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The Blue Trail, the latest movie from Brazilian filmmaker Gabriel Mascaro (Neon Bull, Divine Love, August Winds), takes viewers into a magical but also political Amazon in a near-future dystopia.

The film, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at Berlin this year, is one of the highlights from the recent festival circuit that is screening in the Horizons program of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff), starting on Friday.

“In order for Brazil to develop economically, the country gives priority to its younger generations, while older people are put away in government colonies so they will not ‘get in the way,'” reads a synopsis. The 77-year-old Tereza, however, refuses and decides to escape.

That sets the stage for a movie that puts older women in the spotlight in ways rarely seen. Denise Weinberg stars as Tereza, along with Miriam Socarras and Rodrigo Santoro.

Leading Costa Rica-based indie distributor-producer Pacifica Grey, run by Marcelo Quesada and Karina Avellán, have pounced on the distribution rights to Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail,” a big winner at Berlin and Guadalajara (Ficg).

Pic had its local premiere at the 13th Costa Rica Film Festival (June 20-29) and is set to bow across Central America on Nov. 13, according to Quesada.

“While our editorial line is focused on bringing diverse cinema from all over the world, this year we set out to bring more Ibero-American films to theaters across the region. That’s why ‘The Blue Trail’ (Brazil) joins ‘Querido Trópico’ (Panama) and [Jonas Trueba’s] ‘The Other Way Around’ (Spain) as part of our 2025 releases, currently representing 50% of our lineup,” said Quesada.

In April, Pacifica Grey released the Oscar-nominated “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Its distribution slate also includes Andrea Arnold’s “Bird,” starring Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn”). On the production side,...

Chile’s Néstor Cantillana has been a triple threat at the Guadalajara Film Fest (Ficg), starring in two pics as well as “Hidden Island,” a series co-penned by international sci fi phenomenon Julio Rojas. Cantillana is also developing his second directorial outing with the short, ‘Humedal.”

“This has been my first time at a festival with two films and a series, all so different—from characters to visual style to the unique voices of young Chilean directors. I’m grateful to be here and to feel the love from the people in Guadalajara,” Cantillana told Variety.

Participating in Ficg’s series showcase where its pilot episode played, sci fi thriller “Hidden Island” (“Isla oculta”), co-written by Rojas, Juan M. Dartizio and Felipe Carmona (“Prison in the Andes”), centers on a detective who returns to her hometown in southern Chile to investigate the disappearance of a Mexican archeologist who was searching for the mythical Friendship Island.

One of those tantalising shorts that, though self-contained, feels as though it could easily expand into a feature, Brazilian director Bernardo Ale Abinader and French filmmaker Sharon Hakim immediately immerse us in the world of Marjorie (Isabela Catão) as she walks over sand dunes hunting for a precious herb.

A near-future environmental crisis is suggested rather than overtly stated, first by a piece of plastic caught around Cassia’s leg and later, more strongly, when she returns to her elderly mentor Marjorie (Esther de Paula).

Marjorie is a healer who we see removing pieces of poisonous plastic from her patients – a striking way of bringing home the way that the environmental crisis is getting literally under our skins.

This seems to be the first role for de Paula, which seems remarkable given how good she is. The older star shares the sort of luminosity displayed by Denise Weinberg in...

Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail arrives as a feverish fable set amid the winding waterways of Brazil’s Amazonas, where shifting currents carry more than just river barges. It sketches a near-future society that venerates its elderly with gilded laurels even as it corrals them into a “Colony” at the age of seventy-seven—a compulsory exile disguised as honor. Here, propaganda planes streak the sky, broadcasting cheery slogans even as wrinkled citizens await the arrival of “Wrinkle Wagons,” open-caged vans that collect the unwilling and the defiant.

Into this paradox steps Tereza, a factory worker whose life of steady labor has skirted every daydream—until she learns her forced retirement is imminent. Denied permission by her own daughter to board a commercial flight, she sets out on a river-bound odyssey, guided by smuggler Cadu and buoyed by the promise of an ultralight adventure. The encounter with a bioluminescent snail,...

Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail is the winner of this year’s Berlin jury grid with an average score of 3.4 as Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp, Hong Sangsoo’s What Does Nature Say To You and Lionel Baier’s The Safe House completethe entries.

The Blue Trailstars Denise Weinberg in a dystopian fable following a 77-year-old who embarks on a journey through the Amazon. It received four four-stars (excellent) and five three-stars (good) and beats last year’s joint winners My Favourite Cake and The Devil’s Bath with 3.1.In the official Berlin award ceremony, the film received theSilver Bear grand...

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 75th anniversary edition February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged film that takes stock of German society in the first quarter of the 21st century. It starts 11 days of debuts including for movies starring Jessica Chastain, Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Rupert Friend, Marion Cotillard, Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Emma Mackey and more.

The 2025 Berlinale runs through February 23.

Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

Blue Moon

Section: Competition

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott

Deadline’s takeaway: Richard Linklater’s Broadway chamber piece looks back to a lost time and mourns a lost soul in Lorenz Hart as the booze is about to consume him. In a bravura theatrical performance, Ethan Hawke...

The 75th Berlin Film Festival has concluded after nine days of fearless cinema in Germany. IndieWire was on the ground this year and earlier this week took a closer look at the top contenders for the Berlinale Golden Bear, which will be announced today along with other prizes.

That Rose Byrne and director Mary Bronstein had returned to the Palast red carpet meant their film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (which bowed early on at Berlin after world premiering at Sundance in January) was bound to win something. Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance for her turn as a stressed-out mother in crisis in the A24 psychodrama. Hopefully, this award gives Byrne momentum for the 2025 awards season ahead; it’s one of the great screen performances and certainly the crown of her career.

Today’s ceremony marked the first under new artistic director Tricia Tuttle,...

Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud has won the 2025 Berlinale Golden Bear for Dreams, a queer love story that completes his verbally explicit, but visually chaste Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy.

The deceptively ambitious drama follows a teenage girl’s infatuation with her female teacher, told mostly in retrospect, as the teen recounts her memories through a novel she has written about the events. In his review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney called the film “tender, captivating and often very funny,” noting the fact that Haugerud has made “three thematically related but narratively distinct features in a year is remarkable enough; that they are all terrific, even more so.”

The Berlin jury, headed by Carol director Todd Haynes, picked Dreams from the 19 titles in competition at the 75th Berlinale.

Rose Byrne and Andrew Scott won top acting honors at this year’s Berlinale film festival, with Byrne winning...

The Blue Trail, the lively new film from Gabriel Mascaro, takes its name from the secretions of a mythical snail. Azure and oozing, the substance, when dropped on the iris, is rumored to grant a vision of things to come. This news is welcomed with admirable disinterest by Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a woman of a certain age who has, due to recent state insistences, decided there’s no longer much use in looking ahead. The film is set in a near-future Brazil where the lives of the elderly are overseen by some cruel combination of governmental interventions and half-interested offspring. In Tereza’s world, leaving one’s locale now requires a permission slip, and those without are rounded up in so-called “Wrinkle Wagons.” Anyone lucky enough to reach their 80th birthday, as Tereza soon will, are rewarded with a move to The Colonies: a place no one seems to know much about,...

“Our country is going toward the future,” booms a disembodied voice of authority as The Blue Trail begins. In this cinematic vision of Brazil imagined by screenwriter Tibério Azul and vividly realized by director Gabriel Mascaro, it’s no country for old women. An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.

The Blue Trail is a slightly off-kilter refraction of the world as it exists. Perhaps as a result, it’s all the harder to shake. In the Brazil of Mascaro’s film, the government designates its older citizens as “living heritage” and begins legal protocols to sideline them within society. Their patronization under the guise of protection includes forcing retirement, transferring custodianship to younger relatives, and the eventual scuttling off to an old age colony.

This setup amounts...

It's not often that a Dystopian setting is used as the backdrop for a warm-hearted quasi-adventure story of self-fulfillment but ever since his debut Neon Bull, Gabriel Mascaro has shown a knack for combining unusual ideas and moods. He also took us into the near-future with his previous film Divine Love, which satirised religious views of marriage and child rearing. Now it’s old age he’s got his sights on and, secondarily, the environment - suggesting that while things may not always look as pristine as they once did, where there’s life, there’s hope.

There’s no indication of exactly what year we’re in this time but it surely isn’t very far from now. “The future is for everyone,” declares the banner that flies from the back of a plane making daily forays over the house where 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) lives. The government has...

One of the many peculiarities of recent U.S. cultural trends is the “over-55 community,” gated havens for well-off retirees who embrace the idea of mono-generational living as an all-comforts interlude before Thanatos comes knocking. In Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail, a gentle blend of delayed self-realization fantasy and dystopian portent, the cutoff age is 77, which in a way is progress (think of Logan’s Run) and the move is involuntary, but resistance is not futile. Mascaro’s fourth feature can be considered a pair with his previous Divine Love, which also imagined a near-future controlled by a repressive state disguised as a caring Big Brother, but his latest is less deliciously elliptical than earlier films, privileging sensorial rewards that come from the natural world rather than the human body.

Set aglow by the earthy force of Denise Weinberg as Tereza, a woman determined not to be put away, The Blue Trail...

Pitched somewhere between science-fiction and fable, director Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail” finds a beacon of optimism within its own dystopian view of the future. Set in the director’s native Brazil — and showcasing the astonishing natural beauty (side by side with decay) of the Amazon in every high-definition frame — the film centers a 77-year-old woman, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), in a society that has deemed anyone above the age of 75 an impediment to its economic success. Mascaro sees her differently, and so will we by the end of what unexpectedly turns out to be the greatest South American houseboat movie since “Fitzcarraldo.”

The “Neon Bull” director has always had an incredible visual sense, though his plots tend to lack focus. Not this one. Judging by its concept alone, “The Blue Trail” could technically be classified alongside “Children of Men” on video store shelves. And yet, in both genre and tone,...

Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail,” playing in competition in Berlin, marks another great milestone for Brazilian cinema in a year where the country got its first best picture Oscar nomination with Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here.” Mascaro follows in the footsteps of Salles playing in competition in Venice and Karim Aïnouz playing in competition at Cannes with “Motel Destino,” three consecutive Brazilian films playing in the most prestigious strands of the three most important European film festivals.

“Each one of these films is so different from each other but has great strengths,” Mascaro tells Variety ahead of his Berlinale bow. “I feel very proud to be a part of it.”

“The Blue Trail” takes place in a near future Brazil where the government relocates the elderly to senior housing colonies so the younger generations can fully focus on productivity and growth. Tereza (Denise Weinberg), nearing 80, refuses to accept her fate,...

“The Blue Trail,” Gabriel Mascaro’s dystopian Brazilian movie which is slated to compete at the Berlin Film Festival, has landed on the inaugural slate of newly-launched Paris-based sales banner Lucky Number.

The selection marks Brazil’s return to the Berlinale Competition following “All the Dead Ones” by Caetano Godardo in 2020. Mascaro previously attended the Berlin Film Festival with “Divine Love” which opened at Sundance and went on to play in the Panorama section in Berlin in 2019. Lucky Number has unveiled a first still of the film and will kick off sales at the EFM in Berlin next month.

The politically minded film unfolds on the banks of the Amazon, and is set in a near future, in a society in which the elderly are invited to exile themselves once their expiration date has passed. The story revolves around Tereza, 77, who has lived her whole life in a small, industrialized town in the Amazon,...

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for the 2025 edition, running February 13-23. It’s the first official lineup overseen by new artistic director and former BFI London Film Festival leader Tricia Tuttle, who succeeds Carlo Chatrian and brings her background as an American journalist and curator to the annual German showcase. She’s also working with co-directors of programming, Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, to help reposition the Berlinale’s profile among the great global film festivals and lure bigger-name filmmakers in the process.

This year’s lineup, announced Tuesday, January 21, features new films from Richard Linklater, Michel Franco, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Hong Sangsoo (“What Does That Nature Say to You”), Radu Jude (“Kontinental ’25”), and Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”). Already confirmed in the mix are “Mickey 17” from Bong Joon Ho and Ira Sachs’ Sundance premiere “Peter Hujar’s Day,” plus Tom Tykwer’s “The Light” opening the festival.

Following last week’s lineup announcement, the Berlinale 2025 has now fleshed out its slate with the Competition, Special, and Perspectives sections. Highlights include the world premieres of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott; Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25; Hong Sangsoo’s What Does that Nature Say to You; Michel Franco’s Dreams starring Jessica Chastain; Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower starring Marion Cotillard; and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk with Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, and Vicky Krieps.

The festival will also include international premieres from Julia Loktev, Mary Bronstein, Kahlil Joseph, and more. In terms of omissions for films that potentially could have been a strong fit: there’s no Steven Soderberg’s Black Bag, Wes Anderson’s German production The Phoenician Scheme, nor Berlinale regular Christian Petzold, who wrapped Miroirs No. 3 only a few months ago.

Check out the lineup...

The Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the full list of titles set for its official competition alongside perspective and specials sidebars.

A total of 19 films have been selected for the international competition. It’s a buzzy selection with multiple titles that have been anticipated and boast high-profile names. Highlights include Richard Linklater’s latest feature Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott. Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco launches his latest title Dreams in competition. The film stars Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández and Rupert Friend. Franco last worked with Chastain on the Venice competition title Memory.

Elsewhere, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude lands in competition with Kontinental ’25. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk starring Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps also secures a spot alongside Hong Sangsoo’s latest What Does that Nature Say to You, and Mumblecore veteran Mary Bronstein returns as a director with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You...

German sales agent M-Appeal has sealed a series of deals on the Brazilian title.

German sales outfit M-Appeal has closed a Us deal for Berlinale Panorama title Greta with Rich Wolff and Richard Ross’ Breaking Glass Pictures.

The film has also gone to Benelux (Arti Film) and German-speaking territories (GMfilms).

Greta, is the feature debut of Brazilian director Armando Praça, tells the story of an elderly gay nurse who can’t find a hospital bed for his transgender friend. He secretly takes home a wounded young man, under police guard on suspicion of murder, and gives his bed to his friend.

Berlin — An elderly gay nurse who idolizes Greta Garbo struggles to cope with the dire prognosis for his ailing transgender friend, until a surprising affair with a younger man brings an unexpected chance to break free from his solitude.

“Greta” is an emotional portrait of intergenerational love, life and loss among a marginalized class of Brazilians. Armando Praça’s directorial debut, which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, stars iconic stage and TV actor Marco Nanini, Denise Weinberg, Demick Lopes, and Gretta Sttar.“Greta” was produced by Carnaval Filmes with Segredo Filmes. Berlin-based M-Appeal is handling international sales.

Praça spoke with Variety about giving a compassionate face to marginalized people, creating opportunities for transgender actors, and facing the challenges for Brazil’s Lgbt community after the country’s rightward turn.

“Greta” was inspired by “Greta Garbo, Who Would Imagine, Ended Up in Irajá,” a play that was written in the 1970s.

M-Appeal has acquired world sales rights to “Greta,” the feature debut of Brazil’s Armando Praça which will world premiere in this year’s Berlinale Panorama section.

The Berlin-based film industry has also dropped an international trailer, to which Variety has had exclusive access.

Produced by Carnaval Filmes, whose credit include major titles by Marcelo Gomes, one of Brazil’s most prominent directors, “Greta” turns on Pedro, a 70-year-old gay hospital nurse. The film begins with his attempting to care for his best friend, Daniela, a transgender cabaret singer who refuses further treatment for terminal kidney failure.

Pedro vacates a hospital bed for Daniela by helping Jean, wounded and under arrest for manslaughter, to escape from hospital arrest. Hiding Jean in his apartment, Pedro begins an unlikely affair with the much younger man.

“Greta” begins with Pedro wiping off his mascara as he climbs into an ambulance to accompany Daniela to hospital.

22 films in the Panorama programme so far, with nine directorial debuts.

The first 22 titles from the 2019 Berlin Film Festival (Feb 7-17) Panorama programme have been revealed.

Scroll down for the full line-up

The European premiere of UK director Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, starring Tilda Swinton, her daughter Honor Swinton-Byrne and Tom Burke, and the world premiere of Seamus Murphy’s Pj Harvey documentary A Dog Called Money are among the titles confirmed today.

The line-up also includes the directing debuts of actors Jonah Hill (Mid90s) and Alexander Gorchilin (Acid), and Rob Garver’s documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael,...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed a large selection of movies for its Panorama strand. Section head Paz Lázaro and co-curator and programme manager Michael Stütz have revealed 22 titles, 14 of which will be world premieres.

Among highlights are Jonah Hill’s directorial debut Mid90s; Jamie Bell starrer Skin, about the USA’s neo-Nazi scene; Tilda Swinton drama The Souvenir; and What She Said: The Art Of Pauline Kael, about the legendary film critic.

Panorama Films:

37 Seconds – Japan

by Hikari (Mitsuyo Miyazaki)

with Mei Kayama, Misuzu Kanno, Makiko Watanabe, Shunsuke Daitō, Yuka Itaya

World premiere – Debut film

Director Hikari, aka Mitsuyo Miyazaki, tells the story of Yuma, a young Japanese woman who suffers from cerebral palsy. Torn between her obligations towards her family and her dream to become a manga artist, Yuma struggles to lead a self-determined life.

Dafne – Italy

by Federico Bondi

with Carolina Raspanti, Antonio Piovanelli,...

Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, “mid90s,” about a 13-year-old skateboarder’s coming of age, and a documentary on influential film critic Pauline Kael are among the works that will screen in the Panorama section of the upcoming Berlin Film Festival.

Films starring Tilda Swinton and Jamie Bell and titles from countries including Israel, Brazil and Japan were also announced in the first batch of 22 Panorama selections unveiled by the Berlinale on Tuesday. Nine of the films are debut works, and 14 will have their world premiere in the German capital. The section is curated by Paz Lázaro and co-curator and program manager Michael Stütz.

“mid90s” follows teenage Stevie as he joins up with four skateboarding punks who take him under their wing. Variety described Hill’s debut film as “a slice of street life made up of skittery moments that achieve a bone-deep reality. And because you believe what you’re seeing,...

Russell Crowe and David Stratton. (Photo: Mark Rogers)

Two Australian productions, Stranger Than Fiction Film’s David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema and Endemol Shine Australia’s MasterChef Australia, are in contention for the 2018 International Emmy Awards.

Three-part series David Stratton’s Stories of Australian Cinema, produced for the ABC, is nominated for the Arts Programming Award. It will compete against Canada’s Dreaming of A Jewish Christmas (Riddle Films), Dutch production Etgar Keret, gebaseerd op een waar verhaal (Baldr Film/Ntr Television) and Brazil’s Palavras Em Série (Words in Series) (Gnt/Hungry Man).

Stories of Australian Cinema, directed by Sally Aitken and produced by Jen Peedom and Jo-anne McGowan, sees the film critic and former co-host of ABC’s At The Movies and Sbs’s The Movie Show reflect on Australian films, including interviews from the likes of Nicole Kidman, Judy Davis, Russell Crowe and Jacki Weaver,...

The International Emmys are living up to their name, with a globe-spanning set of nominees announced Thursday for this year’s awards. Endemol Shine, HBO, Fox and Sony all scored noms, while Amazon and Netflix landed just one apiece, a modest showing given their recent run at awards shows and their increasing number of international originals.

In the best actor category, Julio Andrade is nominated for Fox Networks Latin American drama “One Against All,” Billy Campbell for Canadian-produced “Cardinal,” Lars Mikkelsen for Scandi series “Ride Upon the Storm,” and Tolga Saritas for Turkish series “Soz.” The best actress noms include Thuso Mbedu for South African series “Is’thunzi” and Emily Watson in U.K.-produced “Apple Tree Yard.”

Netflix’s single nomination comes in the best comedy category for its Mexican show “Club of Crows.” Amazon’s is in the drama category, for its Indian cricket-themed series “Inside Edge.” It...

Netflix Spanish-language drama La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) is going head-to-head with Amazon’s Indian cricket thriller Inside Edge for an International Emmy.

The two shows are among a number of Svod titles to score nominations for the awards, which take place in New York on November 19.

This year, some 44 shows across 11 categories and 20 countries have been nominated. Other titles include Netflix comedy Club de Cuervos and Thai entertainment format The Mask Singer, which is being remade in the U.S. by Fox.

In addition to the awards, the Academy is presenting special awards to The Flash and Blindspot producer Greg Berlanti and Sophie Turner Laing, CEO of Endemol Shine Group.

“Looking at the diversity & geographic spread of this year’s nominations across all continents and platforms,” said Bruce L. Paisner, President and CEO of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, “it is clear that excellence in...