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Writing a screenplay or creating a television series is hard work. Throughout the process, you encounter one storytelling hurdle after another, and even though you know better, every time you clear that hurdle, you believe you're home free. You're not. And once you finish that first draft, you get to head over the hurdle-laden track that is rewriting.

Sometimes, every single aspect of this process is loaded with challenges. You inexplicably find yourself struggling to find the right character names and place names. Everything right down to coming up with the right title of the show or movie itself is a bear. When this becomes a problem at a studio or network level, you get marketing departments involved, which leads to brainstorming sessions that provide an overabundance of unusable titles.

If German playwright Peter Weiss had his way, the whole world would know his 1963 Brechtian masterpiece as "The Persecution and...

Alice Hirson, who had long-running roles on soaps Another World and One Life To Live in the 1970s before becoming a busy and familiar presence in primetime on Dallas, Full House, 7th Heaven and the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom Ellen, died Friday, February 14, at Los Angeles’ Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital. She was 95.

General Hospital actor and friend of Hirson Chris McKenna shared the news on Instagram, writing, “Alice Hirson shone her light on this world for 95 glorious years. My family and I were so blessed to have her in our lives however briefly. Unforgettable woman. Her final words were ‘It’s nice to have an audience.’ Thank you, Alice. Good night. Legend.”

As Lois Morgan, mother of DeGeneres’ character Ellen Morgan, Hirson was part of one of the 1990s most controversial TV stories. After Ellen came out as gay in the April 1997 episode “The Puppy Episode,” the title...

Exclusive: BBC Studios has invested in the nascent production outfit co-run by the creator of Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test.

The BBC’s commercial arm has taken an undisclosed minority stake in Samphire Films, which was launched by Sophie Leonard and ex-bbc docs commissioner David Hodgkinson last year.

The partnership will see BBC Studios support Samphire’s growth plans for premium documentary and constructed factual brands in the UK and U.S., while taking first-look global distribution and format rights. At launch six months ago, Samphire said it had landed a co-development deal with a major U.S. network, as well as being in funded development on six projects for British and international broadcasters and streamers.

Leonard is a former creative director at Minnow Films, where she worked across hit Channel 4 series Sas: Who Dares Wins and created the American version, Special Forces World’s Toughest Test,...

Exclusive: Today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, we can share a clip from Rotterdam title The Investigation, a new screen adaptation of Peter Weiss’s seminal play based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Directed by Rp Kahl, The Investigation will screen this week at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Described as a 240-minute “hybrid project of film, theater, and broadcast elements,” the film draws faithfully from Weiss’s play. Using notes from journalists and his observations during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–1965, Weiss condensed the original judicial statements into a total of 11 chapters, to depict the hell on earth that emerged during the trial. The original play, “Die Ermittlung Oratorio in 11 Cantos”, premiered simultaneously at 14 locations in 1965.

In Kahl’s film, eight stationary cameras capture 28 witnesses, represented by an accurate range of ethnically diverse actors, reporting on the horror experienced and observed in the camp. A further 11 witnesses from the camp’s administration testify in court.

On Oct. 19, 1965, shortly after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial — the first trial of Germans by Germans for the crimes of the Holocaust — playwright Peter Weiss premiered The Investigation. The play drew on the verbatim testimony of SS officers, Nazi functionaries and camp survivors, to reconstruct the genocidal horror in harrowing, undeniable detail.

Eschewing depictions of the camp itself, The Investigation relies on the words of the perpetrators and their victims to lay bare the greatest crime of the 20th century.

On Jan. 27, 2025, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, the first film adaptation of The Investigation will premiere in Israel. R.P. Kahl’s faithful, four-hour-long re-creation will screen at the Cinematheque Tel Aviv on Monday and at the Cinematheque Jerusalem on Tuesday, Jan. 28.

The Investigation

“Showing the film in Israel, particularly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, is deeply meaningful to us,” says The Investigation producer Alexander van Dülmen.

’The Light’ is one of a slate of features to receive backing from German regional fund Film-und Medienstiftung Nrw.

The Light, Tom Tykwer’s first film for the cinema since his 2016 German-us comedy A Hologram For The King is one of 10 feature film projects allocated almost €6m in production support by the Düsseldorf-based regional fund Film-und Medienstiftung Nrw.

Tykwer’s original screenplay for The Light (Das Licht) centres on a troubled family who take on a Syrian immigrant as a housekeeper. When she successfully shakes up the lives of the family she then confronts them with the dark fate of her own.

Ground-breaking France-based British theater director Peter Brook, who revolutionized 20th-century theater, has died at the age of 97-years-old in Paris.

The director, who pioneered taking theater outside of traditional theatre houses, mounting productions in unexpected venues such as gymnasiums, abandoned factories and old gas works, was renowned for his experimental and out-of-the box approach to staging classic and new works alike.

He was born in West London to parents of Lithuanian Jewish heritage on March 21, 1925. After attending Westminster School and Oxford, he put on his first production, Dr Faustus at the Torch Theatre in London in 1943.

By his early 20s, he had been appointed director of production at the Royal Opera House, where he distinguished himself with an experimental production of Richard Strauss’s Salome featuring sets by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

In the 1950s, he started working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, directing Sir Lawrence Olivier in Titus...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSian Heder's Coda took home the Best Picture award at the 94th Academy Awards, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car took Best International Feature, and Jane Campion won Best Director for The Power of the Dog. Find more of this year's Oscars winners here. We're saddened by the loss of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who recently died at the age of 57. Most revered for his 2000 film Eureka, about a trio who embark on a road trip after surviving a bus hijacking, Aoyama continued his humanist exploration of violence, family, and generation gaps in films like Desert Moon (2001) and Sad Vacation (2007), the loose sequel to Eureka. He was also a prolific novelist and critic, with his novelization of Eureka awarded the Yukio Mishima prize in 2001. Il Cinema Ritrovato has announced the programs of this year's festivities,...