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Exclusive: Sean Baker’s latest Anora has won Best Picture at this year’s Online Film Critics Society Awards. Scroll down for the full list of winners.

Anora also won Best Actress for star Mikey Madison and Best Screenplay while Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance also took home three awards for Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Margaret Qualley alongside a Technical Achievement Award for Makeup/Hairstyling.

Comprised of nearly 300 voting members from around the world, the Online Film Critics Society was founded in 1997. Members include writers from outlets such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Slant, Paste Magazine, AARP, and Sight & Sound.

In addition to the 2024 top film honors, the Online Film Critics Society hands out Special Achievement and Lifetime Achievement Awards. This year the body honors Ava DuVernay with a Special Achievement Award for her “brilliant work and for supporting a new generation of female filmmakers.” This year...

91-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, best known for the influential Heimat trilogy, has started shooting his latest film Leibniz, a portrait of leading Enlightenment thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

A German polymath and one of the founders of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was one of the most important thinkers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

Leibniz recounts five days in his life in the winter of 1704/05, when he is supposed to sit for a portrait painter at Herrenhausen Palace. When the session fails, a young female painter from the Netherlands takes over. She sets herself the task of capturing...

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme has been awarded the lion’s share of the more than €20m paid out by the German Federal Film Fund (Dfff) to 25 film projects in the first four months of 2024.

Studio Babelsberg’s service production arm Zweite Film Service Babelsberg received a grant of over €10.4m from the Dfff II fund for Anderson’s film which has been shooting on sound stages at the studios near Potsdam as well as in the surrounding region since the beginning of March.

The fund, which focuses on supporting production service providers if their film’s budget exceeds...

Exclusive: Ingo Fliess, producer of director Ilker Çatak’s German International Feature Film Oscar nominee The Teachers’ Lounge, tells Breaking Baz that he has partnered with Munich-based Trimafilm to explore “common” projects.

Fliess’ production outfit If… Productions will start work with Trimafilm on a prestige television mini-series being developed for Çatak and Eva Trobisch, who works alongside Trimafilm’s founder Mariko Minoguchi as a writer and director, and whose film Ivo will play at the forthcoming Berlinale.

Both the If… Productions and Trimafilm outfits enjoy a similar flair for smart and socially aware movies, and for passionately made documentaries. Trimafilm’s releases include the feature film All Is Well and the documentary Iron Butterflies.

Fliess explained that last year his company decided to share office space with Trimafilm while “remaining two independent companies” who are in constant exchange “of ideas about directors, scripts, about ideas and having many synergies.” He stressed,...

The 91-year-old German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, director of the Heimat trilogy, will be honored at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival with the Berlinale Camera Award.

Reitz will receive the prize, which honors “personalities and institutions who have made a special contribution to filmmaking and with whom the festival feels closely connected,” at the 74th Berlinale on Feb. 22. The award ceremony will be followed by the world premiere of Reitz’s latest work, Filmstunde_23, co-directed with Jörg Adolph, which will screen out of competition as part of the festival’s Berlinale Special program.

Considered one of Germany’s most influential and important directors, Reitz is best known for his three Heimat films, from 1984, 1992 and 2004, which were presented both as feature films and as television series. The film cycle traces a century and a half of German history as seen through the lives of the Simons, a fictional family from the Hunsrück area of Rhineland-Palatinate,...

Munich-based sales agent Global Screen has closed deals on major territories for nature documentary “The Hidden Life of Trees,” based on Peter Wohlleben’s non-fiction bestseller, which has been published in more than 40 countries.

Capelight has acquired all rights for North America, with Metropolitan picking up France. Further deals are being lined up for Canada (Mongrel Media), Spain (Surtsey Films) and the Benelux (Paradiso).

The Constantin Film production, which attracted nearly 350,000 German cinemagoers before theater attendance was put on hold by the coronavirus pandemic, provides answers to such questions as: Are trees able to talk? Do they have a memory? Do they have a social life?

“Director Jörg Adolph (“Parents’ School”) combines a portrait of a man who understands the language of trees with breathtaking nature footage from the world of forests to create a documentary that is as entertaining as it is fascinating,” according to a statement from Global Screen.

German film and TV company Telepool, jointly owned by Hollywood actor-producer Will Smith and Swiss investor Elysian Fields, is moving forward in multiple areas of the entertainment business, CEO André Druskeit tells Variety. Druskeit reveals a major new acquisition for its German distribution arm, and Julia Weber, head of theatrical sales and acquisitions at Telepool’s world sales arm Global Screen, speaks about the films making their market premieres at this month’s European Film Market in Berlin.

Last year Telepool launched into theatrical distribution in Germany, and continues this year with titles such as “Ironbark,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Now the company has acquired the German distribution rights for the next Will Smith movie, “King Richard,” about the father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, Druskeit says. The film is fully financed by Warner Bros., but co-produced by Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment.

Referring to “King Richard,” Druskeit says: “This...

The recipients were the producers of films nominated for best film, best doc and best children’s film.

More than €2m ($3.2m) in nomination premiums has been awarded to the producers of the films nominated for best film, best documentary and best children’s film at the 2019 German Film Awards, aka the Lolas, in Berlin today (March 20).

The best film nominees are Andreas Dresen’s Gunderman, Markus Goller’s 25 km/h, Caroline Link’s The Boy Needs Fresh Air, Aron Lehmann’s The Most Beautiful Girl In The World, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx and Christian Petzold’s Transit. Each of...

Arri Worldwide secures North American deal ahead of the Efm, where it will showcase two market premieres.

Arri Worldsales has sealed a North American deal ahead of this week’s European Film Market (Efm) with Vertical Entertainment for Alain Gsponer’s family film The Little Ghost.

Santa Monica-based Vertical acquired all Us and Canadian rights for the adaptation of Otfried Preussler’s internationally bestselling children’s classic, which has been sold to 24 countries worldwide to date.

Vertical Entertainment, which was launched last year by industry veterans Rich Goldberg and Mitch Budin, has previously released such family films as the animated feature Freedom Force and the Russian 3D animated film The Snow Queen. produced by Timur Bekmambetov.

Market premieres

Frederik Steiner’s award-winning Zurich (Und Morgen Mittag Bin Ich Tot) is one of two market premieres being presented by Arri Worldsales at the Efm in Berlin this week.

The film about a young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis...

Arri Worldwide secures North American deal ahead of the Efm, where it will showcase two market premieres.

Arri Worldsales has sealed a North American deal ahead of this week’s European Film Market (Efm) with Vertical Entertainment for Alain Gsponer’s family film The Little Ghost.

Santa Monica-based Vertical acquired all Us and Canadian rights for the adaptation of Otfried Preussler’s internationally bestselling children’s classic, which has been sold to 24 countries worldwide to date.

Vertical Entertainment, launched last year by industry veterans Rich Goldberg and Mitch Budin, had previously acquired Tim Fehlbaum’s apocalyptic thriller Hell from Arri.

Market premieres

Frederik Steiner’s award-winning Zurich (Und Morgen Mittag Bin Ich Tot) is one of two market premieres being presented by Arri Worldsales at the Efm in Berlin this week.

The film about a young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis who travels to Switzerland to end her life received the prize in the Newcomer category at this...