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Bloody Disgusting and Cineverse are raising the dead with celebrated zombie drama The Funeral, acquired out of Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) for North America with plans to release the film this fall across all platforms, including its Bloody Disgusting-powered Screambox streaming service.

The news was first reported by Variety this morning.

The Funeral stars popular Turkish actor Ahmet Rifat Sungar (The Wild Pear Tree, Actress) as a solitary hearse driver who is driving the body of a young murder victim back to her family in the East of the country.

“One night, he opens the back doors of the hearse to find the dead girl making strange grunting noises. He is immediately captivated by her beauty and falls in love.

“Together, they set off on a mission to avenge her death, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. Rising young actress Cansu Türedi plays the dead girl.”

Turkish...

Exclusive: The Thessaloniki Film Festival’s Agora Series, a hybrid film-series industry strand, returns this year for its sophomore outing with Paper Entertainment CEO and Tehran executive producer Julien Leroux serving as program consultant.

This year’s Agora series program will run for two extended days, starting November 4, with a focus on the creative process of series screenwriting. The schedule will feature a range of masterclass sessions from local and international series professionals. Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa will host a masterclass on the future of storytelling titled From Six Feet Under to the Top: The Evolution of Contemporary Television at the Pavlos Zannas Theatre on November 4. Podeswa — who was recently announced as the lead director of the Blade Runner 2099 mini-series at Amazon — will discuss the evolution of series content throughout the years and his personal journey in the business. Podeswa’s credits include Six Feet Under, Game of Thrones,...

Exclusive: Paris-based genre specialist Reel Suspects has boarded world sales on Turkish director Orçun Behram’s horror The Funeral ahead of its premiere at the Lisbon International Horror Film Festival, better known as MotelX.

XYZ is repping North America.

Famu and Columbia College Chicago-educated Behram previously made waves with with 2019 dystopian drama The Antenna, about the residents of a tower block terrorized by a new communications system. The film played at a number of festivals including Toronto and London.

New film The Funeral stars popular Turkish actor Ahmet Rifat Sungar as a solitary hearse driver who is driving the body of a young murder victim back to her family in the East of the country.

One night, he opens the back doors of the hearse to find the dead girl making strange grunting noises. He is immediately captivated by her beauty and falls in love.

Olivér Rudolf’s “My Mother, the Monster” has won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award at Sarajevo Film Festival’s CineLink, its industry section that featured projects from Southeast Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The Hungarian feature film project, which is produced by Genovéva Petrovits at Kino Alfa, received a cash prize of €20,000.

The film focuses on Éva, a mother in her forties who is disappointed with her life and tired of feeling insignificant. She finds a new identity behind a scary monster mask which liberates her.

The Post Republic Award, in the CineLink Work in Progress section, went to “One of Those Days Where Hemme Dies,” directed by Murat Fıratoğlu. The project, which is produced by Nefes Polat at Turkey’s Nefes Films, receives post-production services worth €30,000.

The film shows one day in the life of Eyüp, a poor guy in the city, working hard drying and salting tomatoes under the summer sun.

‘Utama’ won the World Cinema grand jury prize at Sundance earlier this year.

Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama won both the best film prize and the audience award at the 21st edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival which closed yesterday, Sunday June 26.

Distributed internationally by Alpha Violet, the Bolivian-Uruguayan-French co-production about an elderly Indigenous man trying to survive in the Bolivian highlands, premiered earlier this year in Sundance where it received the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema: Dramatic Competition. It is Grisi’s debut feature.

Iceland’s Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson won the best director prize...

‘Utama’ won the World Cinema grand jury prize at Sundance earlier this year.

Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama won both the best film prize and the audience award at the 21st edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival which closed yesterday, Sunday June 26.

Distributed internationally by Alpha Violet, the Bolivian-Uruguayan-French co-production about an elderly Indigenous man trying to survive in the Bolivian highlands, premiered earlier this year in Sundance where it received the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema: Dramatic Competition. It is Grisi’s debut feature.

Iceland’s Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson won the best director prize...

The Turkish-Germnan project has been showcased from Les Arcs to Sofia Meetings.

Turkish director Burcu Aykar and producer Müge Özen are attending this year’s edition of the TransiIvania Pitch Stop (Tps) with a headwind behind Aykar’s debut feature project As Shadows Fade.

The project is based on a novel of the same name by the late Turkish author Cahide Birgü, about the everyday life of a woman and her struggles with loneliness.

As Shadows Fade was first presented at the Les Arcs Coproduction Village in December 2021 and went on to win the Tps award at the Meetings on...

Selection of titles come from the Black Sea countries and neighbouring territories.

International co-production platform Transilvania Pitch Stop has unveiled the 10 projects set to be showcased later this month.

The ninth edition of the programme will present the titles to potential partners and financiers on June 23, during the Transilvania International Film Festival.

The features in development are from first and second time directors from Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Hungary and Ukraine.

This year, five projects will benefit from a tailored script consulting provided by script editor and film consultant Christian Routh, while all projects will be...

The expanding Antalya Film Forum dedicated to fostering a new generation of Turkish directors seems poised to really have the goods this year for buyers and festival programmers who would like to know what’s coming down the pike.

The Antalya Film Festival’s industry section – which will run online Oct. 6-8 — features a fresh batch of projects spanning a wide range of often innovative genres mostly germinated from rookie producer-director teams that provides a sharp snapshot “of what’s to come,” vows the Forum’s new co-chief Müge Özen.

Özen, who is a young but experienced producer of standout titles from Turkey such as recent Istanbul hip-hop scene drama “When I’m Done Dying,” which was a Forum project in 2017, has now taken the section’s reins with Pınar Evrenosoğlu.

She points out that “the selection is very different from previous years” since seven out of the eight feature projects...

Updated: A new statement from Zentropa has been added at the bottom of this post.

Producers from 11 nations claim they are “shocked and upset” by “the brazen display of toxic masculinity” they witnessed at an event hosted last month by Zentropa, the Danish production company founded by Peter Aalbæk Jensen and Lars von Trier. Their concerns, detailed in a November 28 statement, are connected to a producers workshop that occurred last month at Film City, Zentropa’s headquarters in Copenhagen. The October 26 workshop happened after singer and actress Björk alleged that von Trier had sexually harassed her while directing their Oscar-nominated 2000 film “Dancer in the Dark,” and before nine women shared with the newspaper Politiken similar experiences they’d endured at Zentropa.

Read More:Weinstein and Drafthouse Scandals: By Speaking Out, Brave Victims Become Heroes

According to the statement, 70 producers from the international film community attended the workshop, where they were greeted by Zentropa’s female producers,...