News

Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi, whose heartfelt documentaries “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory” earned her Academy Award nominations, agreed to step into the world of scripted fiction when Netflix and Pablo Larraín’s production company Fabula sent her the 2019 book “When Women Kill” (“Las Homicidas”) by Alia Trabucco Zerán.

The resulting screen adaption, “In Her Place” (“El lugar de la otra”), puts Alberdi back on the awards trail as Chile’s Oscar entry for the Best International Feature Film.

The original book details four real-life cases of women who committed murder but were pardoned during a time when the death penalty was still implemented in Chile. “It was the first nonfiction book by a writer who usually writes fiction. And this is my first fiction set in a non-fiction world,” Alberdi told IndieWire in Spanish via video call. “The crisscrossing was interesting.”

More than the specifics of the stories,...

Humanity’s obsession with crimes (especially true crimes) has existed since, well, crimes were taking place. One of the most popular shows centered around true crimes, Crime Patrol, has been airing on TV for the past 2 decades with a whopping 2000+ episodes under its belt. Then there’s Netflix, which has sort of carved a niche for itself by unpacking the reasoning behind a crime with shows and movies like Mindhunter, Extremely Wicked Shocking Evil and Vile, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, The Indrani Mukerjea Story, and Sector 36. Somewhere along the way, the aforementioned obsession evolved into a fascination for killers, with people dressing up as these real-life monsters on Halloween. In Her Place takes this intrigue regarding killers to the next level, but does it have anything new to say about this subgenre? Let’s find out.

Maite Alberdi’s In Her Place,...

The wonderful Raymond Carver story “Neighbors” perfectly evoked the strange out-of-body feeling that can come from occupying another person’s home when they’re not in it — the transient thrill of living someone else’s life, and the accompanying sense that it’s a little bigger and brighter than your own. That pang, at once delicious and dismaying, colors “In Her Place,” a peculiar mixture of true-crime riff, domestic melodrama and feminist fable that marks an uneasy venture into fiction for celebrated Chilean docmaker Maite Alberdi, who landed Oscar nominations for both “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory.”

There’s more shared DNA than you might think between Alberdi’s latest and her previous documentary work. In particular, the mixture of procedural storytelling, old-school genre tropes and whimsical human comedy that shaped the hard-to-classify hybrid “The Mole Agent,” a whodunnit-fashioned nursing home study, surfaces again in “In Her Place.

Twice nominated for the Academy’s Best Documentary Feature gong, Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi is one of nonfiction cinema’s best-known contemporary voices.

On Monday evening in San Sebastian, however, Alberdi launches her first departure from the factual world with In Her Place (El Lugar de la Otra), a cunning and deceptively ambitious crime romp she has directed for Netflix.

Penned by Uruguayan writer Inés Bortagaray and Chilean comedian Paloma Salas, In Her Place debuts in competition at San Sebastian. The film’s story is based on the true tale of Chilean writer María Carolina Geel who, in 1955, killed her lover at a high-class hotel in the center of Santiago. But the story isn’t explored through the eyes of Geel. We barely see her. Alberdi’s camera is instead focused on Mercedes, a fictional character who works in the prosecutor’s office and develops a charged fascination with Geel’s life.

For Chile’s most celebrated documentarian Maite Alberdi, whose debut fiction pic “El lugar de la otra” vies for the Golden Shell at the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival (Ssif), venturing into fiction filmmaking posed a number of challenges. But it also had its perks: it took her only a month to shoot the drama while it has taken her an average of five years each time to complete a documentary, two of which, “The Eternal Memory” and “The Mole Agent,” have garnered Oscar nominations.

Recreating ‘50s Santiago for her period film was no mean feat for her art department, led by Pamela Chamorro, given the paucity of buildings dating back from that era. “Earthquakes and the lack of government policies to preserve our architectural heritage, has seen few buildings of past eras still standing in Santiago,” Alberdi told Variety.

Working with a host of actors, numbering around 50, was also a new experience.

The Austin Film Festival (Aff) has announced the 2022 Film Competition Jury and Audience Award winners alongside the Screenplay Competition winners. In the festival, writers are recognized for their contribution to film, television, theatre and new media. The competitions received over 5,000 film submissions and over 10,000 script submissions.

Film Jury Awards

Narrative Feature: Welcome, Violeta!, written by Fernando Fraiha & Inés Bortagaray, directed by Fernando Fraiha

Documentary Feature: With this Light, directed by Nicole Bernardi-Reis & Laura Bermúdez

Comedy Vanguard Feature: The Library Boys, written/directed by Zane Borg

Dark Matters Feature: The Domestic, written/directed by Brad Katzen

Narrative Short: One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, written/directed by Ana Yang

Student Short: Sammy, Without Strings, written by Will Henderson, III & Ralph Parker, III, directed by Ralph Parker, III

Documentary Short: Gina, directed by Kathryn Prescott

Animated Short: Rosemary A.D. (After Dad), directed by Ethan Barrett

Produced Digital Series: Serjan Bratan, written by Alisher Utev & Sergei Litovchenko,...

The Montevideo-based Uruguayan director Alex Piperno has a history of giving his short films very long, enigmatic names and his first feature debut isn’t an exception either. In all its glorious reference to the filmmaker’s favourite verses that standing alone don’t make much sense, their significance becomes crystal clear the moment the last scene unfolds.

“Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine won Tagesspiegel Readers’ Award 2020 at Berlinale

Actually, the window boy is more of a “door boy” as he is wandering through his mysterious portal to a completely other environment straight into a calm, soul-soothing bourgeois apartment belonging to a young single woman. This ability will bring the crewman (Daniel Quiroga) desired peace and a sense of security, but it will also jeopardize his job as a sailor on a large cruiser of the coast of Patagonia. Nobody understands how it’s possible that...

A cruise ship off the coast of Patagonia becomes a portal into the lives of others in Uruguayan director Alex Piperno’s stubbornly esoteric debut Window Boy Would Also Like to Have a Submarine. Marrying a lo-fi aesthetic with heady sci-fi concepts is nothing new within the world of independent film, yet Piperno appears more interested in tracking the loneliness of his characters, foregrounding isolation over plot machinations. Window Boy does little to differentiate its characters, having them, and the film as a whole, remain enigmas.

Mainly taking place on a cruise ship, the film follows Daniel Qulroga’s unnamed sailor, who is about to be fired from his job for constantly disappearing. The reason for these disappearances quickly becomes clear, as the sailor has discovered that a doorway on the ship, in fact, leads to a women’s (Inés Bortagaray) apartment in Montevideo. Separately, in the Filipino jungle, a...

Karim Aïnouz’s beguilingly stunning “Invisible Life” is Brazil’s latest cinematic treasure. Even as the country’s conservative government threatens to cut the funding to the robust film scene that has given us critically acclaimed works like “Aquarius,” “Neon Bull” and “The Second Mother,” there are works like “Invisible Life” that remind international audiences of the stories the nation is fighting to tell in the face of adversity.

“Invisible Life” is a tale of two sisters in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Guida (Julia Stockler), the slightly more adventurous one, escapes from a family dinner one night to go out with a mysterious suitor, a Greek sailor. She disappears the next morning, leaving behind only a note and one of her grandmother’s earrings she had left with the night before.

Her sister, Eurídice (Carol Duarte), blames herself for covering for her sister to leave the family without so much as saying goodbye.

Exclusive: Amazon Studios has bought U.S. rights to Cannes Un Certain Regard winner The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão ahead of its North American premiere at Toronto.

European arthouse stalwart The Match Factory and CAA Media Finance brokered the deal for the well-received Brazilian film. CAA has also signed the film’s director Karim Aïnouz, an A-list festival regular.

The Portuguese-language, tropical melodrama about two sisters struggling to define themselves in the machista culture of mid-century Brazil is a strong contender to be the country’s entry for the International Feature Film Oscar. That decision will be made soon. A U.S. release date has yet to be set.

We revealed the film’s first international trailer in Cannes.

The story begins in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. Eurídice, 18, and Guida, 20, are two inseparable sisters living at home with their conservative parents. Although immersed in a traditional life, each...

Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão is a tale of resistance. It hones in on two inseparable sisters stranded in–and ultimately pulled apart by–an ossified patriarchal world. It is an engrossing melodrama where melancholia teems with rage, with a tear-jerking finale that feels so devastating because of the staggering mix of love and fury that precedes it. It is, far and above, an achingly beautiful story of sisterly love.

Based on a 2015 novel by Martha Batalha, the director’s Un Certain Regard winner homes in on two young sisters in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, the eponymous 18-year-old Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and 20-year-old Guida (Júlia Stockler). Singularly titled as it may be, The Invisible Life is the story of their relationship, and the mutual struggle to escape from the confines–literal and symbolic–of the conservative household they’ve been raised in by strict father Manuel...

Exclusive: Here’s a first international trailer for A-list festival regular Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes Un Certain Regard drama The Invisible Life Of Eurídice Gusmão, which is being sold on the Croisette by The Match Factory.

Rt Features, Pola Pandora, Sony Pictures, Canal Brasil and The Match Factory are behind the Portuguese-language tropical melodrama about two sisters struggling to define themselves in the machista culture of midcentury Brazil. Sony plans to release the film wide in Brazil in November 2019, followed by the rest of Latin America.

The story begins in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. Eurídice, 18, and Guida, 20, are two inseparable sisters living at home with their conservative parents. Although immersed in a traditional life, each one nourishes a dream: Eurídice of becoming a renowned pianist, Guida of finding true love. In a dramatic turn, they are separated by their father and forced to live apart. The sisters take control of their separate destinies,...

Exclusive: Buoyed by a fresh North American deal for Sundance hit Morris From America, Ryan Kampe jets into Berlin with a bevy of buzzy festival titles set to receive their market premieres.

The slate includes Ramzi Ben Sliman’s French drama and Berlinale selection My Revolution, about a French-Tunisian teenager who unwittingly becomes a poster boy for the Arab Spring as he tries to win the heart of his love.

Samuel Vincent, Anamaria Vartolomei, Lucien Le Guern, Lubna Azabal, and Samir Guesmi star. Visit represents worldwide rights excluding France.

Rotterdam title Suntan from Argyris Papadimitropoulos is a dark ‘coming-of-middle-age’ drama that just premiered in Holland and stars Makis Papadimitriou as a lonely, middle-aged doctor of a tiny holiday island who become obsessed with a young tourist.

Elli Tringou, Milou Van Groessen, Dimi Hart, Hara Kotsali, and Marcus Collen also star. Odeon will distribute in Greece and Cyprus.

Visit’s slate comprises several Sundance titles led by [link...

Among the countless movies made about being a new parent, I can’t say I recall many that deal with the sheer physical terror of caring for something incredibly fragile that could never survive on its own. Near the beginning of My Friend From the Park, Liz (Julieta Zylberberg) is bathing her infant son, and realizes she left the towel just a touch out of reach of the bathtub. She stretches and stretches and on some level you realize that the tub floor can’t have that good of grip because we’ve all slipped a little and it’s still a little full with just enough water to possibly drown the kid, or if she slip she’s going to kick him or fall on him and who knows what that’ll do, but she can’t just leave him in the tub either because what if he rolls over,...

Nate Parker’s directorial debut claimed the Us Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and corresponding audience award at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, capping off a barnstorming week for the slave revolt drama.

Last week The Birth Of A Nation sparked a bidding frenzy that resulted in the biggest on-site deal in the festival’s history as Fox Searchlight paid $17.5m for worldwide rights.

Sonita, Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s film about a rapping Afghan teenager opposed to arranged marriage, earned similar double honours as it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary and audience awards.

The Us Grand Jury Prize: Documentary award went to Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s Weiner, while the audience voted for Brian Oakes’ Jim: The James Foley Story.

The World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Elite Zexer’s Sand Story and the audience choice was Carlos del Castillo’s Between Land And Sea.

In other winners:...

The Sundance Film institute has released the line-up of film for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Going to Sundance is one of my favorite events of the year. I love going because you never know what kind of movies you're going to see. Sometimes they are great films that amaze and entertain, other times they completely suck ass, but that's all part of the fun of going to the festival. It's an awesome experience for any hardcore movie geek, and if you ever get a chance to go, you need to.

The event takes place in Park City, Utah next year from January 21st to the 31st. It looks like there's a great line-up of movies at next year's event. My favorite portion of the event is the Midnight section because it deals more with geeky genre type movies, but I also enjoy the various sections of other line-ups.

Some of...

In last year’s section which included Ariel Kleiman’s Partisan and Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick, it was John Maclean’s debut Slow West claimed the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, Alanté Kavaïté’s The Summer of Sangailé landed the Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic, Umrika was the audience’s won the Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic. In this year’s dozen offerings we have names we normally associate with Cannes in The Misfortunates‘ Felix van Groeningen (Belgica), The Other Side of Sleep‘s Rebecca Daly (Mammal – see pic above) and A Stray Girlfriend‘s Ana Katz (Mi Amiga del Parque). Here are the selections.

Belgica / Belgium, France, Netherlands (Director: Felix van Groeningen, Screenwriters: Felix van Groeningen, Arne Sierens) — In the midst of Belgium’s nightlife scene, two brothers start a bar and get swept up in its success.Cast: Stef Aerts, Tom Vermeir, Charlotte Vandermeersch, Hélène De Vos. World Premiere.