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"Where are their parents?" "They fled." Utopia has revealed the trailer for an indie drama titled Drift, the third feature film from acclaimed Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen, following his features Ilo Ilo and Wet Season previously. This premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to some mixed and positive reviews. Jacqueline, a young refugee from Africa, lands alone and penniless on a Greek island, where she tries first to survive and then to cope with her past. While gathering her strength, she begins a friendship with a rootless tour-guide also working on the isalnd and together they find the resilience to forge ahead. "Jacqueline must face the ghosts that haunt her—or tip into full-blown madness." The very talented Cynthia Erivo stars as Jacqueline, with Alia Shawkat, Ibrahima Ba, Honor Swinton Byrne, Zainab Jah, and Vincent Vermignon. This trailer also features the song "It Would Be" written & sung by Cynthia Erivo & Laura Mvula.

The creative team from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will soon be swinging into Colorado to accept an inaugural award at the Denver Film Festival.

The fest today announced a more complete lineup of events, screenings, honorees, special guests, podcasts and more for this year’s installment, scheduled for Nov. 3-12. Plucked to receive the inaugural Denver Film Festival 5280 Award will be the Spider-Verse team. The prize is designed to honor “exceptional cinematic work and collaboration to achieve new heights,” per officials. It will be presented to writers and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, executive producer Bob Persichetti, producer Christina Steinberg and senior animation supervisor Humberto Rosa following a screening of the film on Nov. 7 at the AMC 9 + Co 10.

Anthony Chen, whose credits include Ilo Ilo, Wet Season and Ah ma, has been tapped to receive the Denver Film Festival Excellence in Directing Award following the screening of one of his new films,...

In June of 2021, Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen, acclaimed for his intimate, realist dramas Ilo Ilo (2013) and Wet Season (2019), was invited to serve on the jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival. As part of his participation in the event, he was asked to give a round of interviews to local Chinese journalists and critics. During one of these sessions, a Chinese writer began by praising the director’s family dramas by describing them as uncommonly “mature and precise” for a filmmaker of his age — Chen is 39 today, but was just 29 when he became the first Singaporean to win Cannes’ Camera d’Or prize with Ilo Ilo in 2013 — but he also challenged Chen by asking, “What do you think your films would be like if you let go of control and worked with a freer spirit?”

As the filmmaker wrapped up his time in Shanghai and flew back to London, where...

One of the more unlikely films to emerge from this year’s Locarno is the Thai debut Arnold Is a Model Student. In aesthetic, it resembles one of those well-heeled HBO high school dramedies à la Bad Education, Vice Principals—all clean lines, wide-angle lenses, and charcoal greys and blues. They usually have lashings of irony, something that Arnold—a film neither cold, cynical, or even a riff on uniformity—hasn’t. It toes a delicate line between irreverence and heartfelt good nature in telling the story of a whiz kid who takes a job helping other students cheat on university entrance exams while, in the foreground and back, a real-world anti-authoritarian movement begins bubbling up.

Arnold is the first feature of Sorayos Prapapan, a 35-year-old Thai filmmaker and foley artist who landed his first job in cinema as a production assistant on Uncle Boonmee in 2009. Soon after Prapapan took...