News

Amsterdam-based sales agency Film Harbour has secured the world rights – excluding the Netherlands and Belgium – to documentary “The Propagandist,” which world premieres in IDFA’s International Competition next month.

Film Harbour was launched earlier this year by seasoned documentary sales executive Liselot Verbrugge, former CEO of Deckert Distribution, as revealed exclusively by Variety.

“The Propagandist” is directed by Dutch filmmaker Luuk Bouwman, and is produced by Ilja Roomans for Netherland’s Docmakers.

Using previously unpublished interviews, family films and propaganda films, “The Propagandist” tells the story of the rise and fall of Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen (1898-1975). As head of the Department of Film of the Dutch Nazi Party and SS, he became the most powerful man in the Dutch film industry during World War II.

Teunissen, nicknamed the “Film King” and the “Dutch Leni Riefenstahl” was a well-known filmmaker before the war. The film asks: What drove him to...

Amsterdam-based sales outfit Film Harbour, launched earlier this year under CEO Liselot Verbrugge, has taken on world rights to Pavilion 6 by by Croatian filmmaker Goran Dević, ahead of its Sheffield DocFest world premiere next month.

Part of the BBC Storyville strand, the doc will premiere in Sheffield DocFest’s International Competition in June. It presents a humorous and humane snapshot of a unique moment in time: the waiting line for the Covid-19 vaccination. This is the fifth collaboration between producer Hrvoje Osvadić and director Dević, with previous collaborations including The Blacks.

The company is also beginning sales on another Sheffield DocFest title,...

UK production company Randan, Scottish slang for ’raucous partying’, is launching in Cannes with a slate of productions and backing from the UK Global Screen Fund.

It has been formed by Scotland-based producers Reece Cargan, founder of Bombito, and James Heath, managing director of commrcials outfit Mtp, where he will remain as exec producer for commercials work.

Three projects are in post-production: Rada Leonora’s In The Morning Light, about the life of surrealist artist Leonard Carrington. Mtp had been co-producing the film alongside Lena Vurma’s Dragonfly Films, Meli Melo Cultura & Piano (Mx), Digital Cube (Ro), and Skye Film; Polly Findlay’s Midwinter Break,...

Film geeks, rejoice. Leading indie label Kino Lorber is entering the world of streaming. The company has launched Kino Film Collection, a new subscription video service available in the U.S. via’s Amazon’s Prime Video Channels. The Collection will feature new Kino releases fresh from theaters, along with hundreds of films from its expansive library of more than 4,000 titles, many now streaming for the first time. It will cost users $5.99 per month.

Films available at launch include award-winning theatrical releases and critically acclaimed festival favorites and classics from around the globe, such as The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci), Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos), Taxi (Jafar Panahi), Poison (Todd Haynes), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn), The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour), Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski), Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke), and A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke).

Joining them are entries...

“It was a contributor to the specialty box office, and I hope it will be again,” says Laemmle CEO Greg Laemmle of MoviePass, the subscription service that unsurprisingly went bankrupt in early 2020 after offering a movie a day for ten bucks a month.

A co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was pushed out amid strategic differences with new owners, including the $9.95 plan, acquired the assets out of bankruptcy in 2021. He relaunched MoviePass yesterday after months of beta testing. The movie-a-day-plan, which left the service subsidizing most tickets, “was never going to work,” Sikes tells Deadline. AMC had actually threatened to sue, saying the plan wasn’t sustainable and set consumers up “for ultimate disappointment down the road.” Its bankruptcy filing listed more than 12,000 subscribers it may have owned money to.

The new MoviePass has four tiers from $10 for 1-3 movies, to a limited availability $40 plan with 30 movies a month. Each plan also...

Project is directed by Suzanne Raes.

German documentary sales outfit Deckert Distribution has picked up world rights to Close To Vermeer directed by Suzanne Raes, and has already closed a first deal on the film with US distributor Kino Lorber.

The feature documentary follows the curation of the biggest ever exhibition devoted exclusively to the Dutch master painter. Taking place in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum and to run until June this year, the event has sold out all first tickets in record time.

The deal with Kino Lorber was negotiated by doc consultant Jan Rofekamp and Deckert Distribution’s Liselot Verbrugge.

Taskovski Films has picked up “Turn Your Body to the Sun,” which world premieres in the International Competition section of IDFA, one of the world’s top documentary film festivals. The sales agency is hoping to replicate the success it had with “Radiograph of a Family,” which won Best Feature-Length Documentary Award at last year’s festival.

“Turn Your Body to the Sun,” directed by Dutch filmmaker Aliona van der Horst, tells the story of a Soviet Tatar prisoner of war. After World War II, he is sent to one of Stalin’s brutal camps where the love for an unknown girl becomes his salvation. Sixty years later his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father.

Sana tries to understand what made him the man she knew as a child, through his diaries, various personal and public archives, and registries. As she accompanies the daughter in her journey,...

Feature documentary to tell the story of the Jewish inventor behind Hitler’s favourite car.

It was Adolf Hitler’s favourite motor car - and now the tragicomic story of the inventor behind the Volkswagen is to be told on screen in a new feature documentary announced during Berlin’s European Film Market (Feb 5-13).

How I Invented The Volkswagen (working title) is produced by Submarine, the Dutch production outfit behind Peter Greenaway’s Berlinale competition entry, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, sold by Films Boutique.

The project, which will be directed by Suzanne Raes (The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island), has already received support from the Netherlands Film Fund.

The car was the brainchild of the Jewish engineer Josef Ganz, the eccentric editor-in-chief of the controversial but hugely influential trade journal Motor-Kritik. He first appeared in a revolutionary tiny car in 1932.

Ganz presented the car at a fair in 1933 where it was seen by Adolf Hitler, who has recently...