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This fascinating and timely documentary about a collection of precious antiquities is full of dramatic twists and turns, and offers a microcosm of the current war

Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk’s exemplary documentary unpacks an utterly fascinating legal and ethical conundrum that’s simultaneously extremely timely and weirdly timeless. At the heart of the story is a collection of precious antiquities, the Crimean treasures of the title, some dating back thousands of years to the time of the Scythians. It couldn’t be a more timely story given how the Russia-Ukraine war heated up in Crimea just this past week with a bomb going off on the Kerch bridge, suggesting Crimea – forcibly seized by the Russians in 2014 – may once again become part of Ukraine. This film offers a microcosm of the whole conflict: a battle over identity, nationalism, sovereignty, language, international law, the sympathies of western nations and the EU.

The films are screening at this month’s Jersualem Film Festival.

Tokyo-based arthouse distributor Pandora has acquired Japanese rights to Daniel Raim’s feature documentary Fiddler’s Journey To The Big Screen from busy Jerusalem-based sales outfit Go2Films.

The film tells the story of how director Norman Jewison tunred the musical Fiddler On The Roof into a beloved hit feature film. Narrated by Jeff Goldblum, it includes interviews with Jewison as well as with star Topol, who played Tevye, the milkman protagonist, and the composer John Williams.

Fiddler’s Journey To The Big Screen is screening in the Cinemania section...

Organizers at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival (Cph:dox), which is going ahead in-person for the first time in three years, are taking a stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine with a dedicated program of seven specially curated films.

Spirits may be high in the Danish capital at the prospect of finally having a live event after two editions that were pushed online due to the Covid-19 pandemic but, as the fest’s artistic director Niklas Engstrøm stressed, “All our thoughts go to Ukraine and the many refugees who are currently being forced to leave their homeland.”

As the event’s programmer, Mads Mikkelsen, explained to Variety, organizers had already put together a selection of films from or about Ukraine when they closed the program in late January. “But, of course, everything changed on February 24 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Up to the last minute, we added more films...

Documentary festival expands programme in solidary with war-torn country.

Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Cph:dox) has made three late additions of Ukrainian films to its line-up, as a mark of solidarity with the war-torn nation.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan, Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue As An Orange and Alina Gorlova’s This Rain Will Never Stop have been added to the programme of the festival, which will return as an in-person event from March 23 to April 3.

It brings Cph:dox’s dedicated programme of films that focus on Ukraine to seven, having previously selected Olha Zhurba’s Outside, Simon Lereng Wilmont...

Pandastorm Pictures has taken German rights on Roman Shumunov’s Second World War doc-fiction.

Jerusalem-based sales agent Go2Films has closed a slew of EFM deals for Israeli director Roman Shumunov’s Second World War doc-fiction Berenshtein.

Pandastorm Pictures has taken German rights on the title while Fidelity Entertainment has swooped to nab the film for Poland.

Berenshtein is based on the true story of Leonid Berenshtein, the last surviving member of the great partisans who located Hitler’s secret weapon, the V2 missile development facility, as he revisits his past as a soldier in World War II. The film was produced for Kan 11,...

Jerusalem-based sales agent Go2Films has taken both worldwide rights (excluding North America) and Israeli distribution rights to “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen” by Oscar-nominated director Daniel Raim and narrated by Jeff Goldblum. Kino Lorber and Zeitgeist Films will handle North American distribution on the film, which follows the making of Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof.”

The film was meant to have its international premiere in the Official Selection of Palm Springs Film Festival, which was cancelled due to Covid-19. A new international premiere is currently being negotiated. The film will have its market premiere at the European Film Market, running Feb. 10-17.

Go2Films also confirmed it has already closed the first deal for the film ahead of the EFM, with Jiff set to release the film in Australia in November 2022. Israeli documentary channel yes will broadcast the film after its theatrical release in the country,...

Karim Kassem’s ‘Octopus’ won best film in the Envision Competition.

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s Mr Landsbergis has won the €15,000 best film award of the International Competition at International Documentary Film Fesival Amsterdam (IDFA) tonight (Thursday November 25).

The four-hour documentary is about inspirational Lithuanian political leader Vytautas Landsbergis, who led the country to freedom at the end of the Soviet era.The prize comes just six months after Loznitza’s other film of 2021, Babi Yar. Context, won the the Golden Eye Award.

“It is not easy to bring history to life. It is even more difficult to make it thrilling,...

Karim Kassem’s ‘Octopus’ won best film in the Envision Competition.

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitza’s Mr Landsbergis has won the €15,000 best film award of the International Competition at International Documentary Film Fesival Amsterdam (IDFA) tonight (Thursday November 25).

The four-hour documentary is about inspirational Lithuanian political leader Vytautas Landsbergis, who led the country to freedom at the end of the Soviet era.The prize comes just six months after Loznitza’s other film of 2021, Babi Yar. Context, won the the Golden Eye Award.

“It is not easy to bring history to life. It is even more difficult to make it thrilling,...

Oeke Hoogendijk’s film is premiering in the Envision competition.

In an early deal at IDFA, Jerusalem-based Go2 Films has snapped up both worldwide sales rights and Israeli distribution right to Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk’s Housewitz(Thuiswitz), a world premiere this weekend in IDFA’s Envision Competition.

The documentary focuses on Hoogendijk’s mother, Lous, a Holocaust survivor who hasn’t left her house for decades. She has a recurring nightmare in which she doesn’t know how to get home, just like the day when as a Jewish girl she was deported.

“Go2 is very known for picking...

In the alluring art-world documentary “My Rembrandt,” someone describes the experience of being in sudden, direct proximity to a Rembrandt portrait of a standing figure. He says that it was spooky, like seeing a live human loom right up in front of him. Rembrandt, who painted images of astonishing dark tactile severity, was the mesmeric psychologist of the Old Masters. When you look at one of his paintings, the face it shows is so specific, so lived-in, so there that we seem to be peering directly into the soul of the person it depicts. “My Rembrandt” is a documentary that revels, as any good Rembrandt documentary should, in the extraordinarily subtle majesty with which Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, who lived from 1606 to 1669, teased out the living essence of those he painted.

Yet the movie is also about money, power, and the elusive mystique of “value.” The Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk...

A trip into the museum world that’s far more fun than his last — a grueling, four-hour look at the troubled renovation of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum — Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt speaks with some of the very few people to whom that phrase applies. Not just directors of institutions, but, for instance, an ordinary Joe (okay, one of Europe’s leading landowners) who happens to have a Rembrandt hanging over his fireplace. (And it’s a great one.) The subjects are the rich old dudes you’d expect — and boy, are they white — but these are hardly the ...

A trip into the museum world that’s far more fun than his last — a grueling, four-hour look at the troubled renovation of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum — Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt speaks with some of the very few people to whom that phrase applies. Not just directors of institutions, but, for instance, an ordinary Joe (okay, one of Europe’s leading landowners) who happens to have a Rembrandt hanging over his fireplace. (And it’s a great one.) The subjects are the rich old dudes you’d expect — and boy, are they white — but these are hardly the ...

To mark the release of My Rembrandt, out now, we’ve been given 3 copies to give away on DVD.

Aristocrats cherish, experts rule, art dealers hunt, collectors crave and museums battle for Rembrandt. 350 years after the grand master of intimacy’s death, entire nations are more than ever obsessed with his paintings. Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk, My Rembrandt is an epic art thriller into the super exclusive world of the Old Masters collectors.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

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Open to UK residents only The competition will close 28th September 2020 at 23.59 GMT The winner will be picked at random from entries received No cash alternative is available Please note prizes may be delayed due to Covid-19 To coincide with Gdpr regulations, competition entry information will not be stored once the competition has ended and the winners have been chosen and prizes sent out.

Indie titles hoping to capitalise on blockbuster absence.

UK-Ireland, opening Friday August 14

Picturehouse Entertainment heads the new titles this weekend with Shannon Murphy’s Australian comedy-drama Babyteeth in 140 locations.

The debut feature of theatre and TV drama director Murphy played in Competition at Venice last year, where Toby Wallace won the Marcello Mastroianni award for emerging actor/actress. It most recently won the top prize at the 19th Transylvania International Film Festival last weekend.

Adapted by Rita Kalnejais from her stage play of the same name, the film centres on Milla (Eliza Scanlen), a seriously ill teenager, who falls in...

The super-rich collectors and dealers in Oeke Hoogendijk’s amusing documentary come right out of Rembrandt paintings themselves

When regular art lovers talk about “my Rembrandt”, they’re talking about what Rembrandt means to them. But when super-rich people use the phrase, it means something quite different. Oeke Hoogendijk’s bracing and amusing documentary is about high-stakes shenanigans in the art market involving seriously minted Rembrandt fanciers. It features an awful lot of very rich, clever, cordially self-satisfied collectors and connoisseurs; their pink, twinkly-eyed faces positively beam out of the screen, and surely Hoogendijk is inviting us to wonder how Rembrandt himself would have painted them.

In Scotland, the Duke of Buccleuch has invited someone from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum to advise him on the rehanging of his prize possession: Old Woman Reading (1655). Did the Dutch visitor hope that His Grace might therefore loan this exquisite painting to the Rijksmuseum? If so,...

As the mercury soared, collections plummeted as the heatwave across England took its toll on the U.K. and Ireland box office over the weekend.

Russell Crowe’s “Unhinged,” released by Altitude Film Distribution, retained the box office crown with a weekend gross of £117,633, a decline of 34% from last week, despite increasing screen count from 243 to 270, according to final numbers from Comscore.

Meanwhile, Disney holdover “Onward” dropped 21%, earning £46,576 from 245 sites. In third place, Vertigo’s Australian animation “100% Wolf” surged 28% to collect £42,500 from 259 sites.

Seth Rogen’s “An American Pickle,” released by Warner Bros, debuted in fourth position with £27,732 from 162 sites.

Vertigo’s supernatural title “The Vigil” dropped from fifth to ninth place with £16,012 from 177 sites. The rest of the chart was dominated by re-releases, including “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Greatest Showman,” “Jurassic Park” and the extended version of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The documentary has also sold to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Norway.

Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk’s feature documentary My Rembrandt, which is on Cinephil’s virtual Cannes slate, has achieved multiple sales.

Strand Releasing (Us/Canada), Dogwoof (UK/Ireland), Unplugged (Japan), JinJin Pictures (South Korea), Tour de Force (Norway) and Swallow Wings (Taiwan) have all boarded the film, whose Dutch release through CineArt in the Netherlands this spring was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic after 10 days.

The film, a world premiere at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam last November, is an exploration of the passions still roused by...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer to “My Rembrandt,” directed by Oeke Hoogendijk, which has its world premiere on Sunday in the Masters section of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa).

The film is set in the world of the art market for paintings by the Dutch Old Master. While art collectors such as Eijk and Rose-Marie De Mol van Otterloo, the American Thomas Kaplan and the Scottish Duke of Buccleuch show us their special connection with “their” Rembrandt, French baron Eric de Rothschild puts two Rembrandts up for sale, triggering a tough political battle between the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre.

The film also follows aristocratic Dutch art dealer Jan Six as he seems to be on the trail of not just one but two “new” Rembrandt paintings. This nerve-wrecking journey of discovery seems to be the realization of his biggest boyhood dream. But when he is...

Pictured: Louise Detlefsen and Louise Kjeldsen’s “Fat Front,” about a rebellious movement started by plus-sized women in Scandinavia, world premieres at Idfa.

Danish documentarian Jørgen Leth, whose 1967 short “The Perfect Human” inspired fellow countryman Lars Von Trier as a film student, will be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at Idfa this year. The prolific 82-year-old, based in Haiti, is just one of a number of non-fiction heavyweights to be celebrated at the Amsterdam festival, which will also offer posthumous tributes to Agnes Varda and D.A. Pennebaker, who passed away this year.

Under festival director Orwa Nyrabia, in his second year, Idfa continues to focus on directors from emerging territories as well as films dealing with pressing contemporary issues. In the Frontlight section, Claudia Sparrow’s “Maxima” deals with a Peruvian farmer forced to defend her land against the gold-mining industry; Jia Yuchuan’s “The Two Lives of Li Ermao...

Other winners include hit Us podcast Serial.

Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War has won the Vpro Idfa Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary.

The trophy, which comes with a cash prize of €12,500, was handed out in Amsterdam’s Compagnietheater at the awards ceremony of the 27th Idfa.

The French-Swiss co-production is about a group of American Iraq veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Director Bécue-Renard followed the group for many years during therapy sessions in a clinic for veterans.

A statement from the jury said the film “confronts us with our fragility as human beings, revealing that we must treat each other with gentleness and love. In a way that is never intrusive, the camera participates in therapy sessions for traumatized veterans. (…) A more powerful anti-war film is hard to imagine.”

In addition, the special jury award was a given to Something Better to Come (Denmark / Poland) by Hanna Polak, who for 14 years...

Film-makers seem intrigued by the secret life of museums. There are a number of recent documentaries about the inner workings of these institutions. Eighty-four-year-old American auteur Frederick Wiseman, who will receive a Lifetime Achievement award at next week’s Venice Film Festival, has just made a three hour film about London’s National Gallery. Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk spent a full decade chronicling the multi-million pound renovation of Amsterdam’s celebrated Rijksmuseum for her epic TV series and feature doc, The New Rijksmuseum. Margy Kinmonth’s Hermitage Revealed, which tells the long and tumultuous story of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, will be in British cinemas in early September.

On April 13, 2013, Amsterdam’s massive Rijksmuseum finally reopened its doors after hundreds of millions of Euros spent over ten years of construction, renovation, contract disputes, staff resignations and protestations about access for cyclists. The reopening was an unqualified success, with The Economist calling it a “New Golden Age.” That roundabout road to reopening, however, was paved with seemingly endless setbacks and uncertainties, and the troubled renovation risked national embarrassment for The Netherlands. Watching Oeke Hoogendijk’s sprawling documentary The New Rijksmuseum in its full four-part, four-hour cut, the task at hand often feels like one that may never be completed. And that’s exactly what makes the documentary so engrossing. The film gives immediate access to the experience of the renovation amongst an epic cast of characters, from museum directors to site caretakers to cycling activists to restoration artists. Often, even from the benefit of the present, it seems that the fruits of such incredibly ambitious labor...

Clocking in at nearly four hours over several discrete parts, Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum details the taxing decade-long process of renovating the iconic Amsterdam art museum, home to many of the key works of the Dutch masters, that became an operatic civic brouhaha. First, the reconstruction of a central entranceway draws the ire of the city’s politically powerful bicyclists lobby, which is opposed to a partial obstruction of the central pathway that runs through the center of the museum’s ground floor that is an extremely popular thoroughfare for the bike riding hordes. The safety of the 13,000 bikes that […]...

Clocking in at nearly four hours over several discrete parts, Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum details the taxing decade-long process of renovating the iconic Amsterdam art museum, home to many of the key works of the Dutch masters, that became an operatic civic brouhaha. First, the reconstruction of a central entranceway draws the ire of the city’s politically powerful bicyclists lobby, which is opposed to a partial obstruction of the central pathway that runs through the center of the museum’s ground floor that is an extremely popular thoroughfare for the bike riding hordes. The safety of the 13,000 bikes that […]...

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam — presenter of 8,000 art objects and home to over 1 million, most famously Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642) — began renovations in 2005.

The new space was supposed to be completed by 2008, but work dragged out into 2013. Oeke Hoogendijk's documentary The New Rijksmuseum, filmed during the much-delayed, budget-blowing process, tells its story in two parts, which Film Forum will screen together twice daily for one ticket price.

The first tracks initial setbacks and frustrations, ending with pensive Rijksmuseum General Director Ronald de Leeuw's resignation; the second depicts the renovation efforts following the subsequent appointment of aggress...