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Amat Escalante is a Mexican filmmaker whose cinema dares to dwell in spaces most would rather avert their gaze from. Emerging in the early 2000s, Escalante has built a body of work marked by sparse dialogue, clinical detachment, and unsettling intimacy. His characters often exist on the margins — working-class, voiceless, and wounded — and his camera observes them not with sentimentality, but with a precise and unsparing eye.

Early in his career, Escalante worked closely with fellow Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas, serving as an assistant director on “Batalla en el Cielo” (2005). Reygadas would later co-produce Escalante’s debut feature “Sangre,” and their shared cinematic sensibilities — long takes, non-professional actors, and existential brutality — continue to resonate across both bodies of work.

Escalante’s first short film, “Amarrados” (2002), shot in black and white with handheld urgency, introduces a homeless child sniffing glue to numb the pangs of hunger and trauma. From this earliest effort,...

The Cannes Film Festival has put together a powerful jury for its 78th edition, including Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong (“The Apprentice”) and Payal Kapadia, the Indian filmmaker of “All We Imagine as Light.”

Mixing actors, filmmakers and authors, the jury will also comprise of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo; Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher; French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani; Congolese director, documentarist and producer Dieudo Hamadi; and Mexican filmmaker and producer Carlos Reygadas. As previously announced, Juliette Binoche will preside over the jury, succeeding Greta Gerwig who handed out the Palme d’Or to Sean Baker’s “Anora.”

Both Strong and Kapadia were at Cannes last year, in competition. Strong presented Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice” in which he starred as Roy Cohn, while Kapadia was there with her fiction debut, “All We Imagine as Light” which won the Grand Prize.

Berry became the first African-American woman to win best actress at...

Mubi’s May 2025 selection has arrived, featuring a Rooney Mara double-bill of perhaps her best film (Carol) and most recent effort (La cocina), Cannes-selected Latin American cinema, and a program curated by Magic Farm‘s Amalia Ulman.

As Kent M. Wllhelm said of Magic Farm in his review, “I was sold on the premise of satirizing opportunistic content creators who play dress-up as journalists, but weaving that into the storylines of the ensemble cast is no easy task for a sophomore feature. The plot gets lost; when it feels like there’s too much going on, nothing gets to shine. There’s nevertheless fun to be had in Magic Farm; importantly, Ulman’s voice and perspective are what stick with you after the credits roll. It’s encouraging to see a young director experiment, venturing into new narrative and stylistic territory.”

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

Mexican costume designer Anna Terrazas says the uniqueness of Albuquerque, New Mexico helped her understand the “essence” of Ari Aster’s upcoming Eddington.

Speaking to Screen after her masterclass at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra lab, Terrazas said, “I sent Ari a huge amount of research, and a lot of things did work; but the essence wasn’t truly there. So I had to arrive to Albuquerque [where the film shot] and go out to the streets and towns, just to see what was happening – that place is unique.”

“If people describe it to you, it’s not the same,” said Terrazas. “You...

Flóra Anna Buda, Andrea Gatopoulos, Xiwen Cong, Simon Maria Kubiena, Constance Tsang and Rodrigo Ribeyro have been named as the latest cohort of emerging directors to participate in the Cannes Film Festival’s La Résidence initiative, which is now in its 49th edition.

The six filmmakers are being hosted in the program’s residency in the Pigalle neighborhood of Paris, from March 15 to July 31, where they are benefiting from personalized screenwriting support and a collective program of meetings with film professionals.

Hungary’s Buda made waves in 2023 with her animated short film 27, which won the Cannes Palme d’or for best short, and then the Cristal Award at the Annecy Festival in 2023.

Italian and Greek director, producer and distributor Gatopoulos’s most recent work, the short film The Eggregores’ Theory, opened the 39th Venice Film Critics’ Week and made history as one of the first AI films to show in the sidebar.

Horror’s Greatest makes a comeback with a second season filled with exciting episodes for horror fans hungry for more horror films to see in 2025. This season's episodes include “Animal Attacks”, “Killer Dates”, “Hidden Gems”, “Film Scores”, and “Space Horror”. Showrunner Kurt Sayenga brings to this season new perspectives to horror classics like The Birds and Carrie, to lesser-known frights like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Ghostwatch, with several on-camera interviewees, including myself.

Sayenga shares with us how he developed the themes of the episodes, what new films he discovered through this season, the impact of film scores in horror cinema, and what he hopes audiences will take away from the series.

Bonilla: How would you describe the theme of this season?

Kurt Sayenga: This season takes the general idea of Horror’s Greatest and expands upon it, taking it into places that show the flexibility of the concept. The general umbrella...

Amat Escalante’s “Lost in the Night” (Original title: Perdidos en la noche) is driven towards an exploration of guilt, regret, and morality. It skewers the class divides rampant as they are in its setting of Mexico. Across the rural space, the markers of denomination, hierarchies of privilege, and exclusion are starkly evident. As the less-endowed strike out against injustice and exploitation, down comes a brutal hammer. It’s a morally murky quagmire Escalante depicts, hinting at a worldview refusing to trade in clear-cut binaries. The bad guys express remorse, and the good one who has the right on their side don’t always do morally favorable things.

Escalante surprises, especially since the thematic terrain of class conflicts is a well-trod one. So, he genuflects on the characterization, amping up unexpected discoveries and realizations shifting across a morally nebulous spectrum. No person is wholly avaricious, they have quite a few redeeming qualities.

As Ventana Sur settles into its stride in its first edition in Montevideo, Uruguay, Screen highlights 10 projects expected to make a splash at the leading Ibero-American audiovisual market.

The titles are at various stages in the production cycle and the filmmakers are in Montevideo looking to establish meaningful partnerships.

Selections include stories of vampires grappling with transformation, quests, coming-of-age stories, coastal erosion, and a project from the inaugural Latam Series Market.

Ventana Sur runs through December 6.

The Condor Daughter (Bol-Per-Uru)

Section: Copia Final

Director: Álvaro Olmos

The Condor Daughter marks the second fiction feature from Olmos, who has directed documentary and television,...

Acclaimed Mexican editor-turned-director Natalia López Gallardo, whose directorial debut feature “Robe of Gems” won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2022, is currently developing her second feature, “Only Love Exists.” The contemporary drama about intertwining digital and real lives will pitch in the Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival.

“Only Love Exists” is the story of Teresa, a medical assistant who cares for patients in her work and engages with the fears and desires of others on the internet. Over time, the virtual world starts to encroach into her real life as Teresa indulges more and more in her own desires somewhere on the border of the two dimensions.

After a brush with death, Teresa becomes more acutely aware of the physical world around her, where beauty and oppression coexist, the synopsis says. Through the act of caring for a friend, Teresa begins a journey of salvation.

Cannes film festival

A thoroughly implausible yarn about a Mexican cartel leader who hires a lawyer to arrange his transition is carried along by its cheesy Broadway energy

Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.

Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer...

Sovereign is proud to announce that award-winning Mexican director Amat Escalante’s powerful thriller Lost In The Night received its UK premiere at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival, as part of the ‘Thrill’ section, and now the film is available to rent/buy on Amazon Prime Video in the UK.

From acclaimed Mexican director Amat Escalante, following Heli, for which he won Best Director at Cannes in 2013, and The Untamed, which won him the Best Director prize at Venice in 2016, comes Lost In The Night, a taut, engrossing thriller that blends traditional elements of Latin American cinema with astute social commentary on Mexican society and contemporary influencer culture.

The film, which premiered at Cannes this year, stars Juan Daniel García Treviño (Narcos México), and Latin American influencer superstar Ester Expósito, who has 27 million followers, and features a superb score by Stranger Things composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein.

The film...

Two Spanish female stars who have broken out to huge global audiences in Netflix hits – “Nowhere” and “A Perfect Story” lead Anna Castillo and Ester Expósito, highly prominent in “Elite” in early seasons – are set to star in dramedic vampire thriller “Death to Love,” (“Que muera el amor”), the first series created by “Piggy” director Carlota Pereda, who will also serve as its showrunner.

“If there are two actresses you can believe are immortals, with their out-of-this-world allure and talent, it’s Anna and Ester. I can’t wait to explore this world of darkness, joy and Eternal Love with them,” Pereda told Variety.

With that talent package, and the backing of two Spanish powerhouse producers, Morena Films and Buendía Estudios, “Death to Love” is shaping up as one of the hottest packages to come to market from Spain after it emerged from February’s Berlinale Series Market as one...

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.

Africans with Mainframes (Kima Hibbert)

What if electronic music was invented in the 1920s by Black sharecroppers in the American South? That’s the premise of Kima Hibbert’s debut short, in which a reclusive blogger uncovers a major conspiracy surrounding the origins of electronic music.

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

Bottoms (Emma Seligman)

It’s beginning to feel like South By Southwest is the Rachel Sennott Festival. After breaking out there three years ago with Shiva Baby (the movie premiered as a short in 2018 and would have again as a feature in 2020 if not for the pandemic), she made waves last year in Austin with sleeper horror hit Bodies Bodies Bodies. Now Sennott’s back with Bottoms, one of two...

Night Moves: Escalante Cultivates a Moody, Capricious Mystery

Replete with a slew of customary features encountered in a fatalistic film noir, Amat Escalante’s fifth feature, Perdidos en la noche (Lost in the Night), begins with a missing woman and then splinters off into unexpected directions. Part of the film’s intrigue is in how it resists our expectations, embracing Escalante’s penchant for corruption and nihilism but not without a sense of salvation. While the film’s narrative has more in common with Escalante’s Heli (2013) than his extravagantly perverse The Untamed (2016), it’s a genre film with a mind of it’s own, even if it resists a gratifying sense of catharsis.…...

Seven years after his mesmerizing sci-fi drama on extraterrestrial sex, “The Untamed,” genre-defying Mexican auteur Amat Escalante switches gears once again to try his hand at a sharp-edged, quasi-detective story with “Lost in the Night.” His approach expectedly deviates from a straightforward whodunit. Escalante rejects both simplified villainy and stainless heroism, crafting individuals with clear motivations who never stop to consider their actions through a moral filter. The result is an at times jarring but always intriguing enigma that escapes facile classification, especially because it tends to veer into absurdism.

In just a handful of years since his breakout role in Fernando Frías de la Parra’s “I’m No Longer Here,” Juan Daniel García Treviño has become a familiar face in Mexican cinema, usually playing a member of a criminal organization. Here, Escalante pushes against such typecasting and places him on the righteous side of the fence, as Emiliano, a...

Clockwise from top left: X (A24), Everything Everywhere All At Once (A24), Mea Culpa (Netflix)Image: The A.V. Club

This February, Netflix adds a Best Picture Oscar winner, a Ti West horror movie with a sequel arriving later this year, and Tyler Perry’s latest movie. The surreal Everything Everywhere All At Once...

Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, will be among those taking part in on-stage talks at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which runs Jan. 25 to Feb. 4.

Harry narrates the latest film by Amanda Kramer, “So Unreal,” an essay-documentary about the relationships between cinema, humanity and technology. On Jan. 27, the two will give an IFFR Talk discussing their work as artists with distinctive esthetics whose careers have developed across film and music.

As previously announced, other speakers in the IFFR Talk program include actor Sandra Hüller, and directors Anne Fontaine, Marco Bellocchio, Bill Plympton and Billy Woodberry.

Directors attending with their titles in the Limelight section, which is for films from established filmmakers, include Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante with “Lost in the Night,” Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland with “Green Border” and Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania with “Four Daughters,” which is shortlisted for an Oscar.

Fontaine will attend the world premiere of her 19th feature film,...

Sexy horror movies have been around since the early days of cinema, pushing boundaries with carnality and carnage. The best sexy horror movies blend sensuality and shock, using sex and desire as a source of horror. From strange intimate encounters to erotic tension, these movies deliver on both scare factor and suggestive content.

Despite the genre's focus on the morbid, macabre, and menacing, there are dozens of sexy Horror movies, with the best masterfully blending the terrifying with the titillating. Scariness and sexuality make surprisingly comfortable bedfellows, and there have been horror movies that blend the eerie with the erotic since the dawn of cinema. Whether it was Fay Wray having her blouse suggestively ripped in the 1933 monster-flick King Kong or Greta Schröder in her nightdress in 1922's Nosferatu, horror has always pushed boundaries with carnality just as much as carnage. Some of the first non-adult movies to include nudity were horror films,...

Disney opens animation ‘Wish’; indie titles include ‘The Eternal Daughter’, ‘Girl’.

Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon becomes the widest release ever in the UK and Ireland for Sony, starting in 716 cinemas this weekend.

The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the early 19th century French leader, tops the 690-location opening of Whitney Houston biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody from December 2022.

Written by David Scarpa – who previously collaborated with Scott on All The Money In The World – Napoleon tells the story of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power, and his relationship with Empress Josephine, played in the film...

Roberts and Hawke’s weekend getaway starts to go wrong when two mysterious strangers appear at the door. Then things get weirder

Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke star in this glossy, Shyamalan-level-10 apocalypto-paranoid conspiracy thriller, adapted from the 2020 bestseller by Rumaan Alam. It’s an example of a growing tendency in the movies: baggy, lengthy, episodic pictures which are starting to split the difference between feature film items and streaming TV. Amat Escalante’s Mexican thriller Lost in the Night is, I think, another example of this tendency: films that go on for a while and, like a shaggy-dog story, leave things open for the possibility of getting recommissioned for season two.

Roberts and Hawke play Amanda and Clay, well-off Brooklynites with two teen children; she’s a cynical ad exec, he’s a laidback humanities college professor. On a whim, they decide to take a luxurious weekend...

Amat Escalante brings great intensity to this story of a young man seeking out the truth of his mother’s disappearance, but the point gets rather lost

Amat Escalante is the Mexican film-maker who created the brutal and politically engaged crime drama Heli in 2013, for which he won the best director award in Cannes, and in 2016 the deeply strange body horror parable The Untamed which was a prizewinner at Venice. Now, after a stint on the streaming TV drama Narcos: Mexico he has directed and co-written this contorted Lynchian melodrama about Mexico’s corruption, cynicism and indifference, and all the secrets and lies that bloat the country’s ruling classes.

Lost in the Night concerns what may be the corpse of a woman buried in the grounds of a super-rich family and in this respect it rather resembles Robe of Gems from Natalia López Gallardo, who like Escalante has worked with Carlos Reygadas.

Mubi Podcast: Encuentros returns for a fifth season.The first episode features:Lois Patiño (Spain), visual artist and filmmaker. Her experimental and contemplative feature and short films have been screened at venues such as the Directors Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, and Ficunam. His debut feature Costa da morte won the award for Best Director in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at Locarno and, more recently, Samsara, his third feature, won the Special Jury Prize in the Encounters section at the Berlinale.Natalia López Gallardo (Bolivia-México), editor, actress and director. She has edited films such as Heli, by Amat Escalante; Jauja, by Lisandro Alonso, and Silent Light (Luz silenciosa) by Carlos Reygadas, for which she was nominated for an Ariel Award. She made her directorial debut in 2006 with her short film En el cielo como en la tierra, presented in Rotterdam, and 17 years later, her first feature film...

From the very onset with his feature debut Sangre (2005), filmmaker Amat Escalante has proposed a cinema of provocation that simultaneously critiques corruption and violence, and culminates in disheartening statistics (and tragedy) for his adoptive Mexico. For his fifth feature film, Escalante leans on the some of the same matter but as explored with 2016’s The Untamed, he is “mining” within entirely new genre blueprints. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in the Premieres section, Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la Noche) delves into moral consciousness while navigating a landscape tainted by corruption, and is once again rooted on the ever-changing dynamics shifting social class paradigms.…...

Evil Does Not Exist Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist was announced as the winner of the main competition at the BFI London Film Festival.

The latest film from the Drive My Car director centres on a camping development at a village. The jury, headed by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, said: “Subtle, cinematic and underscored by fully realised performances, Hamaguchi’s assured drama supersedes the sum of its parts. It is both a lyrical portrait of family and community, and a nuanced consideration of the ethics of land development.

The Sutherland award for best first feature went to Mika Gustafson for Paradise Is Burning, which follows three sisters fending for themselves after being left home alone. The Grierson Award for best documentary was taken home by Bye Bye Tiberias, directed by Lina Soualem, which explores the filmmaker's relationship with her actor mum Hiam Abbas.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” was named the best film in the official competition at this year’s BFI London Film Festival Awards.

“Paradise Is Burning” by Mika Gustafson received the Sutherland Award in the first feature competition, while Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias” took home the Grierson Award in the documentary competition and “The Archive: Queer Nigerians” directed by Simisolaoluwa Akande won the short film competition.

The jury presidents for this year’s awards included Amat Escalante (official competition), Raine Allen-Miller (first feature competition), Rubika Shah (documentary competition) and Charlotte Regan (short film competition).

In its official statement on selecting “Evil Does Not Exist” as best film, the jury said: “Subtle, cinematic and underscored by fully realised performances, Hamaguchi’s assured drama supersedes the sum of its parts. It is both a lyrical portrait of family and community, and a nuanced consideration of the ethics of land development.

Voting for audience awards is now open.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s environmental drama Evil Does Not Exist has won the best film award in official competition at the BFI London Film Festival (Lff), which closed today (October 15).

A statement from the competition jury read, “Subtle, cinematic and underscored by fully realised performances, Hamaguchi’s assured drama supersedes the sum of its parts.

“It is both a lyrical portrait of family and community, and a nuanced consideration of the ethics of land development. Amidst a strong competition the jury is unanimous in our admiration!.”

Scroll down for the full list of winners...

Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi has clinched the best film award in the main official competition of the 67th London Film Festival with his latest feature, Evil Does Not Exist.

The enigmatic pic is Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Drive My Car and follows young father Takumi and his daughter, Hana, who live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. A plan to construct a glamping site near Takumi’s house, offering city residents a comfortable “escape” to nature, threatens to endanger the ecological balance of the area and the local people’s way of life.

The festival jury, headed by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante (Lost in the Night), alongside Kate Taylor, program director of the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and English novelist Niven Govinden (Diary of a Film), described Evil Does Not Exist as “subtle” and “cinematic.

Trojan Women: Lopez Crafts Collage of Complicity in Stellar Debut

For her directorial debut Robe of Gems (Manto de gemas), Natalia López Gallardo resists expectations in a chilly narrative of complex intersections. Heretofore celebrated as the editor of critically revered titles from Amat Escalante, Lisandro Alonso and her partner Carlos Reygadas (with whom she co-starred in the underrated 2018’s Our Time – read review), Lopez’s stylistic choices remain self-evident, but there’s an almost harsh reticence in how she continually undermines not only a certain arthouse convention, but the inherent apathy of those balanced precariously in this world on a wire.…...

Film Preservation

India’s Film Heritage Foundation (Fhf), which enjoys the support of cinema greats Martin Scorsese and Amitabh Bachchan, is conducting the third edition of the Biennial Audio-Visual Archival Summer School in partnership with the International Federation of Film Archives. The global film preservation training workshop is coming to India for the first time and will be held at the India International Centre in Delhi Oct. 10–19.

Fhf founder Shivendra Singh Dungarpur said that the final selection of some 50 participants, from 13 African countries, Asia, Europe, Australia, South and North America reaffirms the organization’s goal to “create a worldwide network of film archivists who can work together to save their film heritage around the globe.”

Scorsese said: “The World Cinema Project is committed to locating, preserving and distributing films from all over the world. A program like Bavass benefits this mission enormously by educating future film preservationists who can share...

Escalante will head the competition jury while Allen-Miller will preside over first feature

Filmmakers Amat Escalante, Raine Allen-Miller and Rubika Shah will preside over the competition juries for the 67th BFI London Film Festival.

Escalante, the Mexican director whose credits include 2013’s Heli and 2016’s The Untamed, will head the official competition jury where he is joined by Kate Taylor, programme director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and author Niven Govinden.

The Mexican director’s latest feature Lost In The Night made its debut in Cannes Premiere earlier this year and is also screening in the Lff Thrills strand.

With the 67th BFI London Film Festival gearing up to start on Oct. 4, the juries for the various competitions have been named.

Leading the official competition jury is acclaimed Mexican director, producer and screenwriter Amat Escalante, who won the best director honor at the 2013 edition of the Cannes Film Festival for Heli and the Silver Lion for the best director in Venice in 2016 for The Untamed. Escalante’s latest feature, Lost in the Night, is playing in the London Film Festival’s Thrill Strand.

Joining Escalante on the main jury are Kate Taylor, program director of the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Niven Govinden, the English novelist and author of Diary of a Film.

The films in the official competition that the trio will be judging include:

Baltimore, Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor

Dear Jassi, Tarsem Singh Dhandwar)

Europa, Sudabeh Mortezai

Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Fingernails, Christos Nikou

Gasoline Rainbow,...

‘The Madigan Chronicles’ Optioned By Particle6

Mystical book series The Madigan Chronicles is to be turned into a TV series by UK indie Particle6 Productions. Particle6 has acquired the rights to Marieke Lexmond’s six-book series, which includes the likes of The Dagger, The Magical Tarot Deck and The Wand. The books tell the story of three generations of headstrong witches and their struggle to work together to keep a centuries-old promise and stop a dark witch from claiming a powerful elemental object. While a pilot is being penned for The Dagger, Particle6 is taking a unique approach to the deal by seeking to drive further demand for the IP by creating viral TikTok videos and by developing Magical Spell necklaces, which will be promoted via social media. “Particle6 is big on testing and analytics, and we always work hard to identify the right audience for every project,” said Eline van der Velden,...

Largely known as a film editor for having worked with partner Carlos Reygadas on 2007 masterwork Silent Light and with further collaborations with the likes Amat Escalante, Daniel Castro Zimbrón and Lisandro Alonso, it’s after several years in development (film market murmurs it was known as Supernova), Natalia López Gallardo unveiled her sensory-filled feature debut Robe of Gems (Manto de Gemas) at the 2022 Berlinale — where she walked away with the Jury Prize Silver Bear.

Per our review – Gallardo “focuses on how class, privilege and social status tend to evaporate when the women connecting her narrative dare to employ any real sense of agency, highlighting their often chilling relationship to a power structure which demands their complicity.…...

More than 200 international filmmakers have rallied in support of ousted Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian, pledging their names to an open letter imploring the cultural organization to keep the artist director in place. Among the first signatories were Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Joanna Hogg, “Corsage” director Marie Kreutzer, Andrew Ross Perry, and Olivier Assayas. Over the course of the day on Wednesday, another 130 directors joined them, the list swelling to include M. Night Shyamalan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tilda Swinton, and Claire Denis. 260 filmmakers have now signed the open letter.

“We, a diverse group of filmmakers from all over the world, who have deep respect for Berlin International Film Festival as a place for great cinema of all kinds, protest the harmful, unprofessional, and immoral behavior of state minister Claudia Roth in forcing the esteemed Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian to step down despite promises to prolong his contract,” says the letter.

Chatrian...

The London Film Festival on Thursday completed its lineup, unveiling its full slate of headline galas and special presentations after previously setting its competition program.

Among the movies getting new headline galas are the world premiere of Jeymes Samuel’s The Book of Clarence and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. The special presentations include the likes of The Boy and the Heron from anime legend Hayao Miyazaki, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, and Priscilla from Sofia Coppola.

Among the filmmakers returning to Lff are also such big names as Martin Scorsese, Yorgos Lanthimos, Sally El Hosaini, Jonathan Glazer, Steve McQueen, Michel Gondry, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Aki Kaurismäki, Hirokazu Koreeda, Amat Escalante, Ladj Ly, Alex Gibney, and Frederick Wiseman.

The fest, which runs Oct. 4-15, said it will present a “compelling and diverse” program of films, shorts, series, and immersive works from 92 countries, featuring 79 languages, across its 12 days. “This includes 99 works made by...

Sovereign has acquired the U.K. and Ireland rights to Radu Jude’s latest feature, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” which won the special jury prize at Locarno Film Festival.

Written and directed by Jude, the comedy stars Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Dorina Lazăr, László Miske, Katia Pascariu and Sofia Nicolaescu, with cameos from Nina Hoss and Uwe Boll. According to its official synopsis, the film follows an overworked production assistant who is instructed to “film a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company. But an interviewee makes a statement which forces him to reinvent his story to suit the company’s narrative.”

“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” recently premiered at Locarno, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard Award for best film and won the festival’s special jury prize. The film was well-received by critics at the fest,...

In his films, director and screenwriter Amat Escalante (Mexico) is committed to portraying the violence of his country in a provocative, head-on way. His first three feature films premiered at the Cannes Film Festival: Sangre and Los bastardos screened in the Un Certain Regard section, and his 2013 film Heli premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or, for which Escalante won the Best Director Award. In 2016, he presented The Untamed (La región salvaje), a film with science-fiction elements, in competition at the Venice Festival, which again won him the Best Director Award. This year, he premiered his fifth feature film, Lost in the Night, in the Cannes Premieres section.In this episode, we talk about the relationship between filmmakers and their social context. In conversation with programmer and critic Pamela Biénzobas, Escalante speaks about his relationship with the city of Guanajuato as a source of inspiration and his interest in establishing...

Publishing exec will take over from Petra Müller on January 1, 2024

Walid Nakschbandi is to succeed Petra Müller as CEO of one of the leading German regional film funds, Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw, from January 1, 2024.

Afghan-born Nakschbandi, who settled in Germany at the age of 14, studied political science and law in Bonn and Berlin. He joined the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group in 1996 and ran the group’s TV production arm Ave Gesellschaft für Fernsehproduktion GmbH from 1999.

His producer credits include the TV movie My Daughter, Anne Frank, a documentary on the right-wing terrorist Beate Zschäpe in Letzte Ausfahrt Gera - Acht Stunden mit Beate Zschäpe,...

Below you will find the results of Notebook's critics' poll for the best films of the Cannes Film Festival, as well as an index of our coverage of the festival.Awardstop 101. Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki)2. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)3. May December (Todd Haynes)4. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet)5. Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice)6. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese)7. La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)8. The Pot-au-feu (Tràn Anh Hùng)9. A Prince (Pierre Creton)10. Last Summer (Catherine Breillat)(Poll contributors: Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal, Anna Bogutskaya, Jordan Cronk, Flavia Dima, Lawrence Garcia, Leonardo Goi, Daniel Kasman, Jessica Kiang, Roger Koza, Elena Lazic, Beatrice Loayza, Guy Lodge, Łukasz Mańkowski, Savina Petkova, Caitlin Quinlan, Vadim Rizov, Christopher Small, Öykü Sofuoğlu, Blake Williams)DISPATCHESThe Obscenity of EvilLeonardo Goi on The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer), The Sweet East (Sean Price Williams), Eureka (Lisandro Alonso), and Killers of the Flower Moon...

The festival runs June 23 - July 1.

Films by Jessica Hausner, Elegance Bratton and Sebastian Silva are among 36 titles selected for the Filmfest München’s three international competition strands, CineMasters, CineVision and CineRebels. The festival runs June 23-July 1.

CineMasters

Hausner’s Club Zero will be joined by another four Cannes competition titles - Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster - to screen in Munich’s CineMasters competition for the €50,000 Arri Award which is presented to the producers of the best international film.

The 12-title line-up also includes...

Lost in the Night (Amat Escalante).The more familiar one becomes with Cannes, the less one comes to expect anything like aesthetic coherence from it. Even if one accepts its nominal (or self-proclaimed) status as the standard-setter for international arthouse cinema, there’s still a fair amount of variation within its vast program. Which is to say that while one can lament the general calcification of festival-circuit aesthetics, the arbitrary programming decisions of Thierry Frémaux, or the often perplexing set of awards handed out each year, there are always films worth seeking out. In 1982, the French critic Serge Daney remarked that Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Godard’s Passion were part of cinema’s “secret factory”: that is, films which wouldn’t receive awards, but from which future directors would draw inspiration in years to come. The challenge with each edition, of course, is to discover which films those are.

Amat Escalante returned to the Croisette, exactly 10 years after the premiere of Heli, for which he won the Best Director award at this prestigious festival. With Lost in the Night (aka Perdidos en la noche), Escalante continues to address similar themes, linked to one of the most violent times in Mexico. The opposition to a mine that operates with foreign capital causes a group of municipal police officers to carry out brutal actions. Three years later, Emiliano (Juan Daniel García) – the son of a missing woman who led the complaints against the mine – ends up with a key clue that could bring about the resolution that he and his sister have sought so much. Although there’s an eventual passage in the film...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Cannes frequently gets criticized for the paucity of Latin American representation in the main competition, so it was widely assumed that the new feature from festival veteran Amat Escalante, the 2013 best director winner for Heli, would be guaranteed a spot. Sad to report that watching Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la noche), it’s easy to see why it was shuffled off to a sidebar. The Mexican filmmaker moves out from the shadow of his former mentor, Carlos Reygadas, with his most accessible work to date in this revenge thriller, which is engrossing enough but also a bit meandering and underpowered.

Escalante’s fifth feature takes its cues more from his experience in television on Narcos: Mexico than from his previous big-screen work, which could in theory bring him to a wider audience. But it lacks the tight cohesion of that series at its best, and softens the jarring intensity,...

Amat Escalante’s title debuted in the Cannes Premiere section.

Mexican auteur Amat Escalante’s Lost In The Night is to be released in the UK and Ireland by Sovereign, following its debut in the Cannes Premiere section.

Sovereign is aiming for a late 2023, early 2024 theatrical release, with The Match Factory handling international sales.

The social thriller tells the story of a Mexican activist who disappears without a trace following her protests against the local mining industry. Five years later, her son attempts to find the culprit.

It was written by Escalante in collaboration with his brother Martín Escalante and Paulina Mendoza.

When Ester Expósito walked the red carpet in Cannes two years ago, she swore she’d be back.

“I was here for a brand, to show off some jewelry,” says the actress, who became a fashion trendsetter and online influencer — with 28 million followers on Instagram — after her turn as the cold, manipulative Carla Rosón Caleruega in Netflix’s Spanish teen drama hit Elite. “But when I was up there on those steps, I thought: ‘I’m going to come back soon, not with a brand with a movie.”

As good as her word, Expósito has returned to the Croisette this year as one of the stars of Lost in the Night, the new crime drama from Mexican director Amat Escalante, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and is being sold worldwide by The Match Factory.

Escalante seems a long way from the soapy prep school world of Elite. The Mexican helmer,...

Five years ago, on March 14th 2018, a car pulled alongside Brazilian Councilwoman Marielle Franco’s vehicle and fired several shots, killing both the politician and her driver. The crime, which enraged a country undergoing grave political turmoil, still remains unsolved. The closest authorities have gotten to a solid verdict is a witness testimony stating a former military police officer wanted the Councilwoman dead. The motivation? Franco’s relentless community work in areas of interest to the local militia, long known to have close ties to the military police.

Continue reading ‘Lost in the Night’ Review: Mexican Auteur Amat Escalante’s Latest is a Chilling Commentary on Absence [Cannes] at The Playlist.

When Rigoberto Duplas, the worrying conceptual artist and antagonist of Amat Escalante’s new film, tells Emiliano, our steadfast lead, that the cheap glass in his modernist mansion has a tendency to “rattle,” it sounds like a dig. Luckily, it’s a tendency our hero doesn’t share. Played with furrowed seriousness by Juan Daniel García (a standout in the recent Robe of Gems), Emiliano is the most convincing part of Escalante’s muddled mystery: a film about a young man on a mission to avenge his mother who disappeared after protesting the sale of a local mine.

After breaking out in Un Certain Regard with Blood in 2005, Escalante’s ascension on the festival circuit has been nothing if not steady: awarded best director for Heli by Steven Spielberg’s jury in 2013, the director followed that success with a Silver Lion in Venice for The Untamed in 2016. That agreeably slimy...

September Film and Rival Cineart have snapped up multiple festival titles.

In an early litmus test of the commercial appeal of Official Selection titles, Benelux’s leading arthouse buyers have swept in to each buy a haul.

Pim Hermeling’s September Film, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, snapped up Dry Grasses, La Chimera, Club Zero, Monster, Fallen Leaves and Last Summer at script stage, as well as Salem in Un Certain Regard and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City.

In the market, the company has now picked up Beta Cinema’s One Last Evening which it will both release and look to remake,...

Stateside, audiences may know Amat Escalante best for directing episodes of “Narcos: Mexico” for Netflix. But Escalante deserves more recognition than that, having excellent independent dramas like 2013’s “Heli” and 2016’s “The Untamed.” And Escalante returns to the Croisette for the first time since “Heli” premiered in competition for the Palme d’Or with his new film, “Lost In The Night.”

Read More: Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2023 Lineup Includes New Films From Hong Sang-soo, Michel Gondry & More

As a late addition to the Cannes line-up, “Lost In The Night” won’t have its world premiere in competition for the fest’s top prize, instead premiering in the Cannes Premiere section.

Continue reading ‘Lost In The Night’ Trailer: Amat Escalante’s Latest Twisty Crime Drama Premieres At The Cannes Film Festival On May 18 at The Playlist.

"Why did you hire me if you know who I am?" The Match Factory has unveiled a Cannes promo trailer for Lost in the Night, premiering at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival kicking off soon this month. This is the latest film by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, best known for his more recent indie hits Heli and The Untamed. It's premiering in the Cannes Premiere section at the fest, not in the competition, Though it looks like it could be in there nonetheless. Emiliano lives in a small mining town in Mexico. Motivated by a sense of justice, he searches for those responsible for the disappearance of his activist mother. He finds a clue that leads him to the wealthy Aldama Family - soon he gets a job at their home. In search of the truth & justice, Emiliano plunges into a dark world full of secrets, lies and revenge. Starring Juan...