelo, a university professor in his 40s who is on the run. He travels from São Paulo to the seaside city of Recife during Carnival week, hoping to reunite with his son.

Exclusive: Jewish streamer ChaiFlicks has licensed Oscar-winning Paweł Pawlikowski movie Ida and a wealth of other titles following a deal with Music Box Films.

The SVoD platform that specializes in Jewish storytelling has licensed 15 titles from the Chicago-based outfit, including Golden Globe-nominated Gett: The Trial of Vivane Amsalem. Other titles include Memoir of War, Golden Voices and Aida’s Secrets.

The main draw is Pawlikowski’s Ida, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2015 and follows a young Polish woman (Agata Trzebuchowska) as she prepares to take vows as a Catholic nun. The orphaned protagonist then discovers that her parents were Jewish, and joins her only surviving relative on a road trip to learn the fate of their families.

ChaiFlicks has more than 3,000 hours of Jewish films, TV series, and documentaries, and plans to launch Ida and the other new titles on its platform later this year.

Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov returns to Cannes once again this year with Limonov: The Ballad starring Ben Whishaw, for which we can share a first-look image from above.

The film’s synopsis reads: A revolutionary militant, a thug, an underground writer, a butler to a millionaire in Manhattan. But also a switchblade-waving poet, a lover of beautiful women, a warmonger, a political agitator, and a novelist who wrote of his greatness. Eduard Limonov’s life story is a journey through Russia, America, and Europe during the second half of the 20th century.

The film was written by Pawel Pawlikowski, Ben Hopkins, and Serebrennikov, based on the novel ‘Limonov’ by Emmanuel Carrère, published in the US by Macmillan Publishers and in France by Pol.

Producers are Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside, a Fremantle Company, Dimitri Rassam for Chapter 2, a Mediawan Company, Ilya Stewart for Hype Studios and coproduced by...

After several years working in German TV and locally-oriented film projects, Julia von Heinz had a significant breakthrough with “And Tomorrow the Entire World” — a taut, punchy political thriller with a youthful spirit of anti-fascist revolt, vigorous enough to land a Venice competition slot. Its success evidently raised the status of the director’s long-held passion project, an adaptation of Australian novelist Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical 2001 title “Too Many Men,” which reckoned thoughtfully with her parents’ experience as Auschwitz survivors, and the hereditary nature of trauma. It emerges here, in somewhat simplified form, as “Treasure,” a watchably meandering vehicle for Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry to wrestle out father-daughter conflicts both trivially universal and hauntingly specific to history. The urgency and dynamism that marked von Heinz’s last feature are largely absent; for a story of such particular and searing sorrow, it feels rather mild.

Premiering in an out-of-competition Berlinale slot,...