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La nueva edición tendrá como eje temático el cruce entre el humor y lo fantástico. © Sitges

Apuntad en vuestra agenda cinéfila: del 9 al 19 de octubre, la ciudad costera de Sitges volverá a metamorfosearse en la capital del cine fantástico. Hoy, durante la rueda de prensa celebrada en la Fàbrica Moritz Barcelona, Ángel Sala y Mònica Garcia i Massagué, Director Artístico del Festival y Directora de la Fundación, respectivamente, han ofrecido el primer gran anticipo de la programación del Festival de Sitges 2025, con el cruce entre el humor y el género fantástico como hilo conductor.

En su edición número 58, el Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya inaugurará con Alpha, el nuevo largometraje de la cineasta francesa Julia Ducournau, que se convierte en la tercera mujer en inaugurar Sitges después de que lo hicieran Mary Harron y Ana Lily Amirpour. Esta vez, su nueva película explora un mundo distópico que funciona...

German producers Katharina Bergfeld and Heino Deckert of ma.ja.de. Fiction, co-producers of Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, won the third annual €100,000 CineCoPro award at this year’s Munich International Fim Festival (Miff), presented by Bavarian regional fund Fff Bayern with support from the Bavarian State Chancellery.

The dark tragicomedy premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May where it won the jury award.

Ma.je,de coproduced what is Soto’s second feature with his Colombian outfit Ocúltimo, and Sweden’s Momento Films.

“Equitable and eye-level collaborations across continents are possible and urgently needed,...

Set against a lakefront untouched by time, the Neuchâtel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival offers an annual snapshot of a genre landscape in motion. Holding its 24th edition from July 4 – 12, the Swiss showcase for fantastical film, Asian cinema and digital creation has evolved in tow, growing from upstart to institution as outré fare and auteurs seized ever-greater opportunities.

“We’ve heard the claim that ‘genre is leaving its ghetto’ for nearly as long as we’ve been around,” says Nifff artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder. “Of course, it was never entirely marginalized, but there simply weren’t as many high-profile films openly embracing the fantastic. That’s changing, and we have to evolve along with it.”

This year’s program shows as much. Opening with the international premiere of the sci-fi thriller “Dalloway” – with star Cécile de France on-site to kick off the festivities – this Nifff selection boasts an uncommonly high star-wattage,...

Major figures from the Austrian film industry have come together to protest at proposed cuts to the Austria’s production incentive amid fears that this would lead to “destruction of the industry”, “massive increase in unemployment” and “permanent damage to a whole culturalsector”.

Directors Jessica Hausner and Marie Kreutzer (who both participated in the Investors Circle initiative in Cannes with new projects), Barbara Albert, Stefan Ruzowitzky and Ulrich Seidl are among the signatories of an open letter orgainsed by 17 industry associations protesting at the Austrian government’s plan to slash the ÖFI+ incentive’s annual budget from €22m to €15.5m...

"You wanted a child." "But not this one." What would you do in this crazy situation? After giving birth, the baby you just gave birth to is suddenly taken away but then they return a little while later with the baby. But wait, is it the same baby, or another one? How can you even tell? What do you even say? That's the concept for this tricky, sneaky, mysterious new thriller titled Mother's Baby, directed by the Austrian filmmaker Johanna Moder. The film is premiering in the Main Competition at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival and also stands out as one of the better films in the entire Berlinale line-up this year. I really dug this and have been thinking about it often since first catching my screening. Moder's Mother's Baby features very eerie, creepy vibes throughout. I was entirely caught up in the story, following her along, hoping we'll find...

Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 makes a strong debut on the Berlin critics jury grid while Johanna Moder’s Mother’s Baby, Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan and Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Sex Love) also land.

Kontinental ’25scored a 3.1 average rating from the critics, putting it second behind Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail on 3.4. Jude’s Romanian-set drama received three four-stars (excellent) four three-stars (good) and two two-stars (average) – the latter from Barabara Hollender and Kalapapruek.

Click on the grid above for the most up-to-date version

Jude was last in Berlin with his Golden Bear-winning Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn...

What’s with all the maternity angst lately? First came Nightbitch, then If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now — in keeping with the rule that three makes it a trend — please welcome Mother’s Baby. Led by a fiercely compelling performance from Marie Leuenberger, Johanna Moder’s psychological thriller ticks along with exceptional confidence while it maintains ambiguity as to whether post-partum depression is feeding Julia’s paranoia or there really is something unsettling about her infant son, making her suspect a switcheroo at the private fertility clinic where she gave birth. It’s when the script starts providing answers that things get shaky.

Part of the issue is that the movie often seems to be itching to make a decisive turn into horror but keeps holding back. Moder and co-writer Arne Kohlweyer commit to that shift so late in the action that it all becomes a bit,...

"Georg, something's not right here." The Match Factory has revealed a teaser trailer for a mystery thriller film titled Mother's Baby, made by Austrian filmmaker Johanna Moder. This just premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival a few days ago, and will likely play at more film festivals this the year before hitting theaters. An unsettling film about a new mother. Julia, a successful conductor, and her partner Georg would like to have a child when Dr. Vilfort offers them hope. Julia becomes pregnant at the doctor's private clinic in Vienna. The birth does not go well and the baby is immediately taken away, leaving Julia and Georg in the dark about what has happened. When finally reunited with the child a day later, Julia feels strangely distant. She begins to doubt whether it is really her child... The especially talented Swiss-German actress Marie Leuenberger (from The Divine Order) stars as Julia,...

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are among the latest titles dividing critics on this year’s Berlin jury grid.

Ethan Hawke stars as songwriter Lorenz Hart in his latest collaboration with Linklater which scored an average of 2.8 stars after proving divisive. Blue Moon received three four stars (excellent) while Martin Horyna and Kalapapruek gave it just one star (poor). The rest of the scores comprised two or three stars with one critic left to score.

Linklater’s last outing at Berlin was over 10 years ago with Boyhood which topped...

Mother’s Baby explores the psychological descent of Julia, a successful orchestra leader whose aspiration for motherhood transforms into a distressing experience. As she encounters difficulties connecting with her newborn, the film intertwines psychological exploration with nuanced psychological tension, examining Julia’s disconnection from her child and the disorienting transformation of personal identity.

The psychological tension stems from genuine human anxieties—questioning what occurs when expected maternal connections do not emerge. Julia’s escalating psychological distress centers on her infant’s unsettling conduct and the medical and familial systems that minimize her experiences.

The narrative reveals broader social observations about maternal challenges, personal identity, and psychological well-being—highlighting how women’s internal experiences are frequently marginalized. The presence of axolotls in the film subtly symbolizes regeneration, yet presents this concept through a cold, detached lens, mirroring Julia’s fragmentation of self.

The Collapse of Self: Characters in Flux

Julia begins Mother...

Johanna Moder’s latest — the thrilling, paranoid, bleakly comedic “Mother’s Baby” — is crafted with masterful tonal control for much of its runtime. It comes achingly close to sticking the landing, undone only in its final minutes by a handful of decisions that rob it of its crucial power: its ability to exist within the chilling unknowns of postpartum depression.

In trying desperately for a child, middle-aged orchestra conductor Julia (Marie Leuenberger) and her husband Georg (Hans Löw) find themselves at the door of a fancy fertility specialist, the enigmatic Dr. Vilfort (Claes Bang). The doctor boasts a high success rate for his cutting-edge methods, and all seems well once Julia is pregnant — that is, until the day she gives birth at his private clinic. Something seems amiss when her newborn son is whisked away for some emergency treatment before she can even hold him, but is returned the following day with no complications.

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby: Moder Repeats Motherhood Horrors

A palpable, instinctual fascination with the potential horrors of pregnancy are exactly why neonatal dread remains such a fascinating cinematic subgenre. Alas, there are several iconic titles which often seem to eclipse contemporary offerings attempting to examine the inherent tensions associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Johanna Moder’s latest film, Mother’s Baby, is the latest in what seems a perennial cycle revisiting these fears through more outlandish parameters. But hasn’t this been done to death? A suitably paranoia primed lead performance from Marie Leuenberger (and an appropriately sinister Claes Bang) can’t get around the script’s familiar beats, which also feed us details making everything seem too obvious for any real tension to build.…...

If there is a cinematic equivalent of the theatre of cruelty, it must be the reigning spirit of Austrian cinema. Films by Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz and Jessica Hausner may be very different from each other, but are similarly unflinching as they roam threatening spaces, find the sinister in the everyday and delve into the darkness of human hearts. Johanna Moder’s previous films didn’t share that sensibility, but she shows her Austrian colors in Mother’s Baby, the most viscerally ghastly evocation of new parenthood we’ve seen since Eraserhead.

Not exactly a horror film, Mother’s Baby is nevertheless shot through with horror elements: a weird baby, an isolated woman being gaslit into thinking she’s crazy, a demonic doctor and his horde of witchy nurses working in a strangely unregulated institution straight out of David Cronenberg’s playbook. Over everything hovers the gruesome mystery of birth,...

Feminist body horror is taking over indie cinema.

The female filmmakers behind this new wave of flesh and flash are finding critical and commercial success by combining the viscerally grotesque with progressive themes exploring bodily autonomy, beauty standards, and social expectations for women.

Coralie Fargeat’s indie blockbuster The Substance — which has earned $77 million worldwide and picked up 5 Oscar nominations — is the current queen of female body horror, but gross-out feminist films are everywhere. Sundance’s Midnight screenings this year included Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister — a twisted take on the Cinderella story involving bone-crunching cosmetic surgery and bodily mutilation — and Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a horror comedy about a gravedigger (Glowicki) who goes to macabre lengths in an attempt to re-animate her deceased mate.

Berlin’s lineup features Johanna Moder’s Mother’s Baby, a German-language psychological horror movie about a woman unsure if the baby she’s...

The dream of motherhood turns into a nightmare in Mother’s Baby, the new film from Austrian director Johanna Moder (High Performance, Once Were Rebels, TV series School of Champions) that is world premiering in the competition program of the 75th Berlin Film Festival on Feb. 18.

40-year-old Julia (Marie Leuenberger) is a successful conductor and has a loving partner (Hans Löw). So what could she be missing for complete happiness? Well, the couple is longing for a child. Luckily, a fertility doctor (Claes Bang) offers them hope and treatment. Unfortunately, though, the birth does not go as planned, and the baby is taken away, leaving Julia in the dark about what has happened. When reunited with the child, she feels strangely distant. And she begins to doubt whether this is really her baby.

From there, the co-production between Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, which was co-written by Moder and Arne Kohlweyer, takes...

The 75th annual Berlin Film Festival begins today, and Jury president Todd Haynes has quite the crop of competition titles to choose from. New films by Richard Linklater, Radu Jade, Hong Sang-soo, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and the duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, among others, all vie for the Golden Bear this year. Will there be an early favorite for Berlinale’s top prize after its first weekend?

Continue reading ‘Mother’s Baby’ Clip: Johanna Moder’s Drama Premieres At The Berlin Film Festival Next Week [Exclusive] at The Playlist.

Germany’s film industry may have been hit hard by the economic slowdown, resulting in an overall gloomy outlook, but it’s still celebrating the biggest number ever of local films and co-productions at this year’s Berlinale and looking forward to a diverse lineup of 2025 releases, among them a number of high-profile sequels.

Compounding the sector’s overall predicament was the collapse of the federal government in November, forcing snap elections scheduled for Feb. 23. The political crisis left an ambitious reform of the country’s federal film funding system only partially implemented and a matter to be tackled by the next government.

The industry nevertheless welcomed the current government’s last-minute extension and increase of two key funding incentives in December that has ensured planning security for producers, studio operators and production service providers.

In the meantime, the local film community is cheering the strong showing of German titles at the Berlin Film Festival.

Berlinale Pro director Tanja Meissner says she is hopeful for “significant business” being done at the European Film Market, which kicks off tomorrow.

Speaking at a Berlinale Pro press event this afternoon, Meissner said she had been encouraged by the large number of new projects that have been announced by sales agents on the eve of the EFM.

Until recently, many buyers had expressed fears that the Los Angeles fires would disrupt the ability of US sales agents in particular to finalise film packages to be sold at EFM.

However, the past 10 days have seen a slew of EFM packages...

The lineup for the 75th Berlin International Film Festival has been unveiled, with 19 films competing for the coveted Golden Bear. Outside of those, the festival will also host the world premiere of Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, have a screening of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown and offer up Tom Tykwer’s latest, The Light, which will be opening the festival.

Here is the full competition lineup for this year’s Berlin International Film Festival:

Ari – Léonor Serraille

Blue Moon – Richard Linklater

La cache (The Safe House) – Lionel Baier

Dreams – Michel Franco

Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love)) – Dag Johan Haugerud

Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does That Nature Say to You) – Hong Sangsoo

Hot Milk – Rebecca Lenkiewicz

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – Mary Bronstein

Kontinental ’25 – Radu Jude

El mensaje (The Message) – Iván Fund

Mother’s Baby – Johanna Moder

O último azul (The Blue Trail) – Gabriel Mascaro

Reflet...

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the lineup for the 2025 edition, running February 13-23. It’s the first official lineup overseen by new artistic director and former BFI London Film Festival leader Tricia Tuttle, who succeeds Carlo Chatrian and brings her background as an American journalist and curator to the annual German showcase. She’s also working with co-directors of programming, Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, to help reposition the Berlinale’s profile among the great global film festivals and lure bigger-name filmmakers in the process.

This year’s lineup, announced Tuesday, January 21, features new films from Richard Linklater, Michel Franco, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Hong Sangsoo (“What Does That Nature Say to You”), Radu Jude (“Kontinental ’25”), and Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”). Already confirmed in the mix are “Mickey 17” from Bong Joon Ho and Ira Sachs’ Sundance premiere “Peter Hujar’s Day,” plus Tom Tykwer’s “The Light” opening the festival.

Following last week’s lineup announcement, the Berlinale 2025 has now fleshed out its slate with the Competition, Special, and Perspectives sections. Highlights include the world premieres of Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, and Andrew Scott; Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25; Hong Sangsoo’s What Does that Nature Say to You; Michel Franco’s Dreams starring Jessica Chastain; Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower starring Marion Cotillard; and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk with Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, and Vicky Krieps.

The festival will also include international premieres from Julia Loktev, Mary Bronstein, Kahlil Joseph, and more. In terms of omissions for films that potentially could have been a strong fit: there’s no Steven Soderberg’s Black Bag, Wes Anderson’s German production The Phoenician Scheme, nor Berlinale regular Christian Petzold, who wrapped Miroirs No. 3 only a few months ago.

Check out the lineup...

The Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled the full list of titles set for its official competition alongside perspective and specials sidebars.

A total of 19 films have been selected for the international competition. It’s a buzzy selection with multiple titles that have been anticipated and boast high-profile names. Highlights include Richard Linklater’s latest feature Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale and Andrew Scott. Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco launches his latest title Dreams in competition. The film stars Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández and Rupert Friend. Franco last worked with Chastain on the Venice competition title Memory.

Elsewhere, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude lands in competition with Kontinental ’25. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk starring Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps also secures a spot alongside Hong Sangsoo’s latest What Does that Nature Say to You, and Mumblecore veteran Mary Bronstein returns as a director with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You...

The competition line-up for the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival is being announced at a press conference at 11am Cet (10am GMT).

Scroll down for line-up

New festival director Tricia Tuttle is revealing the titles for the Competition and new Perspectives strand alongside co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz.

The announcement is being live-streamed on the festival’s social channels. Watch it live above.

Screen will update this page with the titles as they are announced. Refresh the page for latest updates.

As previously announced, the festival will open with Tom Tykwer’s Special Gala out of competition selection The Light.

After a hugely successful year for domestic films, Austria’s movie industry is looking forward to another impressive crop of titles, including many international co-productions that reflect not only cultural and historical ties with neighboring countries but also the sector’s strong cross-border partnerships.

Highly anticipated films this year include Hans Steinbichler’s “A Whole Life,” the story of a humble man’s existence in an Alpine valley that spans more than eight decades; Dieter Berner’s “Alma and Oskar,” which explores the passionate and tumultuous affair between Viennese composer and socialite Alma Mahler and artist Oskar Kokoschka in the early 1900s; and Timm Kröger’s “The Theory of Everything,” a black-and-white, 1960s-set mystery-thriller that takes place in a scientific conference in the Alps.

Forthcoming releases include works from established directors and young filmmakers, says Anne Laurent-Delage, executive director of promotional organization Austrian Films. This year’s strong showing follows...

Zurich-based Tellfilm, the Swiss outfit behind this year’s Golden Bear contender “Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert,” has lined up a robust co-production slate, teaming with European partners on the psychological thriller “Motherhood” and the period drama “Gloria!,” while developing their first scripted series “How to Be Sad – The Right Way” with an eye towards global streamers.

Co-produced by Austria’s Freibeuter Film (“The Great Freedom”) and with Germany’s The Match Factory handling international sales, the Johanna Moder directed “Motherhood” will tackle maternal anxieties through the lens of a tense psychological thriller. Production is slated for later this year, with actors Marie Leuenberger and Hans Löw signed as leads. “The Square” star Claes Bang is attached as well.

Lensing this May, the musical drama “Gloria!” will tell a story of artistic liberation in Baroque-era Venice. Headed by Tempesta’s Carlo Cresto-Dina – whose Alice Rohrwacher short “Le Pupille” is...

All of the projects will compete for the €6,000 ArteKino International Award.

New films from Oleg Sentsov, County Lines director Henry Blake and Austria’s Sandra Wollner are among the projects selected for the 14th edition of the Les Arcs Film Festival’s Co-Production Village.

All of the projects will compete for the €6,000 ArteKino International Award.

Ukraine’s Sentsov participates with new project Kai. The filmmaker was in Venice in 2021 with Rhino, before fighting on the front line following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Blake is attending with The Golden Radiance Of A Beetle, a 1919-set romance co-written by Xiao Tang...

France’s Les Arcs Film Festival has unveiled the 18 European feature film projects due to be presented in the 14th edition of its Les Arcs Coproduction Village, running December 10 to 13 against the backdrop of the French Alps.

The meeting, aimed at connecting projects with co-producers, financiers, sales agents and distributors, received 311 submissions this year, 40 more than in 2021.

Hailing from 13 territories, seven of the projects are helmed by female filmmakers, and 11 by men, a proportion equal to the applications received for the Coproduction Village.

Nine of them are first features, six are second features and three are by more established filmmakers.

They include U.K. director Henry Blake’s The Golden Radiance Of A Beetle, his second feature after buzzy debut County Lines. The 1919-set drama follows an English woman who falls in love with a Chinese docker and then morphs into a beetle due to societal hatred.

Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov will attend with Kai,...

Writer-director Johanna Moder's High Performance pits Daniel's economic status against his social status, testing the soundness of his moral fibre against his questioning of what it means to be free. Like a Sartrean hypothesis on freedom, Moder presents Daniel as a financially struggling actor as he battles against his bourgeois roots. Though Daniel seems to have a superiority complex due to his bourgeois upbringing, he purports to be more free due to his lack of corporate ties. As Daniel learns (to the soundtrack of Bill Callahan's masterful "Too Many Birds"), financial success is intrinsically tied with cheating and trickery.

The most extensive previews of this year's Slamdance, opening tonight and running through Thursday, come from Paul Sbrizzi at Hammer to Nail and Twitch. Sbrizzi has notes on Perry Blackshear's They Look Like People, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson's Diamond Tongues, Patrick Ryan's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Alexandre Paschoalini's Asco, Johanna Moder's High Performance, Jiyoung Lee's Female Pervert, Gary Walkow's The Trouble with Dot and Harry and Stephen Richter's Birds of Neptune, plus two documentaries, Maurizius Sterkle Drux’s Concrete Love – The Böhm Family and Paul-Julien Robert's My Fathers, My Mother and Me. We'll be collecting full-blown reviews as they appear. » - David Hudson...

The most extensive previews of this year's Slamdance, opening tonight and running through Thursday, come from Paul Sbrizzi at Hammer to Nail and Twitch. Sbrizzi has notes on Perry Blackshear's They Look Like People, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson's Diamond Tongues, Patrick Ryan's Darkness on the Edge of Town, Alexandre Paschoalini's Asco, Johanna Moder's High Performance, Jiyoung Lee's Female Pervert, Gary Walkow's The Trouble with Dot and Harry and Stephen Richter's Birds of Neptune, plus two documentaries, Maurizius Sterkle Drux’s Concrete Love – The Böhm Family and Paul-Julien Robert's My Fathers, My Mother and Me. We'll be collecting full-blown reviews as they appear. » - David Hudson...

While the Sundance Film Festival is the better known film festival located in Utah that runs in January, it is not the only one, as the Slamdance Film Festival has been running in the same place during the same month for over 20 years. The unique aspect of the Slamdance Film Festival, however, is its Narrative Features and Documentary Features program, which restricts its selection to films that are directorial debuts, made for under $1 million, and don’t have Us distribution. The 2015 incarnation of the festival is set to run from January 23rd to the 29th, and ahead of the festival’s premiere next month, organisers have unveiled the lineup for the aforementioned categories. The lineup is as follows.

Narrative Features Program:

Across The Sea (Turkey/USA), making its North American Premiere

Written and Directed by Nisan Dağ and Esra Saydam

Starring Damla Sönmez, Jacob Fishel, Ahmet Rıfat Şungar, Hakan Karsak,...

Festival top brass announced the 19 films that will screen at the Slamdance Film Festival, set to run in Park City, Utah, from January 23-29.

The 11 narrative and eight documentary selections include 13 world premieres. All competition films are feature directorial debuts budgeted below $1m without Us distribution.

“It’s very exciting to bring this dynamic lineup to audiences in Park City,” said festival director Anna Germanidi. “We are proud to help launch these filmmakers’ careers and celebrate the success we all believe these films deserve.”

“Our success in showcasing emerging artists is most obviously linked with American talent, but increasingly at Slamdance, we want to also support new international talent,” said co-founder and president Peter Baxter.

All synopses below provided by Slamdance.

Narrative Features

Across The Sea (Turkey-usa)

Dirs Nisan Dağ, Esra Saydam

Young, beautiful and pregnant, Damla has to confront her first love in a Turkish summer town before she can fully embrace her new life in...

The Sundance Film Festival dominates Park City in late January, but there is also the upstart Slamdance Film Festival. We’ve not really highlighted that fest or its program, but I always stay at Treasure Mountain Inn where Slamdance is headquartered and they’ve kind of grown on me. Last year they brought Christopher Nolan to speak (the fest had the good sense to program his first film) and Joe Mangianello came to vamp his male stripper docu. This year, there’s every chance of seeing Dennis Rodman, the flamboyant former rebounding machine and Bff of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, for the docu Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang In Pyongyang. So let’s all root for an international incident! Here are the films they’ll be playing from January 23-29:

Narrative Features Program

Across the Sea – Directors & Screenwriters: Nisan Dağ, Esra Saydam. (Turkey/USA) North American Premiere.

Slamdance winner won the Max Ophüls Prize at the weekend, granting it a slot in the Berlinale.

Jakob Lass’ feature debut Love Steaks, this year’s winner of the Slamdance Trailer Competition Grand Prix, was awarded the prestigious Max Ophüls Prize in Saarbrücken at the weekend.

The film, which is in the Lola nomination long list, will therefore also have a screening slot in the Berlinale’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino on Feb 16.

Billed by the filmmakers as “the world’s first Fogma film” (with the obligatory manifesto), Love Steaks had its world premiere at Munich Filmfest last June where it won all four prizes of the Young German Cinema Support Awards.

This included for Best Screenplay, despite the film not having had any written dialogue and featuring the staff and guests at a wellness hotel on the Baltic Sea coast playing themselves alongside newcomers Lana Cooper and Franz Rogowski..

Lass’ graduation film from the University of Film...

Berlinale Paula and Perspektive prizes confirmed.

Berlin’s European Film Market (Efm) is expanding its number of screening venues by setting up shop at the recently refurbished Zoo Palast [pictured] cinema complex.

Exhibitors will be able to choose from five exclusive screening facilities with state-of-the-art projection technology, ranging from Cinemas 3-5 (with seating for 159, 161 and 157, respectively) to Club A and B with seating for 36 and 39.

Two of the cinemas can project 3D DCPs and one of the Club cinemas has its own bar, while all of the venues are kitted out with comfortable armchairs and extra space between the rows.

The Efm will be organising a free bus shuttle service from outside of the Gropius Mirror Restaurant and the Marriott Hotel to the Zoo Palast, but an alternative would be take the U2 underground which stops right outside of the cinema.

The Zoo Palast cinemas replace the screening venues at the Cubix cinema near Alexanderplatz, which had also...