News

For decades, biographical films have been widely popular. Unlike other genres, biopics don’t always have a hard time standing the test of time. Tastes change, perspectives change, and the world changes, but a person’s story remains the same. The genre’s roots can be traced back to the Silent Era, where movies like Joan the Woman and The Life of Émile Zola were produced to educate the public about specific historical figures. These films normally presented their subjects in a sanitized, heroic light, allowing audiences to draw moral inspiration from them or aim to be more patriotic. With time, the approach changed.

By the ‘50s, the genre had evolved past mere glorification. Biopics started covering more controversial and morally flawed characters, allowing audiences to either get a clearer picture of key historical figures or an exaggerated yet entertaining perspective. Stories about world leaders are fun too, and 2024 gave...

Polish filmmaker Patryk Vega is attending the AFM to talk up his AI-generated biopic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, as well as seeking US partners for future AI-supported projects, through his production banner Aio Studios.

Putin has already been sold to 35 countries and is in discussion for multiple additional markets, being sold by Germany’s Kinostar. The company is releasing directly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, UK and Ireland. TriCoast released theatrically in the US.

The feature took 18 months to film with a budget of $15m from private sources, shooting across Poland, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Russia and Ukraine...

Putin, a new political biopic being shopped to international distributors at next week’s Cannes film market, could test the waters for how much AI the film industry, and the audience, is prepared to accept.

The drama from Polish director Besaleel, also known as Patryk Vega, recreates Russian leader Vladimir Putin using artificial intelligence that was developed in-house with his own technology company Aio, creating what the director terms the “first deepfake” feature film.

German group Kinostar is handling world sales for Putin and will be shopping it to international distributors at the upcoming Cannes film market. Kinostar began sales on the film at the AFM last year and will release the film itself in several European territories.

Putin

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Besaleel said he shot scenes of the Russian leader using a Polish actor with a similar build and used AI technology to “overlay Putin’s face on the actor,...

Polish director Besaleel’s film will feature an AI-rendered Russian president and footage shot by Ukrainian film-makers during the Russian invasion

The “world premiere” of a new biopic of Russian president Vladimir Putin featuring an AI-rendered central character, has been announced for 26 September. In a statement released via PR Leap, Polish studio Aio said the film, titled Putin, will be released in 35 countries, and describes itself as “up close and personal with the Kremlin leader’s story”.

First announced in May 2022, Putin is the English-language debut of Polish director Besaleel, also known as Patryk Vega, who was responsible for a string of homegrown box-office hits characterised by grisly violence and glossy production values including Pitbull, Mafia Women and Botoks.

Kinostar has dropped its first trailer for Putin, the first international production from Polish box office king Patryk Vega, who now goes by the name Besaleel. Pitched as a political thriller and psychological portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin, the film, judging by the trailer, is unlikely to have many fans in Moscow.

Besaleel, who says he conceived the project as an artistic protest against the “Russian dictator and the war in Ukraine,” shows Putin alternatively a doddering old man shivering in soiled diapers, as a gangster-style mob boss blackmailing his predecessor Boris Yeltsin and as a cold-hearted killer ordering bombings and assassinations.

The director recreates several real-life events, including the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, in which Russian security forces pumped toxic gas into the crowded Dubrovka Theater to rescue hostages from Chechen terrorists, an action that resulted in the death of up to 130 hostages. The carpet bombing of Chechnya under Putin’s watch,...

Polish box office king Patryk Vega has set his sights on Vladimir Putin.

Vega, who now goes by the artistic name Besaleel, is best known for his gangster films, including local hits Pitbull and Women of Mafia, which have grossed a cumulative $100 million plus at the Polish box office. But for his English-language debut, the director is taking on the man he sees as the world’s biggest mafia boss: The Russian President.

Putin is pitched as a political thriller and psychological portrait of the Russian leader for an international audience. Originally titled The Vor in Law, a reference to a Russian mafia term akin to “the godfather,” the film posits connections between Putin’s links to organized crime in his time as mayor of St. Petersburg and his approach to politics, both inside Russia and on the international stage. Besaleel has called the film an artistic protest against “the...

German distributor and world sales company Kinostar has acquired Polish filmmaker Maria Sadowska’s erotic thriller “Temptation.”

Based on the bestselling novel by Edyta Folwarska, “Temptation” tells the story of young journalist Inez, whose assignment to cover soccer star Maks Wygoda leads her onto a dangerous journey.

“Temptation” was produced by Daniel Markowicz of Warsaw-based Lightcraft, who also produced and directed the recent hit Netflix actioner “Lesson Plan,” and executive producers Paulina Nowak and Anita Dabrowska.

“Maria and Daniel are extremely talented, and we are very happy to start working with Lightcraft on this movie, with hopefully many more to follow,” said Kinostar head Michael Roesch.

Sadowska enjoyed a huge box office hit “Girls to Buy,” which saw the second-biggest 2021 opening in Poland after Daniel Craig’s 007 swan song “No Time to Die.” The film follows a young woman who, desperate to escape her small town, becomes an escort...

U.S. actor John Malkovich is backing a plan to build Stonebridge Studios, a film, music and media production facility in Skopje, North Macedonia. The studio will be the largest of its kind in the Balkans, he said, Film New Europe reports.

The actor, who is presently in the Serbian city of Zaječar, will work with fellow actors D.W. Moffett and Matt Dillon on the creation of the studio, which is part of the Skopje Technology Park project.

In a video shared with Macedonian Radio and Television, Malkovich – whose father is of Croatian descent – said that the project is especially important to him as a “son of the Balkans.” He said he strongly believes that it will be crucial for the country and the region, and will amplify the already ascended Balkan film, music and art communities in every way possible.

The Skopje Technology Park is an initiative of Stp Capital Partners Holding,...

Four titles top £1m as box office continues to recover.

Rank Film (distributor) Three-day gross (Feb 11-13)Total gross to date Week 1. Uncharted (Sony) £4.7m £4.7m 1 2. Sing 2 (Universal) £3.2m £16.8m 3 3. Death on the Nile (Disney) £1.9m £1.9m 1 4. Belfast (Universal)

£1.05m £11.3m 4 5. Jackass Forever (Paramount)

£1m £4.1m 2

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.35

Sony’s videogame adaptation Uncharted has made a strong start at the UK-Ireland box office, grossing over £4.7m on its opening weekend.

The film played in 580 locations, bringing in an excellent £8,105 location average.

Its total is above both the three-day £3.7m and four-day £4.3m opening weekend of Sony stablemate Ghostbusters: Afterlife,...

Romantic comedy ‘Marry Me’ and Oscar-nominated ‘Flee’ among other titles set for release.

All-star murder mystery Death On The Nile leads the new openers at the UK-Ireland box office this weekend, which will also see a wide release for action thriller Uncharted, starring Tom Holland.

Released by the Walt Disney Studios, Death On The Nile opens in a hefty 718 sites – the widest release since October 2020, when James Bond blockbuster No Time To Die opened in a record 772 cinemas.

The Agatha Christie adaptation is a follow-up to Murder On The Orient Express, which opened on 624 sites and took £4.98m across its...

Also opening: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’.

Sony goes up against Warner Bros this weekend at the UK-Ireland box office, as the studios look to continue a strong period for wide releases.

Sony is releasing Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 670 locations. It is directed by Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two Ghostbusters films and is a producer here. In the latest entry, when a single mother and her two children arrive in a small town, they discover a connection to the original Ghostbusters and the secret legacy the kids’ grandfather left behind.

The original Ghostbusters film...

Highest-grossing opening film was in 10th place.

RankFilm (Distributor)Three-day gross (Sep 17-19)Total gross to dateWeek 1 Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (Disney) £2.4m £15.8m 3 2 Free Guy (Disney) £674,645 £15.3m 6 3 Respect (Universal) £377,395 £1.2m 2 4 Candyman (Universal) £323,350 £4.3m 4 5 The Paw Patrol Movie (Paramount) £262,000 £7.6m 6

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.37

The UK-Ireland top five was comprised entirley of holdovers for the three-day September 17-19 weekend.

Disney’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings held top spot for a third consecutive week, with a drop of 34% bringing in £2.4m. It now has a decent £15.8m in total, rising to 22nd...

Distributors releasing titles before James Bond takes screens.

Musical adaptation Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, action thriller Gunpowder Milkshake and Mark Cousins’ documentary The Story of Looking are three of 19 new films landing in UK-Ireland cinemas this weekend, as distributors look for screen space in advance of No Time To Die in two weeks.

The number of releases each week has been steadily increasing throughout the summer, with just eight on June 4, two weeks after cinemas reopened in England. This has risen to 15 last weekend, and jumped further to 19 this time out.

The increase is a welcome sign for the theatrical industry,...

Polish director Patryk Vega’s usually slick technique fails him utterly here in this lurid story about a cop investigating a girl’s kidnapping by the Russian mafia

Patryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose hardboiled thrillers have found commercial favour both at home and with diaspora audiences: 2018’s The Plagues of Breslau was the kind of full-throttle, unapologetically 18-rated entertainment western producers have largely backed away from. Regrettably, his latest is both globetrotting and dashed-off, and so remorseless that it becomes actively punishing. Violence is hardwired into Vega’s film-making: his unhinged protagonists can’t walk into a room without it seeming like a declaration of war. You gulp, then, when an ominous (and suspiciously unattributed) epigram – “What sort of species are we, if we cannot protect our children?” – makes clear this director has turned his brawn to addressing trafficking. What follows has two modes: lurid and sentimental. Either way,...

The beleaguered U.K. exhibition sector, reeling from a Covid-afflicted, calamitous 2020 that has continued into 2021, is finally seeing some green shoots.

Though the country began 2021 under lockdown with cinemas closed — a situation that’s unlikely to ease in the near future — a combination of decreasing case loads and a robust vaccination rollout is raising hopes. Average new daily infections are now 20,000, while average daily deaths are below 1,000, down from the depths of mid-January’s 60,000 new cases and 1,500 deaths per day. The vaccination program is rolling out smoothly, with 10.5 million of the U.K.’s 67 million population having received the first jab of the vaccine already, and all adults above the age of 50 on course to receive a jab by May.

“We are starting to consider reopening dates,” BFI chief executive Ben Roberts told Variety. “In terms of everyone forecasting, May feels reasonable. Could be earlier, could be later.”

“We do...

‘Mama Weed’ starring Isabelle Huppert, is also opening in France.

France, opening Wednesday September 9

The French box office appeared to be on route to recovery in the first week of September thanks to the launch of Tenet and a wider range of titles on release generally. It now remains to be seen if this momentum can be sustained with further US studio releases remaining elusive and the country on high alert following a spike in Covid-19 cases.

French cinemas this week will mainly be reliant on local films to draw spectators.

This week’s biggest release is Jean-Paul Salomé’s...

As the calendar turned to March this year, producer Wojciech Kabarowski had high hopes for his latest film, “The Hater,” which was set to hit Polish cinemas. The follow-up to Jan Komasa’s Oscar-nominated “Corpus Christi” would be released just weeks after Komasa had walked the red carpet outside the Dolby Theatre during the Oscars ceremony. Polish audiences were primed, and the director had a strong track record of box-office hits. “The Hater,” Kabarowski estimated, could be counted on for at least 2 million admissions.

But its release came as the coronavirus pandemic was already sweeping across Europe. “People were afraid, even at that time, to go to cinemas,” Kabarowski says. Instead of the 2 million admissions he had hoped for, just 200,000 moviegoers managed to see the film before the government shuttered cinemas across Poland. While “The Hater” would lock up VOD deals with Netflix and local streaming services, Kabarowski estimates those...

April 2020 might be the biggest month for Netflix ever. Millions of people are stuck at home due to the Coronavirus pandemic with nothing much to do except kill time. And that’s where streaming video comes in, with Netflix happy to take your mind off the horror on the streets. As such, there’s some neat horror (or horror-tinged) stuff hitting the service in just a few weeks.

Cream of the crop is trashy cult classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space. This 1988 film by the Chiodo brothers is notorious for its insane plot, which tells a twisted tale of a clan of evil aliens who just happen to resemble sinister circus clowns. In 2018, Syfy indicated that they were in talks to produce a sequel to the movie, so this suddenly appearing on Netflix might be an indication that the wheels are finally moving on that project.

Slightly more upmarket and...

Polish drama ’Polityka’ opens in surprise fifth place.

Rank Film (Distributor) Three-day gross (Sept 6-8) Total gross to date Week 1 It: Chapter Two (Warner Bros) £6.9m £7.3m 1 2 Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (Sony) £1.1m £18.6m 4 3 Angel Has Fallen (Lionsgate) £693,588 £5.9m 3 4 The Lion King (Disney) £690,000 £73.1m 8 5 Polityka (Phoenix) £452,675 £519,148 1

Today’s Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.24

Warner Bros

It: Chapter Two got underway in the UK with a £6.9m weekend. Including previews on the Thursday, the film had a four-day £7.3m.

That’s quite far below the previous It film, which opened with a hefty £10m in September 2017. That film built all the way to £32.3m,...

Warner Bros sequel likely to dominate, but will it match its record-breaking predecessor?

It: Chapter Two, Warner Bros’ sequel to its 2017 remake adaptation of the classic Stephen King horror novel, is the main story at the UK box office this weekend.

The previous film was a smash in the UK, setting the biggest all-time opening in the UK for a horror film with £10m from 605 sites in September 2017. Eventually, it reached £32.3m, which also makes it the biggest overall horror release of all time in the country. Its $700m worldwide gross also makes it the genre’s all-time global box office champion.

Patryk Vega follows up Kobiety Mafii with this violent tale about the hijacking of a huge Colombian cocaine shipment

Last year’s Polish crime-movie import Kobiety Mafii (Mafia Women) took nearly £900,000 at the box office in the UK and Ireland, which seems pretty remarkable for a number of reasons. Obviously, it demonstrates the size of the UK Polish community and how keen they are to see movies in cinemas, as opposed to waiting to catch this on another platform. Either that, or there’s a heck of a lot of non-Polish people very keen on sprawling, violent comedy melodramas with sizable ensembles that focus on female characters not afraid to get grisly.

Polish purveyor of graphic screen gore Patryk Vega unleashes another tide of visceral mayhem

Patryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose muscular commercial ventures – spin-offs from TV hit Pitbull, medical procedural Botoks – have become appointment viewing for diaspora audiences and thus regular guests in the UK Top 10. Not for nothing does the logo for his production shingle Vega Investments feature a charging bull. His latest – translating, somewhat ominously, as The Plagues of Breslau – is a flat-out serial-killer thriller, 90 blood-spattered minutes that make those carefully designed Scandi crime dramas seem fussy and wussy. It opens with the graphic autopsy of an abattoir worker who was branded before being sewn alive into suffocating cow hide, the sole visual relief being a cutaway to the morgue’s greasy helix of flypaper. Everything that follows is similarly strong meat.

It has, however, been infused with an eccentric-to-distinctive local flavour. Where western variations generally feature chiselled,...

The Polish film industry is having a moment.

Back home, the box office for local-language movies is booming. Polish audiences are packing cinemas for action thrillers like Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Pitbull: Last Dog ($14 million local gross) or Patryk Vega’s Botoks ($13.3 million) and rom-coms with titles like Pretend Fiance ($6.3 million) and Taxing Love ($6 million).

On the art house side, Polish cinema is arguably stronger than it’s been in a generation, thanks to the likes of Pawel Pawlikowski, who directed the 2015 Oscar foreign-language winner Ida and followed up this year with awards-season favorite Cold War, which earned him ...

The Polish film industry is having a moment.

Back home, the box office for local-language movies is booming. Polish audiences are packing cinemas for action thrillers like Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Pitbull: Last Dog ($14 million local gross) or Patryk Vega’s Botoks ($13.3 million) and rom-coms with titles like Pretend Fiance ($6.3 million) and Taxing Love ($6 million).

On the art house side, Polish cinema is arguably stronger than it’s been in a generation, thanks to the likes of Pawel Pawlikowski, who directed the 2015 Oscar foreign-language winner Ida and followed up this year with awards-season favorite Cold War, which earned him ...