News

The German film community is mourning the unexpected death of Good Bye, Lenin! director Wolfgang Becker at the age of 70 after a serious illness.

He had just completed principal photography on his sixth feature,The Hero Of Friedrichstrasse Station, based on Maxim Leo’s novel of the same name.

Becker graduated from the German Film & Television Academy in Berlin (dffb) in 1987 with his directorial debut Butterflies (Schmetterlinge). Adapted from a short story by Ian McEwan, the film won the Saarland Prime-Minister’s Award at the Max Ophüls Prize Film Festival, a student Academy Award and the Golden Leopard in Locarno...

David Moreau’s ‘MadS’ is a fever dream of a film that feels like a cross between Sebastian Schipper’s ‘Victoria’ and Gasper Noe’s ‘Climax’. It’s a one-shot horror thriller that follows an intoxicating yet ridiculously terrifying journey of a few individuals on a night in a French city. Throughout its duration, it feels like a relentless attack on all your senses following characters as they fall into inescapable, frightening situations. After making waves in this year’s Fantastic Fest 2024, it is now streaming on Shudder. It stars Lucille Guillaume, Milton Riche, Laurie Pavy, and Lewkowski Yovel in the central roles.

Spoilers Ahead

MadS (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

Directed by David Moreau, ‘MadS’ on Shudder follows the visceral, maddeningly chaotic journey of a few teenagers as they find themselves caught in a string of horrifying situations. It is one of those films where the less you know the better.

Synopsis

A thrilling post-MTV roller-coaster ride, Run Lola Run is the internationally acclaimed sensation

about two star-crossed lovers who have only minutes to change the course of their lives. Time is running out for Lola (Franka Potente). She’s just received a frantic phone call from her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who’s lost a small fortune belonging to his mobster boss. Manni will suffer severe consequences if Lola doesn’t replace the money in twenty minutes. Written and directed by Tom Tykwer.

Disc Details And Bonus Materials

4K Ultra HD Disc

• Feature presented in 4K resolution with Dolby Vision

• German 5.1 DTS-hd Master Audio

• Special Features:

o Audio Commentary with Director Tom Tykwer and Actor Franka Potente

o Audio Commentary with Director Tom Tykwer and Editor Mathilde Bonnefoy

o Making-Of Featurette

o Still Running Featurette

o “Believe” Music Video

o Theatrical Trailer

Cast And Crew

Written and Directed By:...

Vanessa Kirby, who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Pieces of a Woman and is best known for the White Widow character she played in Mission: Impossible – Fallout and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (as well as landing the role of Sue Storm in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe version of The Fantastic Four), launched a production company called Aluna Entertainment with former Film4 executive Lauren Dark back in 2021, and Variety reports that Aluna Entertainment is now in production on its first feature film. It’s a thriller called Night Always Comes, and Kirby stars alongside Eli Roth (Inglourious Basterds), Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight), Zack Gottsagen (The Peanut Butter Falcon), Stephan James (If Beale Street Could Talk), Julia Fox (Uncut Gems), Randall Park (WandaVision), and Michael Kelly (House of Cards).

Benjamin Caron, whose credits include The Crown and Andor, is directing Night Always Comes from...

Vanessa Kirby has amassed an impressively starry ensemble cast for the first feature out of the gates for Aluna Entertainment, the production company she established in 2021 with former Film4 exec Lauren Dark.

“Night Always Comes,” which Oscar nominee Kirby will lead, is set to star Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zack Gottsagen (“The Peanut Butter Falcon”), Stephan James (“If Beale Street Could Talk”), Julia Fox (“Uncut Gems”), Eli Roth, Randall Park and Michael Kelly.

Shooting is now underway in Portland on the thriller, which is based on the 2021 novel by Willy Vlautin. Benjamin Caron directs from a script by Sarah Conradt (“Mother’s Instinct”).

As per the logline, “Night Always Comes” follows Lynette, a woman who risks everything to secure a future for herself and her brother by setting out on a dangerous odyssey in Portland, in doing so confronting her own dark past over one propulsive night.

Kirby and Dark are producing...

Thomas Hardiman's Medusa Deluxe is now showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries—including the United Kingdom, India, Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico—from August 4, 2023, in the series Debuts.Medusa Deluxe.In the midst of navigating the drama that ensnares all of Medusa Deluxe’s characters, Claire Perkins’s Cleve looks at a fellow hairdresser and explains, “There is some serious history in this hairstyle, do you know that? A story.” The hairstyle in question is initially shown as an unfinished work of art (or travesty if you’re a competitor hoping for a fellow stylist’s downfall): a mess of strands that’s easy to see through and hard to make sense of. But as the film progresses, Cleve creates a truly beautiful and engrossing design out of what was once incoherent webbing: a glowing ship upon a wave of hair, meant to be a recreation of the Orient,...

When Franz Rogowski tries to pinpoint the moment he went from being a struggling unknown to an in-demand art house star — the 37-year-old German actor is still basking in critical acclaim for his performances in Ira Sachs’ Passages alongside Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well

as Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin festival sleeper Disco Boy and will be walking the Lido red carpet with Giorgio Diritti’s Venice competition title Lubo — he goes back to Berlin 2018.

“That was the year I had a double pack: Two films in competition, with [Christian Petzold’s] Transit and [Thomas Stuber’s] In the Aisles,” says Rogowski, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via a shaky Zoom connection from France, where he’s spending a few days after wrapping his latest, Bird from American Honey director Andrea Arnold.

“I was also one of the European Shooting Stars that year. So it was a bit of a turning point.

Barcelona-based Filmax has acquired the rights for Spain and international to “The Teacher Who Promised The Sea,” starring Laia Costa, a best actress winner at Germany’s Lola Awards for Sebastian Schipper’s bank heist thriller, “Victoria.”

Directed by Goya best fiction short winner Patricia Font (“Café para llevar”), “The Teacher,” which recently wrapped production, will be presented to buyers via a promo reel.

Produced by Minoria Absoluta, Lastor Media and Filmax the feature is based on the book of the same name by Francesc Escribano. It brings to the big screen the real-life story of Antoni Benaiges, a Catalan teacher who shook up a rural village in the province of Burgos in 1935, introducing progressive teaching methods from France, based on encouraging students’ self expression, buying a printing press which allowed their thoughts to be published.

In this tiny village, bound by centuries of illiteracy, he proves a controversial figure...

The biggest recipient is Valeska Grisebach’s fourth feature ‘The Dreamt Adventurer’ (working title).

Four projects, all by women filmmakers, have been supported by the German-French Funding Commission made up of representatives from Germany’s Ffa and France’s Cnc.

The largest single amount of production funding of € 360,000 went to Valeska Grisebach’s fourth feature film The Dreamt Adventurer (Der Geträumte Abenteuer). It will be the latest collaboration between Germany’s Komplizen Films and France’s Kazak Productions, co-producers of Filmfest München’s opening film Corsage, as well as Sebastian Schipper’s 2019 film Roads and actress-director Nicolette Krebitz’s Berlinale...

The camera bobs, weaves, floats and ducks, tracks, speeds up and slows down with ease; never resting throughout the entire runtime of Ben Galster‘s mesmeric one-shot music video Kugelsicher, created for pop artist Marie Bothmer. Shot entirely in the twilight period on the border between Berlin and the state of Brandenburg, Galster immediately plunges us into the aftermath of a violent, life-threatening scene, with characters caught in a moral quandary that offers no easy solutions. The result is a flowing, gripping music video with a surfeit of style; an immersive experience that brings to mind both Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria and the post-robbery feel of Reservoir Dogs. Dn had the chance to talk to the Berlin-based director about the technical challenges of the shoot, finding the perfect location, working with an open brief, and getting the right vintage lenses to capture both foreground and background at the same time.

Great Freedom, starring Franz Rogowski, is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting May 7, 2022. The actor is also the subject of Mubi's retrospective, Franz Rogowski: Man of the Hour.Franz Rogowski in Great Freedom (2021).Some people just have it—"it" here being largely indefinable and perhaps even a quality others also possess but for whatever reason doesn’t galvanize the masses like that rare individual. German actor Franz Rogowski is one of those people, a once-in-a-generation talent whose meteoric rise has been as surprising as it is warranted. Though he’d featured prominently as both a lead (in German director Jakob Lass’s 2013 bizarre romantic improvisation Love Steaks) and a supporting player, Rogowski’s star truly began to rise when Berlin School auteur Christian Petzold cast him in his 2018 masterpiece Transit, which launched the face that launched a thousand appreciations of it, particularly in the United States where he had theretofore been largely unknown.

Pedro Almodóvar has put his considerable weight behind Spaniard Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s first feature, ”Lullaby” (“Cinco Lobitos”) as it has initiated a spirited run at Spain’s box office.

“It is undoubtedly the best debut in Spanish cinema for years,” Almodóvar announced in a statement, describing the mother-daughter relationship drama as “a portrait of the role of women within the family, which is truthful, devoid of sentimentality and that does not exclude humor.”

“Life could offer another destiny for women other than caring for the whole family. [The film offers] very accurate interpretations, where Laia Costa stands out and I suppose will sweep all this year’s awards. You have to see it before the heat wave takes it away. Summer is the worst enemy of the theaters.”

Almodóvar’s advocacy is highly necessary as an exciting new generation of cineastes, often female, galvanizes Spain’s arthouse scene led by Carla Simón...

Exclusive: Rising German actor Franz Rogowski, who most recently starred in Cannes Film Festival critical hit Great Freedom, has signed with CAA.

Sebastian Meise’s drama, about the criminilization of homosexuality in post-war Germany, won the 2021 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in Cannes. Rogowski gives a magnetic performance as Hans, a man repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175 but who over the span of decades develops an unlikely bond with his cellmate.

Rogowski is also known for Christian Petzold films Transit and Undine, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, Gabriele Mainetti’s Venice Film Festival title Freaks Out and Sebastian Schipper’s Berlin drama Victoria.

The former Berlin Shooting Star also starred in In The Aisles for which he won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role at the 2018 German Film Awards and a Lola Award.

Rogowski continues to be represented in the UK by Sam Fox and Kate Morrison at B-Side Management,...

International feature film and commercial content group Iconoclast and Berlin-based StickUp Films have established a new joint venture to produce feature films and series for the domestic and international markets.

Represented by Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the new shingle, Iconoclast Films Germany, is aiming to produce a minimum of three film or series projects annually within a five-year ramp-up period.

The company is headed by Luis Singer and Dennis Schanz of StickUp Films – the creators and co-producers of Netflix’s award-winning series “Skylines” — as well as Iconoclast executive producer Swantje Rummel.

Iconoclast sees the new venture as part of its international content strategy and a logical extension of its brand. In addition to producing recent works by the likes of Gus Van Sant, Julian Schnabel (“At Eternity’s Gate”), Harmony Korine (“The Beach Bum”) and Romain Gavras (“The World Is Yours”) through its companies in the U.S. and France, Iconoclast...

Few actors in cinema right now are as distinctive and exhilarating as Franz Rogowski. Among a sea of bland leading men he has a presence wholly his own, making every new film an event just to see what he’s going to do next. He’s impossible to pin down, possessing an unpredictability from one scene to the next, and the ability to convey that there’s so much going on underneath the surface of his characters––some of which we can interpret, much of which we may never fully know.

Being a mystery we’re not used to seeing in modern film, it’s no surprise Rogowski quickly made a name for himself working with some of our best directors, with key supporting roles in Sebastian Schipper’s one-shot wonder Victoria, and the most recent films of Michael Haneke (Happy End) and Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life). He is...

Tripping with Nils Frahm is having its world premiere on Mubi on December 3, 2020.With Nils Frahm's new concert film premiering today, the German musician, who scored Sebastian Schipper's Victoria and the multi-screen Cate Blanchett art work Manifesto, has generously shared a list of his favorite film music. Featuring scores by Miles Davis (Elevator to the Gallows), Eleni Karaindrou (Eternity in a Day), Vincent Gallo (Buffalo 66), and Air (The Virgin Suicides), the selection is eclectic and inspiring, cutting across genres, decades, and music styles. Frahm writes:"I have always respected and admired filmmakers. I believe no other type of artist generally works harder than the director. A good director is like a great musician, since films are like long songs or albums, only even more complicated.

One could add: a musician is even more like a filmmaker, so his or her compositions respect the art of storytelling, timing, and the change of atmosphere.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paolo Sorrentino and Natalia Beristáin contribute to a diverting but indulgent anthology about lockdown life

Here is a short film anthology with a luxury gloss and prestige sheen, curated for Netflix by the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, his brother Juan de Dios Larraín and Italian producer Lorenzo Mieli. They invited 17 film-makers from around the world to make short films during lockdown about the theme of lockdown. Larraín himself contrives an amusing piece about an ageing lothario in a care home who contacts an old flame on Skype while his long-suffering nurse has to sit impassively in the background.

Some film-makers have stuck toughly to the spirit of lockdown, with lo-fi pieces shot on their smartphones within their own four walls. Sebastian Schipper creates something starring himself with TikTok-style visual gags about doppelgangers and triplegangers. Rungano Nyoni gives us a wacky comedy about the texting life of a...

In the past few months during quarantine, we’ve seen filmmakers creating a number of different short-form projects and self-releasing them on their own channels. Now, the biggest project yet is arriving from Netflix as they’ve teamed with nearly 20 filmmakers who each made their own new short. They will now be released next week as part of the anthology film Homemade.

Featuring films by Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart (who will team together for their next film) as well as Ana Lily Amirpour, Antonio Campos, Rachel Morrison, Naomi Kawase, David Mackenzie, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paolo Sorrentino, and more, it’s an eclectic batch of work from all over the world.

“For once in our careers, this wasn’t about money, agencies, lawyers or the Hollywood structure,” producer Juan de Dios Larrain tells Variety. “This was a simple idea of [conveying] one message in five to seven minutes, and the idea was...

Before Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart team up for their Princess Diana biographical drama “Spencer,” the two will be lending their directing talents to Netflix’s short film anthology collection “Homemade.” The “Jackie” and “Neruda” filmmaker is behind the Netflix project alongside his brother, Juan de Dios Larraín, and Lorenzo Mieli, CEO of the Fremantle-backed company The Apartment. Variety first reported the news. “Homemade” is set to feature 17 short films helmed by directors from all around the world, including Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, Ladj Ly, Naomi Kawase, Sebastián Lelio, Ana Lily Amirpour, Kristen Stewart, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Each film in the “Homemade” anthology was made in quarantine using only the equipment each filmmaker had at his or her disposal. In the case of Larraín’s short film, that means using the Zoom app to create a conversation-based movie. Plot details for each film are under wraps, although Larraín told Variety that...

Before Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart team up for their Princess Diana biographical drama “Spencer,” the two will be lending their directing talents to Netflix’s short film anthology collection “Homemade.” The “Jackie” and “Neruda” filmmaker is behind the Netflix project alongside his brother, Juan de Dios Larraín, and Lorenzo Mieli, CEO of the Fremantle-backed company The Apartment. Variety first reported the news. “Homemade” is set to feature 17 short films helmed by directors from all around the world, including Larraín, Paolo Sorrentino, Ladj Ly, Naomi Kawase, Sebastián Lelio, Ana Lily Amirpour, Kristen Stewart, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Each film in the “Homemade” anthology was made in quarantine using only the equipment each filmmaker had at his or her disposal. In the case of Larraín’s short film, that means using the Zoom app to create a conversation-based movie. Plot details for each film are under wraps, although Larraín told Variety that...

Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player, MubiI and more are moving fast to respond to cancelled theatrical releases and cinema closures.

The UK release of independent, arthouse and foreign language films has been thrown into disarray following the closure of every cinema in the country as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak.

But streaming services such as Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player and Mubi are throwing a lifeline to these titles and offering audiences the opportunity to support cinema at a time when it needs it most.

Even 10 years ago, this would not have been possible as widespread take-up of Svod...

Curzon will be venturing into people’s homes via their Curzon Home Cinema service, with a specially curated series of films with the support of world-class filmmakers including Ruben Östlund, Celine Sciamma and Andrew Haigh.

The virtual cinema experience of curated films will be shown over the coming weeks, with people around the country encouraged to watch along together to retain the magic of the collective viewing experience. The films will be followed by an exclusive live interview with the director talking from their own personal isolation.

The series will launch on Friday 27th March with the release of System Crasher (courtesy of 606 Distribution), followed by a live Q&a with director Nora Fingscheidt. The live Q&a will begin at 9pm (GMT), and Curzon encourages people at home to watch along together from 6.45pm (GMT). The film will also be available on the service from the morning of Friday 27th March.

System Crasher Photo: Kineo Film/Weydemann Bros/Yunus Roy Imer In response to the UK cinema closures, Curzon Home Cinema service has announced a virtual cinema film series that will be followed by an exclusive live interview with directors including Andrew Haigh, Whit Stillman and Celine Sciamma.

The series will kick off on March 27 with the release of System Crasher, which will be followed by a live Q&a with director Nora Fingscheidt. The live Q&a will begin at 9pm (GMT), and Curzon encourages people at home to watch along together from 6.45pm (GMT).The film will be available for streaming from the morning of March 27.

Other films and directors to be included in the series:

45 Years, Andrew Haigh

Bait, Mark Jenkin

Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman

Only You, Harry Wootliff

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Celine Sciamma

The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg

Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund

Things To Come,...

The Innocents

Eskil Vogt, the Dp for Joachim Trier’s films, should have his sophomore directorial effort The Innocents ready for a major film festival in 2020. Shot by Sturla Brandth Grovlen and is produced by Mer Film’s Maria Ekerhovd, Mark Lwoff, and Misha Jaari. Vogt’s 2014 directorial debut Blind premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Best Screenwriting – World Dramatic award.…...

Filming a long, extended take in a movie is one of the best ways to win some acclaim and show off a bit of your directorial prowess. But it’s often so complex and so ambitious that still only a handful of directors have ever dared make their movie to appear as though it was filmed in one continuous, unbroken shot. Sam Mendes is the latest mad man to attempt the feat for his World War I epic “1917,” and boy did he nail it. Here are some other films that helped pave the way for him.

“Rope” (1948)

The master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was the first to attempt a single-take feature film, taking on a radical experiment with a big budget and A-list stars that included James Stewart. His movie “Rope” was inspired by a play by Patrick Hamilton and concerned a pair of men who murdered someone, hid his...

San Sebastian – Barcelona-based Lastor Media and Malmo Pictures have teamed with San Sebastian’s Irusoin to produce “Suro” (The Cork), the feature debut of Mikel Gurrea and a product of San Sebastian’s Ikusmira Berriak program.

The film stars Laia Costa, who broke through with Sebastian Schipper’s “Victoria” and also serves as executive producer, and Pol López (Josep M. Fontana’s “Boi”). “Suro” is scheduled to start shooting next year.

Set in the Empordà region of Catalonia, close to the French border, “Suro” is a Catalan-language dramatic thriller with an auteurist voice but aimed at wider audiences, according to its producers.

The news comes as Irusoin, producers of “Loreak,” Spain’s international Oscar entry in 2015, world premieres in main competition section “The Endless Trench,” directed by Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga. Another Irusoin production, Asier Altuna and Telmo Esnal’s “Agur Etxebeste,” a sequel of “Aupa Etxebeste!

German director Sebastian Schipper burst onto the international scene in 2015 with Victoria, a craftily made one-shot, real-time heist movie that premiered in competition at the Berlinale, walking away with several awards and garnering a fair amount of buzz abroad.

For his latest feature, Schipper has widened his scope — to several countries and a more traditional shooting technique — but has also narrowed it, concentrating on the intimate relationship between a pair of teenagers who meet on the road: a rebellious 18-year-old Brit played by Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk, Port Authority) and a shrewd if scared Congolese refugee played by relative newcomer ...

German director Sebastian Schipper burst onto the international scene in 2015 with Victoria, a craftily made one-shot, real-time heist movie that premiered in competition at the Berlinale, walking away with several awards and garnering a fair amount of buzz abroad.

For his latest feature, Schipper has widened his scope — to several countries and a more traditional shooting technique — but has also narrowed it, concentrating on the intimate relationship between a pair of teenagers who meet on the road: a rebellious 18-year-old Brit played by Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk, Port Authority) and a shrewd if scared Congolese refugee played by relative newcomer ...

Instant attraction on New Year’s Eve – and a little white lie – lead a young couple down the poignant path from passion to heartache

Movies about love at first sight are common enough and so are movies that track the bittersweet season cycle of a relationship’s first year. Then there are movies about a relationship further down the road, brutally tested by the agony of fertility treatment – such as Tamara Jenkins’s excellent Private Life, from 2018 – involving older people who have had ample time to jettison any youthfully naive illusions they may have had about themselves, about each other and about life itself. The marvel of this Glasgow-set debut film from writer-director Harry Wootliff is to make these genres overlap. It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

There is enormous tenderness and sensuality in the lead performances: from Spanish actor Laia Costa, the star...

The script for Sebastian Schipper’s film was 12 pages long allowing most of the dialogue to be improvised in this 138 minute German film shot in one continuous take. Russian Ark followed a similar path but was essentially a dreamy documentary about St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace – Schipper’s film follows a more conventional narrative arc in and around the kinetic streets of Berlin. The cinematography is by the strong-backed Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.

The post Victoria appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Exclusive: Here’s first footage of Sebastian Schipper’s (Victoria) new movie Roads, starring Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk), Stéphane Bak (Alone), Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line), and Moritz Bleibtreu (The Fifth Estate).

The Tribeca Film Festival world premiere follows a young man from the Congo who attempts to cross Europe’s borders in search of his brother. In Morocco, he teams up with a sharp-witted British runaway who pinched his stepfather’s recreational vehicle in order to escape from a family holiday. On their journey, the disparate duo have to make decisions that will also influence the lives of others. CAA is handling U.S. sales and HanWay handles international.

German filmmaker Schipper’s 2015 feature Victoria was one of the buzz films of the Berlin Film Festival that year. The story about a bank heist gone wrong unfolds in one seemingly continuous shot.

Script for Roads came from Schipper and Oliver Ziegenbald.

What movies are you thinking about right this very second?

I've got four movies playing in my head at the moment, two still imaginary and two just screened. The still-imaginary ones are, first, the Bill Condon / Sir Ian McKellen / Dame Helen Mirren thriller The Good Liar which got strong buzz out of the industry promo event CinemaCon. The second is the film adaptation of Cats which sounds Titanic-like (the boat not the movie) in its possibly epic high profile sinkability. Apparently the cats are not fully mocapped creatures but still look like the actors with fur digitally added but they're cat-sized (but why would they mention the cat-sized bit unless they shared scenes with humans which Nooooo).

As for the real movies that already exist in competed form, Laika has another winner with Missing Link (they've yet to make a stinker!) which we currently have in the 'most likely...

Isabelle Huppert stars opposite Lou de Laâge and Benoît Poelvoorde in Anne Fontaine's White As Snow (Blanche Comme Neige aka Blanche-Neige) Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The feature film line-up for the 18th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival has been announced.

Films of note include the documentaries The Projectionist by Abel Ferrara, Jeanie Finlay's Seahorse, executive produced by Virunga director Orlando Von Einsiedel, and Frédéric Tcheng's Halston; the directorial débuts from Dolly Wells with Good Posture, starring Emily Mortimer, and Christoph Waltz's Georgetown with Annette Bening, Vanessa Redgrave, and Waltz; Roads with Fionn Whitehead, Stéphane Bak, and Moritz Bleibtreu, directed by Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann producer, Sebastian Schipper; the Oren Moverman and Trudie Styler produced Skin, directed by Guy Nattiv, Michela Occhipinti's Flesh Out, produced by Marta Donzelli, and Anne Fontaine's White As Snow with Lou de Laâge, Isabelle Huppert, Damien Bonnard, Vincent Macaigne, Charles Berling,...

The 18th edition of Tribeca Film Festival will get underway next month, featuring 103 films from 124 filmmakers, with 50% women-directed films in the three competition sections. Highlights include world premieres directed by Abel Ferrara, Werner Herzog, Christoph Waltz, as well as films by Sebastian Schipper, Mary Harron, Peter Strickland, and Andrew Ahn.

Check out the lineup below for the festival taking place April 24 – May 5.

U.S. Narrative Competition

Tribeca’s U.S. Narrative Competition showcases extraordinary work from breakout independent voices and distinguished filmmaking talent. These ten world premieres will vie for the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actor, and Best Actress. Last year, the award for Best Narrative Feature went to Kent Jones’ Diane while Jeffrey Wright was awarded Best Actor for his role in O.G. Other previous films from this section include Reed Morano’s Meadowland (2015), Ingrid Jungermann’s Women Who Kill (2016), and...

Roads

It’s been four years since German director Sebastian Schipper’s single take thriller Victoria (2015), but he’ll back in 2019 with his first English language film, Roads, which he produced alongside J.C. Reymond and David Keitsch as a German-French co-production. The film is lensed by Dp Matteo Cocco. Maren Ade, Jonas Dornbach, Kalle Friz, Isabel Hund, Jean-Christophe Reymond, and Janine Jackowski are all co-producing. An international cast is comprised of German star Moritz Bleibtreu, Ben Chaplin, Fionn Whitehead, Stephane Bak, and Claudia Trujillo. Schipper, previously known as an actor, became an international director of note with his fourth feature, Victoria, which won a Silver Bear for cinematography in the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival.…...

Exploding onto the scene with his fourth feature film in 2015’s Victoria (read review) which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Sebastien Schipper actually saw his debut film Gigantic premiere at Sundance back in 2000. Schipper went into production on Roads in October back in 2017 with Fionn Whitehead, Stéphane Bak, Moritz Bleibtreu and Ben Chaplin. Not showing up on the 2018 festival circuit and a February release date in Germany means Park City is an option.

Gist: Written by Sebastian Schipper and Oliver Ziegenbalg, this follows William (Bak), a young man from the Congo, as he attempts to break through Europe’s borders in search of his brother.…...

Moroccan-born Belgian helmers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (“Gangsta”) are teaming up with French filmmaker Jeremie Guez (“A Blueberry in My Heart”) on their next French-language project, “Calypso.”

Th helmers are currently prepping to shoot “Bad Boys for Life” with Will Smith.

Guez, who will will soon start shooting “The Sound of Philadelphia” with Matthias Schoenaerts and Garrett Hedlund, has written the script of “Calypso,” based on an original idea by El Arbi and Fallah.

“Calypso” revolves around a marriage between a corrupt night club owner and a woman who has been feeling lonely and neglected for too long. While on the verge of a divorce, the couple’s bond is tested when a murder is committed at the night club, and the husband appears to have been framed for it.

All the action will take place in the night club. Guez said the film will be a mix...

Stars: Andrea Berntzen, Aleksander Holmen, Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne, Jenny Svennevig, Solveig Koløen Birkeland, Ingeborg Enes Kjevik, Sorosh Sadat, Brede Fristad, Aleksander Holmen, Karoline Schau | Written by Siv Rajendram Eliassen, Anna Bache-Wiig | Directed by Erik Poppe

Directed by Erik Poppe, this award-winning Norwegian drama recreates the events of the Utoya massacre in a single 72 minute take. Presenting the story entirely from the point of view of one of the victims, it’s a terrifying and horrifically immersive experience that is utterly devastating.

On 22 July, 2011, Norway suffered two tragic terrorist attacks, both committed by one man, a right-wing extremist. The first forms a prologue of sorts here, as CCTV footage shows the car bomb explosion in Oslo that killed eight people. Two hours later, the perpetrator travelled to the island of Utoya and opened fire on a group of defenceless teenagers at a socialist youth summer camp, killing 69 people in the course of 72 minutes.

There are moments of life-and-death crisis in which time simultaneously stops and stretches, becomes both immaterial and absolutely of the essence, and few spaces do more to blur it than a hospital — where lives end, begin and are drastically altered in seconds that pass like centuries. In her wrenching debut feature “Blind Spot,” Norwegian actress-turned-filmmaker Tuva Novotny nails that panicked, indefinably elastic form of time, making expert use of a potentially gimmicky technical device to do so. Shot in real time in a single, appropriately exhausting take, Novotny’s film follows a family plunged into a severe emotional hellscape when a seemingly well-adjusted teenage girl jumps from a fourth-storey window, forcing them (and us) to unpack an inexplicable tragedy with nary a spare moment to breathe.

Narratively speaking, what happens in “Blind Spot” might have filled a single arc of an “ER” episode back in the day. What makes the...

Kanopy, the on-demand platform for public libraries and educational institutions, has partnered with German cultural group the Goethe-Institut to showcase 48 critically acclaimed German films on its VOD platform.

The partnership, announced Wednesday, Oct. 3, German Unity Day, will feature titles from nearly a century of German cinema, from F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu to Sebastian Schipper's 2015 thriller Victoria, which was famously done in a single, 2 hour, 18 minute, one-shot take.

The Goethe-Institut will curate the list of titles, which will be available for free for Kanopy users, and anyone else who wants to watch, for the month ...

Kanopy, the on-demand platform for public libraries and educational institutions, has partnered with German cultural group the Goethe-Institut to showcase 48 critically acclaimed German films on its VOD platform.

The partnership, announced Wednesday, Oct. 3, German Unity Day, will feature titles from nearly a century of German cinema, from F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu to Sebastian Schipper's 2015 thriller Victoria, which was famously done in a single, 2 hour, 18 minute, one-shot take.

The Goethe-Institut will curate the list of titles, which will be available for free for Kanopy users, and anyone else who wants to watch, for the month ...

Adapted from the work of Ian McEwan, Sir Richard Eyre returns to the silver screen with The Children Act, and to mark the film’s release we had the pleasure of meeting the man at the helm, as well as the film’s leading two stars – Emma Thompson and Fionn Whitehead.

We asked Thompson, who plays a high-court judge, on her research into this archaic, elusive world, and she goes on to tell us about the joys in being an actor, constantly understanding new people and worlds. This leads into Whitehead (Dunkirk) talking about getting into the head of a teenager who is willing to sacrifice his life for his religion, and he tells us about secretly joining up to as Jehovah’s Witness meeting. Given the young actor has been very vocal about his admiration for Thompson, we asked her if she can recall working with any true legends...

Last November, shockwaves were sent through the film festival circuit when 79 of Germany’s most prominent filmmakers published an open letter calling for a “new start” for the Berlin Film Festival following the 2019 exit of long-time artistic director Dieter Kosslick.

The high-profile directors, including Fatih Akin, Maren Ade, Christian Petzold and Sebastian Schipper, demanded “more transparency”, a streamlined program, more selection input from women and an uptick in quality to put Berlin on “an equal footing with Cannes and Venice.”

In the past 12 months, two of Berlin’s key programmers have vacated their positions and last week, German authorities revealed their plan for the new-look top job with Locarno Film Festival artistic director Carlo Chatrian and German Films MD Mariette Rissenbeek jointly taking the reins.

In her first interview since her appointment, we spoke to Rissenbeek about the selection process — she had a front row seat having also served on...

Locarno chief Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, managing director of promotion agency German Films, have been officially confirmed as the new co-heads of the Berlinale to take over from Dieter Kosslick when his contract is up after the 2019 edition.

Chatrian will serve as artistic director, handling film selection, while Rissenbeek will be festival manager, running the business of the fest, including organization and sponsorship. Previously, Kosslick had handled both roles.

Monika Grütters, the German state minister for culture and media who led the hiring committee, made the announcement today in Berlin.

Chatrian’s appointment had leaked to the German media earlier this week. The well-liked Italian, a former journalist, has been artistic director at the Locarno Film Festival since 2012. Alongside a strong roster of international arthouse films Locarno is known for attracting U.S. movies including Jason Bourne, The Big Sick and Atomic Blonde to its iconic Piazza Grande.

Rissenbeek...

While the Federal Film Board may be the premier funder for the German film industry, it also boasts a strong track record with international co-productions.

The Ffa has backed such high-profile Hollywood productions as Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War” and Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” via the government’s German Federal Film Fund, which it manages. It has also directly supported smaller international films, including Sebastian Lelio’s Chilean-German co-production “A Fantastic Woman,” which won the Oscar for foreign-language film earlier this year after taking the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for screenplay in 2017.

In 2018, the Ffa is funding such international co-productions as Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s “It Must Be Heaven” and Israeli helmer Yuval Adler’s “The Operative” as well as “Honey in the Head,” Til Schweiger’s English-language remake of his 2014 German box office hit, with Nick Nolte and Matt Dillon set to star.

Last year,...

Sandra Hüller shines in an intriguing fable about a giant supermarket, in which she plays a sweet counter manager with a fondness for a forklift driver.

Sandra Hüller is the German actress who found world-cinema stardom on account of her performance in the black comedy Toni Erdmann; now she makes a very stylish appearance at the Berlin film festival in this utterly engrossing and richly humane workplace drama In the Aisles, from Thomas Stuber. Hüller is, of course, excellent. My only quarrel with the film is that she isn’t in it more.

Franz Rogowski (who was in Sebastian Schipper’s one-take robbery thriller Victoria) plays Christian, a quiet, watchful guy who has just started work in a gigantic cash-and-carry megastore. He mostly works the night-shifts, after the customers have gone home, wheeling motorised pallets and driving forklifts in the aisles, getting crates of food and other things down from...

How do you make a film about Utøya? Veteran Norwegian helmer Erik Poppe’s latest feature will revive discussions about the justification of making movies about recent historical tragedies, just as Paul Greengrass suffered the wrath of the Twitterati when it was announced he, too, was making a movie about the 2011 Norway attacks for Netflix. It’s been six-and-a-half years since right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 in the worst attack in Norway since the Second World War. This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.

Shot in one take in a style that could raise accusations of artistic pretension, Poppe’s camera settles on 18-year-old Kaja–a fictional character, like all others in the film–portrayed in a brave, dignified performance by newcomer Andrea Berntzen. Kaja wants to be in politics and is in the ideal place for it,...

Cloud Atlas director says there is a “strong quest for a natural change” at the festival.

Speaking at the press conference launching the 68th Berlin Film Festival, jury president Tom Tykwer addressed the controversial letter signed by 79 German filmmakers calling for an overhaul of the Berlinale, and also responded to the industry harrassment debate.

An open letter, published in November 2017, said that appointing a successor to current festival director Dieter Kosslick, whose contract expires in May 2019, “offers the chance to renew and streamline the programme”.

It was signed by German filmmakers including Fatih Akin, Maren Ade, Christian Petzold and Sebastian Schipper.

At the conference, the Cloud Atlas co-director said the letter was ”conceived as being critical of the festival” but was actually “rather constructive.”

He said: “I think many of my colleagues wanted to express in this letter that there is a quest for a natural change, which is nothing extraordinary when in two year’s time it...

Victoria, God’s Own Country stars wrap UK feature.

Screen can reveal a first look at upcoming UK love story Only You, featuring rising stars Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor.

Source: The Bureau

Only You

The project is the latest from UK outfit The Bureau, the company behind autumn festival favourite Lean On Pete and previous titles 45 Years and Daphne.

In Only You, Costa and O’Connor play a couple who, after a one-night stand on New Year’s Eve, fall madly in love. Within weeks they are living together, and not long after they begin trying for a child. When conception isn’t immediate, pressure builds on the pair and the idea of a family begins to overshadow their relationship.

The Bureau’s Paris-based international sales arm is selling the film at Unifrance’s Rendez-vous this month.

Laia Costa shot to prominence in 2015 with her leading role in Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria, for which she won...

Caravan

Since his 2015 breakout Victoria (read ★★★½ review), the two-hour plus single-shot romantic drama/heist thriller premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival (and took home the Silver Bear for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography), anticipation has been high for German director Sebastian Schipper’s next project.

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