News

At 86, Ridley Scott is on the cusp of releasing one of the biggest films of his career — “Gladiator II” — and already has at least two additional projects lined up for 2025, a reteam with Paul Mescal and a Bee Gees biopic. With no signs of slowing down.

He’s not the only Hollywood veteran who’s still making movies: Martin Scorsese, who turned 82 this year, made one of the best films of his career with “Killers of the Flower Moon” while Clint Eastwood (94) has what might be his final film, “Juror #2” in theaters now.

Here are 15 directors over 80 who are still busy making movies.

Photo credit: Getty Images Martin Scorsese, 82

The prolific director of “Goodfellas,” and “The Departed” was Oscar-nominated again for his 2023 historic epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and is now developing two films: “The Life of Jesus” and a movie about Frank Sinatra. He also returned to documentaries...

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...

Recipients also include ‘Made In EU’ the new film by Bulgaria’s Stephan Komanderev.

Made In EU, the new film by award-winning Bulgarian filmmaker Stephan Komanderev, has received €220,000 from the Leipzig-based regional German fund Mdm in its latest round of awards.

Produced by Halle-based 42Film, which also produced Karlovy Vary winner Blaga’s Lessons, the film is based on real events that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bulgaria. A seamstress working in a clothing factory in a small town is at the centre of an online drama when she is labelled “patient zero” and accused of infecting her...

Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson) greets Shriver (Michael Shannon) in Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie

Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie (adapted from Chris Belden’s book Shriver) stars Michael Shannon (also a producer), Kate Hudson (executive producer), Don Johnson, and M Emmet Walsh with Kate Linder, Romy Byrne, Mark Boone Junior, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Jimmi Simpson, Wendie Malick, and Zach Braff.

Honoré de Balzac, Jerzy Kosinski and Hal Ashby’s Being There, starring Peter Sellers (shown to Olivia Colman by Toby Jones in Sam Mendes’s Empire Of Light), The Landlord, Harold And Maude, Linda Lavin and Harris Yulin in A Short History Of Decay, Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller and Call Me Gantenbein, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Lost Time, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper,...

Eight films have screened with 11 more to come.

As the Berlinale Competition nears the halfway point, Celine Song’s Past Lives is leading Screen’s Berlin 2023 jury grid with an average score of 3.6.

The romantic drama is way out in front after receiving five four-star ratings from critics – the highest mark meaning “excellent”.

Anton Dolin from Meduza and Katja Nicodemus from Die Zeit marked it lower, at three and two stars respectively.

Song’s debut feature follows two childhood friends from South Korea who reconnect for a few days in New York. It had its world premiere at Sundance last month.

Road to Nowhere: Von Trotta Presents the Basics on Bachmann

Throughout her career, Margarethe Von Trotta, a key figure from the New German Wave of the 1970s, has often focused on the recuperations of specific iconic women, from Rosa Luxembourg to Hildegard von Bingen to Hannah Arendt, usually with exceptional results. Her latest focuses on esteemed Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and her toxic relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch in Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, detailing their relationship in the late 1950s.

Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with Bachmann, this isn’t a helpful entry point, dealing specifically, and through surprisingly superficial flourishes, never conjuring either the actual impetus of this relationship or a clear portrait of the artist herself.…...

One wonders what Ingeborg Bachmann — the celebrated Austrian poet, author, linguist and thinker who became a darling of the midcentury, continental European literary set — would make of the staunchly old-fashioned Margarethe von Trotta biopic that now bears her name. She might be happy to be portrayed by Vicky Krieps — who among us would not be? She might be gratified by the occasional mention of one of her poems or lectures, and the nice amber tinge to Martin Gschlacht’s stately photography. Or she might be justifiably miffed that for all she achieved across a glittering, eccentric literary career, it is her rocky personal life and the men who rocked it, that are the film’s sole, stultifying focus.

Then again, the movie’s Bachmann would be unlikely to have much time to think on the issue at all, being far too busy agonizing over the grand dramatic tragedy of a soured romance.

German cinema looks set for a major boom this year with a strong lineup of diverse works that span historical dramas, coming-of-age tales, high-octane nostalgia, animation and sci-fi fun.

The Berlin Film Festival is bowing a muscular selection of local titles, among them “Afire,” by Berlinale mainstay Christian Petzold (“Undine”), screening in competition. The films centers on a group of young people staying at a holiday house near the Baltic Sea during a hot, dry summer, exploring volatile emotions that start to sizzle when a wildfire spreads through the surrounding forest.

Likewise vying for the Golden Bear is Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic “Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey Into the Desert,” starring Vicky Krieps (“Corsage”) as the radical Austrian author. The film examines her relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch and her 1964 journey of self-discovery through the Egyptian desert.

“Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” by Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”) and...

As one of Germany’s premier female directors since the 1970s, Margarethe von Trotta is no stranger to stories of women, who, like her, have defied conventions in milieus typically dominated by men.

Whether portraying the life and death of a revolutionary socialist (Rosa Luxemburg), a groundbreaking philosopher (Hannah Arendt) or a medieval nun, composer and botanist (Vision), many of von Trotta’s best movies have been carried by protagonists who refuse to bow down to gender and social norms.

This was certainly the case with Ingeborg Bachmann, the celebrated Austrian poet and writer who lived defiantly against her time and wound up paying the price for it, dying prematurely at the age of 47. Played by an illuminating Vicky Krieps, she’s the centerpiece of this handsomely mounted but rather stolid period piece, which chronicles Bachmann’s cantankerous doomed romance with Swiss playwright Max Frisch and the trip she takes...

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Ingeborg Bachmann may not be a familiar name to many people outside the German-speaking world, but veteran German director Margarethe von Trotta evokes this mid-century poet’s struggle with life, love, and language in a mood piece so persuasively intimate that it doesn’t matter whether or not you have heard of her.

What matters is that you understand immediately that this is a woman of remarkable talents, a brilliant woman who is visibly colluding in her own destruction by a controlling man. One of the oldest stories in the world, in other words, made immediate by Vicky Krieps’s mercurial portrayal and Von Trotta’s extravagant, operatic and equally mercurial direction

The film is clearly a meeting of minds.

Row Pictures is the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything.

Karsten Stöter’s Germany-based Row Pictures, the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, has unveiled a slate of features from Natja Brunckhorst, Markus Schleinzer and Eliza Petkova.

Brunckhorst’s second feature, Zwei zu Eins, is set to go into production this summer at locations in Central Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia. It will be co-produced by the Lübeck-based arm of zischlermann filmproduktion with backing from broadcasters Zdf and Arte as well as Mdm, the Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw and Bkm.

The German sales company’s slate also includes titles by Margarethe von Trotta, Emily Atef, Tatiana Huezo.

The Match Factory has finalised a seven-strong slate of titles playing at the 2023 Berlinale, on which it represents world sales rights.

The company’s lineup includes four titles in Berlin Competition, including German director Christian Petzold’s latest film Afire, about a group of friends in a holiday home by the Baltic Sea where emotions run high as the parched forest around them catches fire.

The film stars Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt and is produced by...

The Berlin International Film Festival unveiled the competition lineup for its 2023 edition on Monday morning, naming the 18 movies that will compete for the coveted Gold and Silver Bears at the 73rd Berlinale.

Berlinale executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian presented a very international and arthouse-heavy lineup, with a strong focus on politically-charged cinema.

In a late addition, Superpower, Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman’s documentary on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Russian invasion of the country and the ongoing war, will have its world premiere in Berlin’s out-of-competition Berlinale Special section. The doc, made for Vice Studios, Aldamisa Entertainment and Fifth Season, is being sold internationally by Fifth Season.

Berlin 2023, taking place a year after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, will have a major focus on Ukraine. Even the festival’s official pin will be in the Ukraine colors of blue and yellow.

In competition, German auteur...

Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (a highlight of the 60th New York Film Festival)

When I met up with Vicky Krieps (who starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread) last August she was on holiday in Italy. We spoke about her role in Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), Corsage (Austria’s Oscar entry), and Bachmann & Frisch. Vicky can now be seen this week playing Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage and in 2023 as Ingeborg Bachmann in her relationship to Max Frisch in Margarethe von Trotta’s Bachmann & Frisch. Ronald Zehrfeld from Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, co-written with Christian Kracht, plays Frisch. Finsterwalder has an upcoming Sisi release for 2023, Sisi & I, starring Sandra Hüller with Susanne Wolff as Sisi.

[imageleft...

Vicky Krieps as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (a highlight of the 60th New York Film Festival)

When I met up with Vicky Krieps (who starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread) last August she was on holiday in Italy. We spoke about her role in Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), Corsage (Austria’s Oscar entry), and Bachmann & Frisch. Vicky can now be seen this week playing Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage and in 2023 as Ingeborg Bachmann in her relationship to Max Frisch in Margarethe von Trotta’s Bachmann & Frisch. Ronald Zehrfeld from Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, co-written with Christian Kracht, plays Frisch. Finsterwalder has an upcoming Sisi release for 2023, Sisi & I, starring Sandra Hüller with Susanne Wolff as Sisi.

[imageleft...

Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort) star Vicky Krieps on Mathieu Amalric: “I am not him, yet I am almost his alter ego as well.”

When I met up with Vicky Krieps (who starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread) she was on holiday in Italy. We discussed her role in Mathieu Amalric’s penetrating Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), which is based on Claudine Galéa’s play Je Reviens De Loin.

Vicky can soon be seen playing Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, in Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage (screening in the Main Slate of the 60th New York Film Festival and produced by Toni Erdmann director Maren Ade) and as Ingeborg Bachmann in her relationship to Max Frisch in Margarethe von Trotta’s Bachmann & Frisch. Ronald Zehrfeld from Frauke Finsterwalder’s Finsterworld, co-written with Christian Kracht, plays Frisch. Finsterwalder has an upcoming Sisi project for 2023, Sisi & I,...

Click here to read the full article.

Pioneering female filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta will receive this year’s lifetime achievement honor at the 35th European Film Awards.

The German director and screenwriter has been a force on the European film scene for nearly 50 years since her directorial debut The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, co-directed with Volker Schlöndorff, back in 1975. She has carved out a unique position in cinema history with her focus on female stories, particularly portraits of real-life women overlooked or ignored by history.

Her second film, and first solo directing effort, Marianne & Juliane (1981), which won the Golden Lion in Venice, is a lightly-fictionalized retelling of the story of sisters Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin, one of whom became a journalist and women’s rights advocate, the other a left-wing terrorist. Barbara Sukowa, who starred as Marianne in the film, became von Trotta’s muse, playing the lead...

German film director, screenwriter, and actor Margarethe von Trotta will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 35th European Film Awards.

Set to take place on Dec. 10 in Reykjavik, Iceland, the award ceremony will pay tribute to von Trotta’s “unique contribution to the world of film.”

Born in Berlin, von Trotta grew up with her mother in the German city of Düsseldorf and started her career acting in theater and in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. She went on to become a leading female director of European auteur cinema and made her directorial debut in 1978 with “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages.” Her credits include “Marianne & Juliane” which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1981, “Sheer Madness,” which competed in Berlin in 1983, and “Rosa Luxemburg,” which premiered in Cannes in 1986 and won Barbara Sukowa the Best Actress Award. The film also received an...

Leading arthouse sales company the Match Factory has acquired the rights to “Bachmann & Frisch,” a biopic about the radical Austrian writer and poet Ingeborg Bachmann, directed by Venice Golden Lion winner Margarethe von Trotta. The film stars Vicky Krieps — who appears in two Cannes Film Festival films this year, “Corsage” and “More Than Ever” — as the poet, and Ronald Zehrfeld as her partner, the Swiss writer Max Frisch.

The pickup follows the international sales success for the Match Factory with Von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” in 2012. The company also represented Von Trotta’s “Forget About Nick” in 2017.

“Bachmann & Frisch” tells the story of the author’s life in Berlin, Zurich and Rome, her relationship with Frisch, her trip to Egypt and her radical texts and readings.

Also in the cast are Tobias Resch (“Breaking the Ice”), Basil Eidenbenz (“Denial”), Luna Wedler (“Je Suis Karl”) and Marc Limpach (“Munich: The Edge of War...

Swiss productions and co-productions are on the rise, driven in part by federal and regional funders that offer attractive opportunities for domestic and international filmmakers.

Quickly recovering from the impact of the pandemic, the local film industry has gotten off to another strong year with local films and international co-productions.

Elie Grappe’s Swiss-Ukrainian-French title “Olga” premiered at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, while unspooling in Locarno were Lorenz Merz’s “Soul of a Beast” and Swiss-international co-productions like Stefan Jäger’s “Monte Verita” and Laurent Geslin’s nature documentary “Lynx.” Venice saw such Swiss co-productions as “Ariaferma,” by Italian helmer Leonardo Di Costanzo, and Bolivian director Kiro Russo’s “El Gran Movimiento.” And opening this year’s Zurich Film Festival (Zff) was Michael Steiner’s Swiss-German Taliban thriller “And Tomorrow We Will Be Dead.”

The upswing in Swiss cinema is due in no small part to Zurich as a film location,...

Upcoming features from Margarethe Von Trotta and Fernando Trueba also receive support.

Co-productions from Belgian director Lukas Dhont, Canada’s Brandon Cronenberg and UK filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa are among 49 selected for support in the latest Eurimages funding round.

Dhont, whose transgender dancer drama Girl won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2018, received €300,000 toward his anticipated second feature, Close.

The Belgium-France-Netherlands co-production centres on two 13-year-old boys who have always been incredibly close but drift apart after their relationship is questioned by schoolmates. When tragedy strikes, one is forced to confront why he distanced himself from his closest friend.

German...

Upcoming features from Margarethe Von Trotta and Fernando Trueba also receive support.

Co-productions from Belgian director Lukas Dhont, Canada’s Brandon Cronenberg and UK filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa are among 49 selected for support in the latest Eurimages funding round.

Dhont, whose transgender dancer drama Girl won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2018, received €300,000 toward his anticipated second feature, Close.

The Belgium-France-Netherlands co-production centres on two 13-year-old boys who have always been incredibly close but drift apart after their relationship is questioned by schoolmates. When tragedy strikes, one is forced to confront why he distanced himself from his closest friend.

German...

Zurich-Berlin based Tellfilm, producer of “Blue My Mind” from “Killing Eve” director Lisa Brühlmann, is set to go into production on Aug. 22 on its biggest movie yet, “Monte Verità,” a period drama about a woman’s across-the-board emancipation.

Set to shoot in the Locarno region of Ticino, southern Switzerland, “Monte Verita” is lead produced by Tellfilm and co-produced by Vienna’s Kgp Filmproduction and Coin Film in Germany’s Cologne.

Directed by Stefan Jäger (“Horizon Beautiful”), “Monte Verità” consolidates Tellfilm’s transformation from a company making movies targeting the Swiss domestic market into one creating higher-profile European co-productions.

“‘Blue My Mind’ and ‘Animals’ marked a kind of breakthrough for us. ’Monte Verità’ is our next step, the biggest Telefilm production to date. We have become bigger and more international,” said Katrin Renz, CEO at Tellfilm and one of the European Film Promotion’s 2018 Producers on the Move at the 71st Cannes Festival.

Volker Schlöndorff on Sam Shepard in Voyager (Homo Faber): 'I was very fond of his performance and I think the movie is memorable because of his presence' The death of Sam Shepard at the age of 73 on July 27, 2017, from complications of motor neurone disease (known as Als in the Us) was announced by a spokesperson for Shepard's family. Shepard starred in Jim Mickle's Cold In July, based on the book by Joe Lansdale. Hampton Fancher, co-screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, recalls meeting Sam when he was doing The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman, based on the book by Tom Wolfe.

Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Shepard as Walter Faber, opposite Julie Delpy and Barbara Sukowa, in Voyager, based on Max Frisch's book Homo Faber, with a screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer, sent the following tribute upon hearing of his passing.

Schlöndorff writes: "Sam was not...

“No one gets over anything,” remarks Stellan Skarsgård’s Max, rekindling with old flame Rebecca years after they last met. He was a fledgling writer, she an idealistic young student. But then they split up, he moved back to Europe and she became a hotshot lawyer in New York City. And neither ‘got over’ it. Now Max reflects in the words of his new novel: life is defined by what you did that you regret, and what you did not do that you regret; “The things that come between do not matter.” Seeing each other again, they travel to Montauk, the village at the end of Long Island, to look out to the open ocean and search for what they’ve lost. But all they can do is look back.

Volker Schlöndorff’s latest film has something of the Allen-esque themes of regret and unchangeable fate (the New York setting...

Past lovers Nina Hoss and Stellan Skarsgård border on the unlovable in this slow-paced drama, but Volker Schlöndorff’s film rewards patience for its final twist

Volker Schlöndorff’s scalding film of The Tin Drum shared the Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979. The director turns 78 next month and is no longer at the peak of his powers. But Return to Montauk proves that he still has it in him to startle and wrongfoot an audience.

What appears to be a clunky, tasteful, middle-aged rehash of Before Sunset, with two former lovers reunited after one of them writes a novel about their affair, turns out at the eleventh hour to have a sting in its tail. Schlöndorff and the novelist Cólm Toibín wrote the screenplay, which is adapted in part from the memoir Montauk by the late Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, to whom the picture is dedicated.

Return To Montauk set at Lincoln Center Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

While filming Return To Montauk (Rückkehr Nach Montauk) in New York last spring, Volker Schlöndorff spoke to me on the set. His film will have its world premiere at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in a couple of weeks. We discussed shooting in Berlin with Niels Arestrup and Stellan Skarsgård, connecting Sam Shepard to Max Frisch, Brooklyn author Colm Tóibín's Henry James in his novel The Master, Proust beyond Jeremy Irons in Swann In Love, shopping for clothes, Nina Hoss and Bronagh Gallagher at Lincoln Center, and what's in an affair.

Stellan Skarsgård, Mathias Sanders, Isioma Laborde-Edozien and Colm Tóibín - New York Public Library Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Return To Montauk, co-written by Tóibín, is the story of a writer, called Max Zorn (Skarsgård), who is married to Clara (Susanne Wolff). He comes to New York to promote his book and meets again,...

Fred Schepisi with Mary Schepisi, on casting Andorra: "Clive Owen, Joanna Lumley, Toni Collette, Gillian Anderson, and I can’t say the other names …" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Before the Universal Pictures and Working Title Films Bridget Jones’s Baby lunch with Renée Zellweger, Sharon Maguire, Helen Fielding, Eric Fellner, and Colin Firth at Lotos Club, there was a screening of the film arranged by Peggy Siegal at the Park Avenue Screening Room. When I arrived I noticed director/writer Fred Schepisi with his wife Mary.

Geoffrey Rush with Alexandra and Fred Schepisi for The Eye Of The Storm Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In 2012, Alexandra Schepisi, Geoffrey Rush and the filmmaker met me at The Regency Hotel in New York for a conversation on The Eye of The Storm. And last year, I saw him at the Monkey Bar reception for Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, starring Kate Winslet with Matthias Schoenaerts,...

Volker Schlöndorff directs cast and crew on Return to Montauk set Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When Volker Schlöndorff sent me the call sheet for his Return To Montauk shoot in New York City, we arranged a schedule for me to be on set to document the goings-on as he was filming at the New York Public Library and up at Lincoln Center. The film, co-written with Colm Tóibín, stars Stellan Skarsgård and Nina Hoss with Niels Arestrup, Susanne Wolff (Dominik Graf's Dreileben 2: Don't Follow Me Around), Isioma Laborde-Edozien, Mathias Sanders and Bronagh Gallagher (Alan Parker's The Commitments).

Stellan Skarsgård as Max Zorn Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Volker and I met at his hotel the day after he was shooting in the Financial District, for a conversation that led us to a quote from Thoreau, connecting Sam Shepard to Max Frisch, Colm Tóibín's Henry James in his novel The Master,...

Berlin is bringing a series of announcements, and a few have caught our eye. First, briefest, and probably of the greatest interest is Andrew Haigh‘s Lean on Pete, which BFI and Film4 are supporting while The Bureau Sales and Celluloid Dreams possess international distribution rights to. Production commences this summer on a film that, as we reported in May, adapts Willy Vlautin‘s novel and follows “15-year-old Charley as he embarks on a perilous journey in search of his long lost aunt and a possible home. Charley’s quest carries him from the horse-racing track at Portland Meadows, through the sagebrush of the Oregon desert, to the city streets of Denver, his sole companion the stolen racehorse Lean on Pete.”

Casting is underway, and it’s expected that the project will be complete by next spring.

Meanwhile, Variety tell us Volker Schlöndorff will partner Stellan Skarsgård and Nina Hoss...

Montauk Revisited

Director: Volker Schlöndorff

Writers: Volker Schlöndorff, Colm Toibin

New Wave German auteur Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum, 1979) is at work on another project, Montauk Revisited, an adaptation of a novel by Max Frisch. During publicity for his last feature, Diplomacy in late 2014, Schlondörff had mentioned Ralph Fiennes as the male lead in a film about two lovers who meet by chance in Paris and decide to return together to Montauk for the winter season. It looks as if Fiennes is no longer attached, but the German trades recently mentioned the item has been brought ‘before the camera,’ and was recently one of four projects at the German-French co-production meeting in Marseille. Most exciting of all to note is the casting of Nina Hoss (Barbara; Phoenix) in the female lead, with Danish actor Stellan Skarsgard replacing Fiennes.

Cast: Nina Hoss, Stellan Skarsgard

Production Co./Producers: Franco-German Funding Commission, Ziegler Film Project

U.

2016 marks the 25th anniversary of Wim Wenders' masterwork Until the End of the World. Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Sam Shepard's influence before he worked with Volker Schlöndorff on Max Frisch's Homo Faber (Voyager), Peter Carey and the script, Yasujiro Ozu actors Chishû Ryû and Kuniko Miyake, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Chen Kaige, Robby Müller and Vermeer, Yohji Yamamoto, Notebook on Cities and Clothes, Lord Byron and much more are inspected here.

Until The End Of The World stars Solveig Dommartin, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Jeanne Moreau, Rüdiger Vogler and Sam Neill and an extraordinary soundtrack featuring Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, U2, Julee Cruise, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed, Crime and the City Solution, Neneh Cherry, R.E.M., Patti Smith, Daniel Lanois, T-Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello, Jane Siberry, k.d. lang with uncredited performances by David Byrne with Talking Heads, Tom Waits...

Anne-Katrin Titze presents The Salt Of The Earth - IFC Center Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

On September 18, at 3:05pm, as part of the Wim Wenders: Portraits Along The Road in New York, film journalist Anne-Katrin Titze will present Wenders' and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado's The Salt Of The Earth on the life and work of master photographer Sebastião Salgado.

Sebastião Salgado could be John Ford looking out over the plains

In an upcoming conversation on Until The End Of The World, Wim and I discuss Sam Shepard's influence before he worked with Volker Schlöndorff on Max Frisch's Homo Faber. We also talk about Yasujiro Ozu actors Chishû Ryû and Kuniko Miyake, Alfred Hitchcock and San Francisco, Chen Kaige and China, Robby Müller and Vermeer, and look forward to Michael Almereyda's Experimenter.

Starring Solveig Dommartin, Max von Sydow, William Hurt, Jeanne Moreau, Rüdiger Vogler and Sam Neill,...

Diplomacy director Volker Schlöndorff with Anne-Katrin Titze at Lincoln Center on Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man: "Actually, I always compared Niels Arestrup to Philip Seymour Hoffman." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the 2014 Telluride Film Festival, Volker Schlöndorff was awarded the Silver Medallion and Diplomacy (Diplomatie), starring Niels Arestrup and André Dussollier was screened, as well as Billy, How Did You Do It? (Billy Wilder, Wie Haben Sie's Gemacht?) and Baal starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In New York, we discussed his adaptations from The Tin Drum by Günter Grass to Cyril Gely's play Diplomatie and dubbing Dustin Hoffman in German with Otto Sander in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman. Working with Sam Shepard on Voyager, Arestrup's correspondence with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man, Bertrand Tavernier's The French Minister and Ralph Fiennes' Max Frisch desires are explored.

Anne-Katrin Titze: As far as adaptations are concerned,...

Look Now! will release ThuleTuvalu [pictured] in Swiss cinemas in early 2014.

Zurich-based HesseGreutert Film has turned its attention to the highly topical issue of climate change for its new feature documentary production ThuleTuvalu, directed by Matthias von Gunten.

In the €870,000 production, Von Gunten visited Thule, the northernmost town in Greenland, where the ice is melting, and then travelled to the other side of the globe to the Pacific island state of Tuvalu which is slowly drowning in the rising sea.

Look Now!, which has released such documentaries as David Sieveking’s Vergiß Mein Nicht and Peter Liechti’s Vaters Garten this year, plans to release ThuleTuvalu in Swiss cinemas in early 2014.

HesseGreutert had also produced von Gunten’s previous film, the documentary project Max Frisch, Citoyen, which was also distributed by Look Now!

Producer Simon Hesse also told Screen that next year will also see the theatrical release of HesseGreutert’s production of Men Lareida’s feature debut, Viktoria...

Michael Haneke's unforgettable 2009 Palme d'Or winner is exact in its composition, yet allows for gentleness and humour

As the decade progressed, the reputation of this German-born Austrian director increased almost exponentially. His movies were difficult, extreme, painful and confrontational; yet a box-office smash with his surveillance nightmare Hidden took him out of the arthouse ghetto and in 2009 he won the Cannes Palme d'Or for this period movie made in black-and-white.

Set in a remote Protestant village of northern Germany in 1913, the film is about an outwardly placid rural community which is in fact repressive and plagued with anonymous acts of retaliatory malice and spite. The authorities clamp down further, and so the cycle goes on. There is no clear solution to the puzzle of who is carrying out these acts. The mystery simply deepens. But it is clear that the village children hold the key. We are witnessing the...

A superb and disturbing film, Michael Haneke's vision of pre-first world war Germany offers no easy answers. By Peter Bradshaw

The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety.

It has chilling brilliance and icy exactitude, filmed in black and white with the lustre of liquid nitrogen, and its director, Michael Haneke, achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity. He has created a film whose superb technical finish and closure seems to me in contrast to its status as an "open" text, a work which resists clear interpretation. It reminded me of the group-guilt dramas of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch, and also the 1980 novel Wie Deutsch Ist Es? by Walter Abish, in which the son of a 1944 anti-Hitler plotter,...

A superb and disturbing film, Michael Haneke's vision of pre-first world war Germany offers no easy answers. By Peter Bradshaw

The White Ribbon is a ghost story without a ghost, a whodunnit without a denouement, a historical parable without a lesson, and for two and a half hours, this unforgettably disturbing and mysterious film leads its viewers alongside an abyss of anxiety.

It has chilling brilliance and icy exactitude, filmed in black and white with the lustre of liquid nitrogen, and its director, Michael Haneke, achieves a new refinement of mastery and audacity. He has created a film whose superb technical finish and closure seems to me in contrast to its status as an "open" text, a work which resists clear interpretation. It reminded me of the group-guilt dramas of Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch, and also the 1980 novel Wie Deutsch Ist Es? by Walter Abish, in which the son of a 1944 anti-Hitler plotter,...

TOKYO -- Based on Max Frisch's best-seller ''Homo Faber'' (retitled ''Voyager'' for worldwide release), this seminal novel had been a property of Paramount Pictures ever since its appearance on the best-seller lists back in 1957. But when it was recently dropped, apparently on the supposition that its incest theme was too difficult to film, the book was immediately picked up by German director Volker Schloendorff.

Now one of the finalists in the ''Felix'' European Film Awards, ''Voyager'' also happens to be Schloendorff's best film since ''The Tin Drum'' (1977).

American playwright Sam Shepard plays 50-year-old Walter Faber, a self-made man who views himself as an architect of his own fortunes. As sketched by Frisch, he's a recognizable type of modern intellectual who stubbornly believes that he can control his own destiny, even when confronted by one unnerving coincidence after another while on an odyssey half-way around the world. Add to this the moral dilemma of a man unsuspectingly having an affair with his own daughter, and you have a provocative updating of Sophocles' ''Oedipus Rex'' theme.

Schloendorff, however, introduces two changes into the plot: He switches Faber's nationality and discards the stigma of his protagonist condemned to die of cancer.

So Walter Faber is an American engineer, instead of a Swiss one, who cruises the world in the employ of Unesco to inspect dams and construction sites.

Considering today's propensity for globetrotting, it doesn't really make much difference in the long run which nationality he is. But to strip Faber completely of moral responsibility by eliminating the cancer issue weakens the ending considerably.

Shot in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, France, Italy and Greece -- in addition to a trip across the Atlantic on an ocean liner --

''Voyager'' -- screened here as part of the Tokyo International Film Festival -- gets off to a strong start by depicting a crash-landing of the then new Super-Constellation aircraft in the Mexican desert. It's Faber's first brush with death, which in turn introduces the first coincidence that is about to change his life.

On the flight, he has met by chance a German passenger who turns out to be the brother of a long-lost friend of pre-World War II days. Since the friend had married the woman Faber once loved but abandoned for a career, the engineer decides to join his new companion on a journey to a plantation outpost in the South American jungle, where they discover that the friend and brother has committed suicide.

Back in New York, Faber decides to return to Europe by way of an ocean liner. This triggers the second coincidence: a chance meeting with a girl named Sabeth (Julie Delpy), who fascinates him and later turns out to be his daughter by the woman he once loved. Since the girl is on her way back from a student sojourn in the United States to rejoin her mother, Hanna (Barbara Sukowa), in Greece, the focus of the film hereafter is a conscious spiritual reworking of the Oedipus theme.

Shepard gives an even and convincing performance as the tired intellectual searching for a new meaning to his life. But it's young French actress Delpy -- a discovery of Jean-Luc Godard in his recent ''Lear'' adaptation -- who steals the show as the seductively carefree Sabeth.

German actress Sukowa as Hanna also offers an effective cameo, although her performance is unfortunately limited by its brevity. Otherwise, she well might have tied a lot of loose knots together to underscore the reasons why Frisch was fascinated by the modern-day plot possibilities offered by a timeless Sophoclean tragedy in the first place.

VOYAGER

(Germany-France-Greece)

Bioskop Film (Munich), in co-production with Action Film (Paris) and STEFI 2/Hellas Video (Athens)

Producer Eberhard Junkersdorf

Co-producer Klaus Hellwig

Director Volker Schloendorff

Screenplay Volker Schloendorff, Rudy Wurlitzer

Based on the novel by Max Frisch

Directors of photography Yorgos Arvanitis, Pierre L'Homme

Art director Nicos Perakis

Costumes Barbara Baum

Music Stanley Myers

Editor Dagmar Hirtz

Color/Black and white

Starring: Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy, Barbara Sukowa, Dieter Kirchlechner, Traci Lind, Deborah-Lee Furness, August Zirner

Running time -- 117 minutes

No MPAA rating

(c) The Hollywood Reporter...