News

When Donbass arrived in 2018, sandwiched between the start of the 2014 Russian-backed conflict in the titular eastern Ukrainian region and full-scale invasion of the country four years since its release, the world Sergei Loznitsa trained his camera on was a surreal, decaying wasteland. It’s not that the film was necessarily prophetic about the atrocities that would later spread across Ukraine. But it spoke to concerns that now feel especially of-the-moment, the same that have long served as a cornerstone of the Belarus-born, Kiev-raised director’s oeuvre. While Donbass was a work of fiction, its preoccupations with the way truth can be manipulated also haunt the archive-based documentaries for which Loznitsa is arguably best known. From Blockade (2006) to The Kiev Trial (2022), the director hasn’t exhumed Ussr-era footage as a sort of time machine, but a means to reappropriate history from the regime’s official narratives. Which is why to salute...

Sergei Loznitsa’s forensically objective, intellectually nuanced documentaries tend to stand in stark contrast to his fictional output; in films like My Joy, In the Fog and Donbass, the Ukrainian director is inclined to put his cards on the table, usually addressing his signature subject: the abject failure of the Russian state. Two Prosecutors follows in that tradition, being a very slow and very talky chamber piece that could be the most terrifying comedy that Aki Kaurismäki never made, or a Chaplin-esque horror film about the evils of bureaucracy in a world ruled by morons. This time, Loznitsa doesn’t just have the Kremlin in his sights; Two Prosecutors is one of his most accessible films to date, with relevance to every country wrestling with authoritarian political parties right now.

Based on a novella by Soviet and political activist Georgy Demidov (1908-1987), Two Prosecutors begins with a screen credit noting...

Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 is unmistakably his own. That’s evident in the film’s self-derisive humor, caustic social critique, surreal interventions in everyday situations that are taken to their ridiculous limit, and an intrepid revisiting of history so specific to Romania that it ends up gaining a universal, almost fable-like force.

Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of the past. In Kontinental ’25, set in the Cluj area of Transylvania, a Hungarian-Romanian bailiff, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is guilt-ridden after evicting an older man, penniless due to drinking and gambling, from his basement studio, after months of squatting, which led the man to commit suicide. Though Orsolya feels bad to have kicked the man out, she was just doing her job—and, besides, the man’s unsanitary living quarters needed to be demolished to make...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Oscilloscope releases the film Friday, February 14, 2025.

Despite being set in a parallel-universe Winnipeg where the people talk in Farsi and the world around them seems as if it’s been frozen in time since the mid-1980s, the haunted but hopeful “Universal Language” is an unmistakably modern film at heart.

Described by writer-director Matthew Rankin as a piece of “autobiographical hallucination,” this wonderfully deadpan whatsit is the work of a white 43-year-old Canadian man who fell in love with the movies a time when “foreign” cinema was becoming more available to people outside major cultural hubs. He found that Kanoon-style fables like “Where Is the Friend’s House?” and “The White Balloon” spoke to him in a way that few English-language films ever had. That discovery sparked a cross-cultural dialogue that eventually compelled Rankin to visit Tehran...

Universal Language could easily have overdosed on twee. Set in an alternate-universe Winnipeg where almost everyone is ethnically Iranian and speaks Farsi, it pays homage to films like Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Director Matthew Rankin himself plays a character sharing his name, who travels home from Montreal to Winnipeg following news of his mother’s sickness. His story intersects with two subplots: children Negin (Rojina Esmaeili) and Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) find a 500-riel note buried under ice and look for an axe so they can chop it out while Massoud (co-writer Pirouz Nemati) leads a guided tour of Winnipeg parking lots and highways.

Although Universal Language is very witty, with TV-commercial parodies and absurdist touches, fundamentally it’s a deeply sad film. This is reflected in its look: during the dead of winter, Massoud leads tourists around Winnipeg’s beige and grey districts.

“When you work with great producers like Patrik [Andersson] and Jakob [Abrahamsson], you can do anything, even under the current difficulties in documentary filmmaking,” British filmmaker Lorna Tucker tells us from her home in London.

Tucker, a relatively new figure in indie British filmmaking, makes a distinction with documentary filmmaking because she has just launched her latest feature Garbo: Where Did You Go?, a doc on the life of screen legend Greta Garbo.

The film was co-produced by Abrahamsson and Andersson’s Stockholm-based Mylla Films in collaboration with head producer Embankment Films. The project is the first international co-production from Mylla — a sign of the company’s growing ambitions and resources. Andersson and Abrahamsson launched the company in 2022 and have quickly become two of the buzziest figures in Scandinavian cinema. In a sign of their popularity, Göteborg Film Festival head Pia Lundberg even name-checked the duo during a recent pre-festival interview with us.

Tsai Ming Liang Guide: As the 20th century drew to a close, cinema, like other art forms, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Hollywood, in a desperate attempt to keep audiences engaged, embraced new technological advancements, such as improved visual effects. It sought to captivate the masses by blurring the lines between reality and imagination, producing sci-fi blockbusters like “Terminator 2” (1991), “Jurassic Park” (1993), and “Armageddon” (1998). However, thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles, another group of filmmakers across Europe and Asia consciously took cinema in a different direction. Rather than helping audiences forget the fourth wall, they aimed to reinforce it, creating films that were acutely aware of their own impact, intentionally distancing viewers from the on-screen events by withholding the cut.

In contemporary film theory, this shift is referred to as ‘Slow Cinema.’ To an avid cinephile, it is now a fairly common term. Maestros like Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa,...

Indiewire having encouraged us to reminisce about the 2000s through its recent Best of the Decade list, there’s the reminder of one key thread defining that era: the prominence of digital video and the prescient idea that it would alter filmmaking on all budget levels going forward. Still, films shot on standard-definition Dv, often with the tape format MiniDV, had one of the more inimitable aesthetics of this period; analogous to the revival of 4-track home recording in independent music, these works––from Dogme 95’s first wave to Jackass: The Movie––were tactile, immediate, and bathed in visual glitches, its grain artfully tarnishing the images rather than providing the implacable soul or character of the photochemical kind.

Across the pond, British independent filmmaking was never so wilfully art-damaged: the Y2K era was a commercially lucrative time, defined in the memory by fluffy period dramas and comedies, post-Trainspotting crime flicks,...

Richard Hunter’s feature “Foul Evil Deeds” is one of the more European of British first features, taking its inspiration from continental art house names rather than the more usual luminaries of U.K. social realism such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

It consists of interwoven stories of everyday wickedness, from the careless to the horrific: “The influences are people like Ulrich Seidel and Michael Haneke being a huge one, Roy Andersson being a big one, and peripherally looking at all of those,” Hunter told Variety.

“The early Ruben Östlund as well. The Britishness, inherently, obviously comes out through me.”

Hunter arrived at filmmaking from advertising. “I did documentary at university, and that led into music videos, and from there into commercials. And there I found my wet place in that world. I looked to the people that had done that transition like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze,...

From statues that weep blood to dancing suns that lead to sudden darkness in the middle of the day, the Catholic faith overflows with accounts of miracles. But in order for a miracle to be deemed as such, it must go through a series of rigorous examinations during which the vast majority of occurences are debunked. The pious Rita López (Mónica Villa), the protagonist of Tomás Gómez Bustillo’s Chronicles of a Wandering Saint, spends her days seeking to be of service in her local church, but realizes nothing will pave her path to heaven faster than coming up with her own miracle––hence she enlists her husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi) in the restoration of a statue that might have mystical powers.

In his feature-length debut, Gómez Bustillo creates a world in which the mundane and divine are partners in a waltz that goes from sublime to absurd. With loving irreverence,...

In Universal Language, a man makes a journey to his childhood home and meets the family now living there––these are at least the broad strokes. The director is Matthew Rankin, a Canadian filmmaker whose work usually requires less-basic terms. In his previous film The Twentieth Century, Rankin reimagined the life of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, through a lens of German expressionism: a trippy Brazil with a masturbation complex. Much of the casting was done either cross-gender or color-blind: “In a school play you can have a Filipino Captain von Trapp and a transgender Artful Dodger and it’s fine,“ Rankin explained at the time. ”In film, I don’t understand why there’s this pressure to always link an actor to their exact demographic profile.”

For Universal Language, Rankin takes that idea to a different place: the Winnipeg of this film is, for wont...

In the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg, a futile tension exists between French and English speakers — doubly silly, since the country is officially bilingual. In his gently satirical “Universal Language,” writer-director Matthew Rankin imagines a rather fanciful solution, where Farsi is now the region’s dominant tongue. Taking his cues from such Iranian classics as “Children of Heaven” and “The White Balloon,” Rankin mixes the humanism of Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, et al. with his own peculiar brand of comedy (as seen in the more off-the-wall “The Twentieth Century”), offering a delightful cross-cultural hybrid designed to celebrate our differences.

Though Rankin shows a genuine affection for all things Persian, the first and most obvious hiccup to his premise is that audiences don’t necessarily share his interest or his references. There’s something inherently provocative — and perhaps even triggering to some — about seeing a nondescript Canadian elementary school where...

“Do you think people can change?” Ann (Joanna Arnow) asks her long-term dominant Allen (Scott Cohen) toward the beginning of Joanna Arnow’s second feature, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Told through a series of comic vignettes, the film follows Ann through an indeterminate period of time in her early 30s as she navigates relationships, awkward family dinners, a bland corporate job, and the possibility of changing from her now-ensconced ways. As can be gleaned from its title, the potential for action or growth is faint, and Arnow builds a unique comedic style around a persistent sense of disappointment. The dominant tone is one of melancholic absurdity, with an airy timing à la the stilted awkwardness of Roy Andersson used to imbue scenes with a heaping of uneasy deadpan space on their front and back ends. We always seem to enter a scene too early or too late,...

In Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” 19th-century scientist Baxter (Willem Dafoe) restores Bella (Emma Stone) to life with the brain of her unborn child — and the surreal visual design reflects her wild imagination as she progresses from infant to liberated woman.

To achieve that, the director instructed production designers James Price (“Paddington 2” art director) and Shona Heath (a collaborator of fashion photographer Tim Walker making her film debut) to create a fantastical world that was a throwback to the old-school style of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus,” with miniatures, painted backdrops, and rear screen projection (high-tech LED screens created the oceans and skies).

“My experience in film is zero,” Heath said in an on-set interview in the video above, “so this wouldn’t be standing if it wasn’t for James.”

What they conjured — to Arts Director Guild- and Academy Award-nominated success — was a retro-futuristic fantasy influenced by...

“My role is to sometimes talk to the press or to fight with policemen,” Cannes Delegate General Thierry Fremaux joked during a keynote this evening at the Göteborg Film Festival.

Fremaux had been making a comedic reference to his altercation with a local police officer on the pavement outside the Carlton Hotel at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The altercation — which went viral — was just one of the topics Fremaux touched on this evening in Göteborg during a keynote session with Swedish filmmaker and two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund.

Concluding the description of his unique job title, Fremaux added: “We are really at the service of the artist, the press, the audience and the professionals. If those roles are well done, we are happy.”

The evening’s session was chaired by outgoing Göteborg head Jonas Holmberg, who quizzed the pair on their working relationship and what they...

Mubi has unveiled their February 2024 lineup, featuring Roy Andersson’s little-seen 1991 short World of Glory, Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing starring Catherine Keener with an early Jake Gyllenhaal performance, and special Black History Month selections: Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer, Kasi Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou, Carl Franklin’s One False Move, and more.

Check out the lineup below, including recently added January titles, and get 30 days free here.

Just-Added

American Movie, directed by Christopher Smith | Festival Focus: Sundance

Pieces of April, directed by Peter Hedges | Festival Focus: Sundance

The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez | Festival Focus: Sundance

But I’m a Cheerleader, directed by Jamie Babbit | Festival Focus: Sundance

Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg | Festival Focus: Sundance

Medicine for Melancholy directed by Barry Jenkins | First Films First

Antiviral, directed by Brandon Cronenberg | First Films First

Shithouse, directed by Cooper Raiff | First Films First

Age of Panic,...

Actors Ewan McGregor, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, directors Ruben Östlund, Ernst de Geer, Ramata-Toulaye Sy and Cannes Film Festival honcho Thierry Frémaux are some of the stellar guests set to walk the red carpet at the 47th edition of Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival.

This year’s Göteborg Fest unspools from Jan. 26 to Feb. 4.

For his last run as artistic director of Scandinavia’s biggest film festival, Jonas Holmberg has selected 240 films from 82 countries, and what he calls “one of the strongest lineups ever” for Göteborg’s main Nordic competition strand. Among the highly anticipated titles vying for the coveted Best Nordic Film Dragon Award worth Sek 400,000, is Norway’s “Handling the Undead” by Thea Hvistendahl, set to kickstart the festival on the heels of its Sundance world premiere.

“This will be the first time we open with a zombie horror,” notes Holmberg, who looks forward...

Film at Lincoln Center

A massive Edward Yang retrospective, New York’s first in a dozen years, continues with A Brighter Summer Day, Yi Yi, and new restorations of A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong.

Roxy Cinema

A 35mm print of Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and “City Dudes” screen this Saturday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A Roy Andersson retrospective continues with his flagship films and a lesser-seen work; the Todd Haynes series winds down; The Wicker Man plays on Saturday and Sunday.

Film Forum

The Third Man begins a 75th-anniversary 35mm run while Days of Heaven (read our interview with Brooke Adams) continues in 4K.

Museum of Modern Art

The comprehensive Ennio Morricone retrospective continues.

IFC Center

Casablanca and Alphaville have runs; The Muppets Take Manhattan plays early, while Black Christmas, Revenge of the Sith, and Last Crusade have late showings.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: Yi Yi,...

Film at Lincoln Center

A massive Edward Yang retrospective, New York’s first in a dozen years, has begun, featuring new restorations of A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong.

Museum of the Moving Image

A Roy Andersson retrospective begins with two lesser-seen works; the Todd Haynes series continues with Carol and Far from Heaven; Ghost in the Shell plays on Friday, while The Shop Around the Corner screens through the weekend.

Film Forum

A Charlie Chaplin series is underway to coincide with the new Woman of Paris restoration; Days of Heaven (read our interview with Brooke Adams) and Michael Powell’s career-killing masterwork Peeping Tom continue.

Museum of Modern Art

The comprehensive Ennio Morricone retrospective continues, including Once Upon a Time in America.

Roxy Cinema

Amadeus plays on 35mm; Home Alone also screens.

IFC Center

It’s a Wonderful Life and Alphaville have runs; Black Christmas, Revenge of the Sith, Last Crusade,...

Lucien (Danny Ronaldo) in The Magnet Man. Gust Van den Berghe: 'I think humor is amazing. But at the same time, it cannot come for free? I do like it when it comes with weight' Photo: Courtesy of Tallinn Film Festival Belgian director Gust Van den Berghe transports us both back in time and to a world that, though a far more vibrant aesthetic, recalls the careful creations of Roy Andersson, in that it is simultaneously realised in glorious detail while retaining a theatrical, otherworldly edge. It is there that we meet Lucien, a near-silent protagonist in the Buster Keaton mould, who lives with his parents in the countryside. He’s a simple soul with an unusual talent - the ability to attract metal objects. When he accidentally finds himself attracted to a train on the move and deposited a long way from home, he joins a circus, where...

The award was handed out tonight during a ceremony at Oslo’s Opera House.

Danish drama Empire (Viften) has won the lucrative Nordic Council Film Prize for 2023.

The prize, worth $45,000, is split between director Frederikke Aspöck, screenwriter Anna Neye and producers Pernille Munk Skydsgaard, Nina Leidersdorff and Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen.

The award was handed out tonight during a ceremony at Oslo’s Opera House.

Empire celebrated its world premiere in Göteborg and opened in Danish cinemas in April via Sf Studios. REinvent handles international sales.

The film was selected among six Nordic candidates by a jury consisting...

Ordinary events are imbued with a poignancy in this documentary showing the fragile power of community and identity in a Belarusian village

Cast in a subdued, beige-toned palette, the tableau-like compositions in Kristina Savutsina’s documentary portrait of a small Belarusian village echo the wry sensibility found in the work of Swedish director Roy Andersson. Like in the latter’s output, Khan’s Flesh traffics in the mundanities of everyday life, where ordinary events also hold the capacity for poignancy and irony.

Throughout this crisp 57-minute film, the camera remains static, yet the highly associative editing creates a sense of movement and rhythm out of stillness. Moving from one ordinary space to another – a hospital bed, a church, a community meeting room, even a graveyard – Khan’s Flesh manages to elicit a kind of circular totality out of a constellation of minute gestures. At once simple and monumental, images of reunion and separation,...

Six nominees vying for the lucrative annual award.

The Nordic Council Film Prize is including a Greenlandic nominee for the first time, with six titles in the running for the prize, worth $45,000.

The full list of nominees this year are:

The Edge Of The Shadow (Greenland) Directed and written by Malik Kleist and produced by Nina Paninnguaq for PaniNoir and Imalik Film. Empire (Den) Directed by Frederikke Aspöck, written by Anna Neye and Frederikke Aspöck and produced by Pernille Munk Skydsgaard, Nina Leidersdorff and Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen for Meta Film Bubble (Fin) Directed by Aleksi Salmenperä , written by Reeta Ruotsalainen and Aleksi Salmenperä,...

Drawn from an exciting Locarno Pro lineup, these talents – directors, producers and industry execs – impacted at Locarno, and will often in the future. Nine are women, which says a lot about cutting-edge innovation in Europe and beyond.

Despina Athanassiadis, France

Born in France and with Greek roots, Athanassiadis is currently focusing on her Alliance4Development project “The Young One,” about female truck drivers – “It’s a story of transmission, from older to younger generation” – which was awarded script consultancy residency at DreamAgo. “As a filmmaker, I’m interested in people who struggle. I find it fascinating, watching how they find ways to fix their problems. I want to see them on screen,” she states. In her next film, she will focus on a middle-aged French woman, whose life changes forever when she goes to Greece. “It’s a movie with inner and outer journeys, and with lots of international characters.

After successful US screenings at Sundance and SXSW, Fremont has its international premiere at Karlovy Vary.

After world premiering at this year’s Sundance in the Next section, and also screening at SXSW, Babak Jalali’s fourth film Fremont has its international premiere at Karlovy Vary, where it it is vying for a Crystal Globe.

Born in Iran and raised in London, Jalali first came to prominence when his 2005 short film Heydar, An Afghan In Tehran garnered a Bafta nomination. His debut feature Frontier Blues premiered in Locarno’s official competition in 2009 while his sophomore effort Radio Dreams won the...

Wang Bing’s moving documentary follows young workers as they laugh, fight and question their bosses while undertaking a season of brutally hard work

Charlie Chaplin’s frantic production-line factory worker in Modern Times is a ghostly presence in this giant, immersive documentary from Chinese director Wang Bing, the movie equivalent of a wall-sized tapestry; it is about the sweatshop capital of China, the northern town of Zhili in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, known as the “city of children’s clothing”. Thousands of workshops turn out mountains of cheap garments and every year vast numbers of young people from about 16 to 22 come from outlying cities to do a season of brutally hard work in return for cash in hand.

This is China’s hop picking or kibbutzim, the young workers often staying in the grim dorms the bosses offer rent free to justify low pay. There are bricks of cash to be seen in this film,...

It’s a measure of the state we’re in today that Thomas Cailley’s follow-up to his 2014 debut Love at First Fight could be described as a metaphor for just about anything you like. It takes the surreal premise of Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 Cannes hit The Lobster and, through a peculiar kind of cinematic alchemy, makes a surprisingly credible family drama out of it. Its overarching themes of love and tolerance go a long way, and it’s by no means a stretch to see a bunch of current hot-button topics — the world refugee crisis, climate change and trans rights to name but three — refracted through Cailley’s lens.

In The Lobster, people who fail to find a partner at least get to choose what animal they would like to be, but in The Animal Kingdom — selected to open the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes — the process is way more random.

Reincarnation is the central topic o Ryuchi Hiroki's drama “Phases of The Moon” that has just had its European premiere at far East Film Festival in Udine. Based on the bestselling novel by Shogo Sato, the script follows the aftermath of a big family tragedy, and one man's attempt to come to terms with it.

“Phases of the Moon” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

What happens when someone dies has been one of the most explored questions since the birth of religions. Some believe in heavens and hells, others in reincarnation, and an increasingly large number of people, in plain unison of decomposing bodies in nature. Which one of many presumption's is true is left to each one of us to fathom once we meet our end. If Hiroki was asked, he would chose both reincarnation and John Lenon's music to prove his point.

Kei (Yo Oizumi...

Poor Beau. Nearly half a century on Earth, and he’s never really lived. Sure, he was born — that much director Ari Aster depicts from Beau’s point of view at the outset of his wildly self-indulgent and frequently surreal third feature, “Beau Is Afraid,” lingering long enough to witness the infant’s umbilical cord being snipped — but what has Beau done with his life since then? Can it be said that he ever really developed an identity apart from his successful single mom, Mona Wasserman, who haunts the film for the better part of three hours before finally revealing herself?

Not since “Psycho” has an off-screen mother loomed so large over a film’s protagonist, played here by Joaquin Phoenix, cowering from the world. The Hitchcock comparison could be misleading, since Aster makes a surprising tonal shift away from traditional nightmare material for this deranged road trip, which follows...

Good news for those who wish to know what their Twitter feed’s jacking off to: the Criterion Channel are launching an erotic thriller series that includes De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the Wachowskis’ Bound, and so many other movies to stir up that ceaseless, fruitless “why do movies have sex scenes?” discourse. (Better or worse than middle-age film critics implying they have a hard-on? I’m so indignant at being forced to choose.) Similarly lurid, if not a bit more frightening, is a David Lynch retro that includes the Criterion editions of Lost Highway and Inland Empire (about which I spoke to Lynch last year), a series of shorts, and a one-month-only engagement for Dune, a film that should be there in perpetuity.

Retrospectives of Harold Lloyd, Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, and shorts by Fanta Régina Nacro round out the big debuts,...

Impressively bleak animated Hungarian sci-fi feature White Plastic Sky imagines a grim dystopia a hundred years from now where, like in Soylent Green (1973), older people are harvested at age 50, turned into trees so that they can become food for the younger generation. Except in this movie, the high-tech cannibalism is no state secret waiting to be blurted out by Charlton Heston, but a fact of life universally accepted phlegmatically by all. It only becomes a problem for protagonist Stefan (Tamas Keresztes) when his wife Nora (Zsofia Szamosi) decides to undergo the “implantation” procedure at age 32, having lost the will to live since the death of their child.

Made using a striking blend of rotoscope-traced live actors and intricate CG-drawn background designs to build a richly detailed world, this could build a cult following off a warm reception in Berlin.

Rotoscoping is a technique that dates back to the earliest days...

Goteborg, Sweden — Fast consolidating as one of Europe’s highest-profile filmmakers, Sweden’s Ruben Östlund scored three of the biggest Oscar category nominations last Tuesday – picture, direction and original screenplay – for “Triangle of Sadness,” a send-up of the super rich.

His latest work, however, “This is Cinema!,” billed as “an on-site experience directed by Ruben Östlund,” has seen Östlund directing not a film, but it’s audience. The event took place on Saturday at Sweden’s Göteborg Festival, Scandinavia’s biggest film-tv event.

In it, Östlund climbed on stage to direct a local audience on how to play a far more active part in the cinema-going experience. Greeted with self-critical jubilation by attendees, Östlund’s show sees him join other leading lights on Europe’s film scene, such as Cannes head Thierry Frémaux, in campaigning for cinema as a collective social activity.

Ostlund’s “experience” also comes as art-house cinema...

Tj O’Grady Peyton last appeared on the pages of Dn as both director and actor in Wave, a film which shows a man isolated by the barrier of unintelligible language so it only seems fitting that his latest short, Broken: A Lockdown Story, is guided by a bizarre exploration of language and expressions. Tj worked with fellow London Film School graduate John Craine to create the story of a family who have seen better times as envisaged through the fantastical prism of its matriarch whose playful account belies the reality of the household’s situation. The film’s playful score and quirky narration, which has fun playing with recognisable idioms, are equally matched by its highly stylised scenes of outlandish capers and a delightfully dry sense of humour which runs throughout. We sat down with Director Peyton and Writer/Cinematographer Craine to delve into how they wove together a selection...

With the release of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Bardo: False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths,” Netflix invited guests to experience the sights and sounds of the Academy Award-winning director’s most personal film.

Through a series of conversations, the audience learned more about the design and craft of the project and had the opportunity to view concept art, costumes, and pieces from the sets.

Daniel Giménez Cacho stars as Silverio Gama, a Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Silverio finds himself on a surreal journey into memories and dreams when he returns to Mexico after many years away.

“Bardo, False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths” will stream globally on Netflix beginning December 16.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji agreed to work on the film without reading the script

Darius Khondji has worked on films from “Seven” to “Uncut Gems,” earning an Academy Award nomination for “Evita” in 1996. Sitting...

“I thought about exploiting the pandemic to tell this story of intimacy,” Romanian-born, Swedish-based director Ştefan Constantinescu told Variety, after the screening of “Man and Dog.” The movie was showcased in the main competition of this week’s Torino Film Festival.

Constantinescu’s debut follows Doru (Bodgan Dumitrache) who suddenly leaves his work in Göteborg, and returns to Romania with a growing load of jealousy on his back, after receiving a mysterious text message claiming that his wife (Ofelia Opii) is being unfaithful. His anxiety will escalate to gigantic proportions, trapping him into a meticulous investigation.

“I exploited the pandemic to build up tension and add further pressure on Doru,” he pointed out. However, he also disclosed that the first draft of the script was penned by his co-writer Andrei Epure back in 2015, well ahead of the healthcare crisis.

“We kept on speaking about it for a while. After two,...

Double Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund has been named new Honorary President of Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival, the biggest movie event in Scandinavia..

The “Triangle of Sadness” helmer will act as an advisor for the Swedish fest and “leave his artistic imprint on the festival program,” promised the organizers. That includes the upcoming 46th edition, starting in January.

“It was both an easy and a joyful choice to accept this heavy title,” said Östlund, who will succeed previous presidents, Ingmar Bergman and Roy Andersson

“We share the vision of a more vital cinema culture, free from nostalgic throwbacks. We will have to do this work in many different areas, but I can reveal that the first one for us to lecture is the cinema audience.”

“They must learn the difference between scrolling for dopamine on individual screens and to take part in a show,” he added.

As reported by Variety,...

Ruben Östlund Appointed Honorary President of Göteborg Film Festival

Ruben Östlund has been appointed as the new Honorary President of Göteborg Film Festival. Östlund will be an advisor for the festival, starting with the upcoming 2023 edition. The board of Göteborg Film Festival appoints the Honorary President for five years, at which point it will be renewed or concluded. In a statement, Östlund described his decision to accept the honorary role as “easy and a joyful.” Past presidents include Ingmar Bergman and Roy Andersson. Östlund will speak at the opening ceremony of the 2023 edition. Jonas Holmberg, Artistic Director at Göteborg Film Festival, said: “With two Palme d’Or wins and many unforgettable cinematic moments, the Gothenburg-born and loyal visitor of the festival Ruben Östlund has the artistic integrity, the intellectual playfulness, and the international luminescence that make him an excellent Honorary President for Göteborg Film Festival.”

Luca Guadagnino To Attend Saudi...

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month, including new restorations of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom I & II ahead of the third installment beginning to roll out right after Thanksgiving. Additional highlights include Christos Nikou’s Apples, Lorenzo Vigas’ The Box, Paweł Łozińsk’s The Balcony Movie, and Antonio Marziale’s short Starfuckers, along with films by Hou Hsiao-hsien, Park Chan-wook, Lucrecia Martel, and more.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

November 1 – A Married Woman, directed by Jean-Luc Godard | For Ever Godard

November 2 – No Ordinary Man, directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt | Portrait of the Artist

November 3 – Time to Love, directed by Metin Erksan | Rediscovered

November 4 – Apples, directed by Christos Nikou | Mubi Spotlight

November 5 – The Assassin, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | Hou Hsiao-hsien: A Double Bill

November 6 – Daughter of the Nile, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien | Hou Hsiao-hsien: A Double Bill

November...

Director Geng Jun regroups his dream team for his latest film, “Manchurian Tiger”, a follow up (or sort of) to his previous “The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping” and “Free and Easy”, set once again in and around Hegang, Heilongjiang, the director’s hometown in the cold Northeast of China, and based on everyday quirky characters of the area.

“Manchurian Tiger” is screening at London East Asia Film Festival (Leaff)

Before the plot takes shape, we see a few sketches introducing the characters. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu) is an excavator machine operator in a mine of this constantly cold Chinese Northeast, and between a cigarette and an excavation, he enjoys the regular visits of his lover Xiaowei (Guo Yue) who is not the first one as we will discover later! Despite her insistence, he is firmly and melancholically convinced that his marriage is the only thing he has left in his life.

Click here to read the full article.

Oscar-winning British director Sam Mendes will be honored at this year’s Stockholm Film Festival with the 2022 Visionary Award for lifetime achievement.

Mendes, who won a best director Oscar for his feature debut, American Beauty (1999), and picked up three Oscar nominations — for best film, best director and best original screenplay — for war drama 1917, will attend the Swedish festival and present his new film Empire of Light there Nov. 11.

The 1980s-set drama stars Olivia Colman as the manager of a struggling old cinema in an English coastal town who forms an unlikely bond with her new employee Stephen (Michael Ward). The film reunites Mendes with his 1917 and Skyfall cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Before starting his career in movies, Mendes had established himself as one of London’s leading theater directors. He founded and ran the Donmar Warehouse in London for 10 years and has directed plays shown at the National Theatre,...

Cannes Directors’ Fortnight has unveiled the new team of programmers and consultants who will work with incoming delegate general Julien Rejl on his inaugural selection for May 2023.

Rejl will be supported by seven programmers.

Hervé Aubron, film academic and Cahiers du Cinéma critic Agathe Bonitzer, actress, whose credits include When Margaux Meets Margaux and A Bottle In The Gaza Sea Elsa Charbit, experienced programmer who was formerly artistic director of France’s Entrevues, Belfort International Film Festival Caroline Maleville, programming manager at the French Cinematheque Jean-Marc Zekri, head of Paris arthouse cinema Le Reflet Médicis Daniella Shreir, U.K. founder and co-editor of feminist film journal ‘Another Gaze’ Muyan Wang, Paris-based Chinese critic

They will be joined by four consultants

Alvaro Arroba, Buenos Aires-based Spanish film journalist and programmer for the city’s International Independent Film Festival (Bafici). He will advise on Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries. Cintia Gil, former Sheffield DocFest and Doclisboa head.

Five Nordic features are nominated for the Nordic Council Film Prize. The prestigious recognition, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, was first awarded to Aki Kaurismäki’s “The Man Without a Past.”

Hlynur Pálmason’s “Godland,” Teemu Nikki’s “The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic,” “Lamb” by Valdimar Jóhannson, Joachim Trier’s Oscar-nominated “The Worst Person in the World” and “Clara Sola,” directed by Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, will all vie for the award.

It is billed as a prize that celebrates “a unique filmmaking vision, deeply rooted in Nordic culture” and comes with a sum of Dkk 300,000, shared equally between the director, screenwriter and producer.

Trier, fresh off his win at Saturday’sAmanda Awards, already won the prize in 2016 for “Louder Than Bombs.” It’s also not the first nomination for Finland’s Nikki, previously noticed for darkly comedic “Euthanizer.” His new film, featuring Petri Poikolainen who suffers from Ms,...

Göteborg-based Cinenic Film, headed by Annika Hellström and Erika Malmgren, has a flawless track record in backing debut directors with global breakthrough potential.

Their roster takes in Ísold Uggadóttir (“And Breathe Normally”), Gorki Glaser-Müller (“Children of the Enemy”) and most recently Christoffer Sandler, whose fiction debut “So Damn Easy Going” opened the last Göteborg Film Festival and is now heading off to the Norwegian Film Festival in Haugesund (Aug. 20-26).

Cinenic will also be in Haugesund with its latest young filmmaking recruits, Angelika Abramovitch and Minka Jakerson and their respective feature debuts “The Braid” and “The Soft Skin,” to be pitched at the Nordic Co-production Market, part of Haugesund confab New Nordic Films (Aug. 23-26).

The Crimean-born Swede Abramovitch competed in Clermont Ferrand with her graduation film from Stockholm’s Academy of the Arts “Catcave Hysteria” and was picked for the Future Frames next generation showcase in Karlovy Vary in July.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Belle (Mamoru Hosoda)

If a name can trigger nostalgia, don’t be surprised when the occasional sense of deja vu sets in while watching Belle, a dazzling near-future tech fantasia wrapped around a tale, yes, as old as time. Directed by Mamoru Hosoda and mostly set in a vast online world of sweeping musical numbers and weightless action sequences, it tells of Suzu, an awkward teenager (as if there were any other kind) who finds quick fame performing as the pop-singer Belle: her avatar on a hugely popular social media platform called U that looks like a sugary cocktail of Tik Tok and “The Oasis” from Spielberg’s Ready Player One. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: HBO Max

Blue Island...

Director Geng Jun regroups his dream team for his latest film, “Manchurian Tiger”, a follow up (or sort of) to his previous “The Hammer and Sickle Are Sleeping” and “Free and Easy”, set once again in and around Hegang, Heilongjiang, the director’s hometown in the cold Northeast of China, and based on everyday quirky characters of the area.

“Manchurian Tiger” is screening at Udine Far East Film Festival

Before the plot takes shape, we see a few sketches introducing the characters. Xu Dong (Zhang Yu) is an excavator machine operator in a mine of this constantly cold Chinese Northeast, and between a cigarette and an excavation, he enjoys the regular visits of his lover Xiaowei (Guo Yue) who is not the first one as we will discover later! Despite her insistence, he is firmly and melancholically convinced that his marriage is the only thing he has left in his life.

For such a small and lightly populated region, the Nordics have been delivering an impressive number of critical darlings from a wide range of filmmakers. Nordic features hit a milestone this year, with three Cannes prize-winning films, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb,” Juho Kuosmanen’s “Compartment No. 6” and Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” along with Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s documentary “Flee,” among the 15 on the Oscar shortlist, with the last two getting multiple noms.

Sundance also hosted a record number of Nordic movies, such as Alli Haapasalo’s “Girl Picture,” which picked up the Audience Award in the World Dramatic section, while more pics are in the pipeline at the Berlinale.

For decades, Sweden, Denmark and, to a lesser extent, Norway, were considered the top purveyors of internationally successful movies with helmers including Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Susanne Bier, Roy Andersson, Trier and Ruben Ostlund, taking...

With a top prize of $44,000 it is one of the world’s most lucrative film awards.

Denmark won big with the two Dragon awards handed out in Goteborg on February 5, with Tea Lindeburg’s As In Heaven winning the prize for best Nordic film. With a prize of $44,000, it is one of the world’s most lucrative film awards.

The film, which previously won best director and best actress at San Sebastian, is about a girl in the 19thcentury who hopes to leave her family’s farm to be the first in her family to study. Her future prospects change...

18 works in progress by some of the Nordic region’s biggest names – Bille August, Björn Runge, the multi-prized Jp Valkeapää and Malou Reymann will be showcased at the hybrid Nordic Film Market (Feb. 3-6), along with some Sundance and Rotterdam competition entries.

The Nfm runs parallel to the final stretches of the Göteborg Film Festival (Jan.28-Feb.6).

So far, over 450 international delegates have signed up for the major Nordic film confab. Only 250 will be able to attend in-person, due to Covid restrictions in Sweden.

“We’ve received a huge interest from professionals to attend in-person, following the decision of Sundance, Rotterdam and Berlin’s European Film Market to go online. It’s been very difficult to say ‘no’ to people, but our priority is to guarantee a safe event,” said Göteborg head of industry Cia Edström who underlines the various safety measures to be implemented at the Nfm, from vaccination checks,...

Red Road, Citizen Kane, Reservoir Dogs… some debut features feel like anything but

The start of a new year always makes one feel inclined to do something new, whether it’s taking up knitting, committing to a workout regime or, for the more ambitious among us, making a film. In a suitable spirit of beginnings, Mubi annually serves this impulse with its First Films First series of essential debut features by major film-makers – though most of them, admittedly, don’t inspire a surge of hopeful “I could do that” confidence.

Mubi’s debut selections this year are a formidable bunch, beginning with their admittedly pretty downbeat New Year’s Day pick, Andrea Arnold’s sharp, lean, unshakable revenge drama Red Road (2006), which set the tone for one of the great sensory film-making careers in British cinema. That’s followed up with Roy Andersson’s A Swedish Love Story, a gentle,...

“A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist–moving an audience through a movie […] making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark,” said the late, great Gordon Willis. As we continue our year-end coverage, one aspect we must highlight is, indeed, cinematography. From talented newcomers to seasoned professionals, we’ve rounded up the examples that have most impressed us this year. Check out our rundown below.

About Endlessness (Gergely Pálos)

Working with close collaborator Gregory Palos, director Roy Andersson rids About Endlessness of any color contrast (there are almost no shadows too) to create a surreal but superficial uniformity implying the banality of everyday tasks. The film’s use of static one-shots over a series of vignettes paints life in a period of stasis. Andersson’s aesthetic choices give the film a sense of transcendence while uncovering the dark humor of everyday life while still looking gorgeous,...