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Every year, apart from its commitment to experimental forms, it’s Marseille’s very social contradictions that are most striking about the Festival international de cinéma de Marseille, or FIDMarseille. This is a film festival experience marked by the most ghastly signs of inequality, which one necessarily stumbles upon while schlepping from cinema to cinema: destitution, dillapitation, vandalism, garbage, class divisions. White people in air-conditioned screening rooms versus the racialized locals in the sorching heat outside. The city’s dilapidated walls are plastered with posters about the upcoming elections and Gaza.

It isn’t without interest, then, that some of the most memorable films from this year’s selection come from a context of institutional devastation, albeit from the other side of the world. That is, South America, where times of prosperity and democracy are like interludes between one coup d’état or authoritarian delirium and the next. Perhaps FIDMarseille...

Films by Pierre Creton, Ghassan Salhab and Mariano Llinás are among the line-up of the FIDMarseille international film festival in France (June 25-30).

The international competition features 13 world premieres and one international premiere, including Night Is Day from Lebanese filmmaker Salhab which chronicles the uprising in Lebanon.

French filmmaker Creton, who won the Sacd prize for best French-language feature at last year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, co-directs with Vincent Barré on 7 Walks With Mark Brown, described as an essay on attention and friendship.

Also in competition is Kunst De Farbe from Argentina, 1985 screenwriter Llinás exploring themes of music, painting and cinema.

Sônia Braga to be honored during opening ceremony

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures Of Ghosts will open the 15th Hollywood Brazilian Film Festival running November 6 to 11.

The documentary, this year’s Brazilian submission for the Oscars, explores the picture palaces of Filho’s hometown of Recife. It will screen at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and premiered in Cannes Special Screenings. US distributors are Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films.

Sônia Braga, star of Kiss Of The Spider Woman and Filho’s Aquarius and Bacurau, will be honoured during the opening ceremony

The year’s line-up was curated by Thiago Macêdo Correia,...

The Venice Gap-Financing Market (September 1-3), part of the Venice Production Bridge, will present 34 fiction and documentary projects.

The Venice Gap-Financing Market (September 1-3), part of the Venice Production Bridge, will present 34 fiction and documentary projects at the 80th Venice International Film Festival (August 30-Septmber 9), including a new project from Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, All Before You.

All Before You offers a retelling of the 1963 farner-led revolt against British colonial rule in Palestine. Jacir’s previous director credits include The Oblivion Theory, which won the top prize at the Berlinale co-production market in 2021, Salt Of This Sea, Wajib and When I Saw You,...

The 10th edition of the Venice Gap-Financing Market, organized as part of the Venice Film Festival’s industry program Venice Production Bridge, has selected 62 projects in the final stages of development and funding.

Filmmakers taking projects to Venice include Jim Sheridan, an Oscar nominee with “In America,” “In the Name of the Father” and “My Left Foot”; Annemarie Jacir, whose credits include Cannes’ “Salt of This Sea,” Berlin’s “When I Saw You” and Locarno’s “Wajib”; Aisling Walsh, who directed “Maudie” with Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, and “Elizabeth Is Missing” with Glenda Jackson; and Kim Mordaunt, who won best debut at Berlin with “The Rocket.”

Also selected are Roberto Minervini, who directed Cannes’ “The Other Side” and Venice’s “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?”; Laurynas Bareisa, who won the Venice Horizons Award for “Pilgrims”; Måns Månsson, who was in Berlin competition with “The Real Estate”; György Pálfi,...

Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, Canadian filmmaker Geneviève Dulude-De Celles, Brazilian filmmaker Ricardo Alves Jr., veteran Hungarian filmmaker György Palfi and Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini are five filmmakers among the 62 projects selected for the 2023 edition of the Venice Gap-Financing Market (September 1st to the 3rd).

The filmmaker behind Wajib in Annemarie Jacir (who also has the book to screen project The Oblivion Theory in the works), will present All Before You at the market. Docu-fiction blending helmer Roberto Minervini (who is among the producers on Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light) is going full fiction with The Damned.…...

New Feature projects by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, Ireland’s Aisling Walsh and Jim Sheridan as well as Romanian filmmaker Anca Damian have been selected for the upcoming edition of the Venice Gap-Financing Market.

The 10th edition of the co-financing meeting will run from Sept. 1 to 3 as part as of the Venice Production Bridge, which is the industry component of the Venice Film Festival (Aug 30 to Sept. 9)

The market will present 62 projects in the final stages of development and funding, selected from 280 submissions.

The selection spans 34 feature-length fiction Film and documentary projects, 14 Immersive projects, 11 Biennale College Cinema – Virtual Reality projects and three Biennale College Cinema projects.

To be eligible for inclusion, the fiction films must have at least 70% of funding in place and be looking for minority partners only.

Full List of Feature Film Projects:

After The Evil (doc) by Tamara Erde, Gloria Films Production All Before You (fiction), by Annemarie Jacir,...

João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s feature world premiers at Cannes next month.

Berlin-based Films Boutique has taken world sales rights to João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora’s The Buriti Flower (A Flor Do Buriti), which world premieres next month in Un Certain Regard at Cannes.

The film has already scored early distribution deals with France’s Ad Vitam, Brazil’s Embaúba Filmes and Portugal’s Desforra Apache

Brazil’s Nader Messora and Portugal’s Salaviza’s previously collaborated on The Dead And The Others, winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2018.

The Buriti Flower saw...

It is fair to assume Criterion could plunder the world of licensed film to build an ultimate noir playlist; credit, then, for focusing sharp and nabbing deep cuts. The Criterion Channel’s November / Noirvember program will be headlined by “Fox Noir,” an eight-title program with Otto Preminger deep cut Fallen Angel, three by Henry Hathaway, Siodmak, Dassin, Kazan, and Robert Wise, and while retrospectives of Veronica Lake and John Garfield will bring some canon into the fold, I’m mostly thinking about that potential for discovery.

Following “Free Jazz,” Bob Hoskins, and Joyce Chopra programs, the other big series is a 30-year survey of Sony Pictures Classics: Sally Potter, Satoshi Kon, Panahi, Errol Morris, Almodóvar, Haneke, Mike Leigh, just a murderer’s row. Streaming premieres include 499 and A Night of Knowing Nothing, two recent epitomes of I Wish I Had Seen That; Criterion Editions comprise Cure, Brazil, Sullivan’s Travels,...

Mexican virtual lab offers Usd 30,000 in cash prizes.

Spanish multiple Cannes award winner Olivier Laxe and Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso are among participants in the expanded third Mexican project lab Catapulta set to run as an entirely virtual event from March 24-27.

Scroll to bottom to see all lab participants

Laxe, whose Fire Will Come won the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury prize in 2019 and followed a 2016 Critics’ Week grand prize for Mimosas and the 2010 Fipresci award for Directors’ Fortnight selection You Are All Captains, takes part in the new development programme.

His project After (France) follows a man and...

Mexican virtual lab offers Usd 30,000 in cash prizes.

Spanish multiple Cannes award winner Olivier Laxe, US auteur Rick Alverson and Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso are among participants in the expanded third Mexican project lab Catapulta set to run as an entirely virtual event from March 24-27.

Scroll to bottom to see all lab participants

Laxe, whose Fire Will Come won the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury prize in 2019 and followed a 2016 Critics’ Week grand prize for Mimosas and the 2010 Fipresci award for Directors’ Fortnight selection You Are All Captains, takes part in the new development programme.

His project After (France...

Exclusive: Ricardo Alves Jr.’s debut feature plays in Iffr’s Bright Futures programme.

Paris-based sales agent Wide Management has acquired international rights to Brazilian drama Elon Doesn’t Believe In Death, which is having its European premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr).

The Portuguese-language film is the debut feature of director Ricardo Alves Jr., whose previous shorts Tremor and Permanencias both drew festival attention.

The film is playing in Iffr’s Bright Futures strand after previously world premiering at the Brazilia Festival of Brazilian Cinema in September 2016.

Elon Doesn’t Believe In Death follows the titular Elon as he searches for his missing wife at night in the sprawling Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte after she mysteriously disappears.

Director Alves also produced the project and co-wrote with Diego Hoefel, Germano Melo and João Salaviza.

Wide has also picked up further Iffr title The Last Painting, the Taiwanese film that is world premiering in the...

Exclusive: Iffr reveals lineup and jury for programme focused on emerging filmmakers.

International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) (25 Jan – 5 Feb) has announced the full line-up of its Bright Future programme, including the titles that will compete for the Bright Future Award.

Scroll down for the full lineup

The competition for the Bright Future Award 2017 consists of sixteen debut films, including Chinese documentary Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts by Rong Guang Rong and Caroline Leone’s melancholy Brazilian road movie Pela Janela. Also competing are Belgian title Inside the Distance and German feature Self-Criticism Of A Bourgeois Dog.

The jury for the award will be made up of Italian film producer Marta Donzelli (Le Quattro Volte); Marleen Slot, Netherlands producer for Viking Film (Neon Bull) and chair of Film Producers Netherlands (Fpn); and Jean-Pierre Rehm, director of the French film festival Fid Marseille.

Outside of this competition, Bright Future also presents...

The Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) has selected twenty-five film projects that receive grants for script development, digital production, postproduction, distribution or workshops. In its Fall 2012 selection round, the Fund gave 330,000 Euro to projects from seventeen Asian, Eastern European, Latin-American and African countries. (See full list below)

From many strong applications for workshop initiatives, the Hubert Bals Fund chose to support the Naas Training Workshop (Egypt), the Digital Cinema Workshops Series (Morocco) and Cinema Land (Vietnam). The Naas workshop offers a training and networking program for art house and cine club managers in the Mena region. In Morocco, the Workshop Series aims to increase digital filming skills among young film professionals. Cinema Land offers filmmaking talents expertise and training in the Central-Vietnamese cities of Danang and Hue, where there are no such facilities as yet.

In the distribution category, the Hubert Bals Fund supports the plan to screen acclaimed director Riri Riza’s Atambua 39° Celsius (pictured top) during open air screenings – the region has no cinemas - within the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara, where the film was shot.

Atambua 39° Celsius received Hubert Bals Fund support for digital production earlier this year, recently premiered in competition at the Tokyo Iff and will see its European premiere during Iffr 2013. The film offers a sensitive portrait of refugees from East Timor and of their scattered families.

One of the eleven projects selected in the script development category is Tarde para morir joven (Late To Die Young), second feature film project by Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor. Her very successful début feature film De jueves a domingo (Thursday Till Sunday), also supported in script stage by the Hubert Bals Fund, won a Hivos Tiger Award in Rotterdam and subsequently screened in many film festivals worldwide. Tarde para morir joven tells about members of an isolated community that see their existence threatened by a forest fire.

Also selected for script development support is Teboho Edkins, a promising new talent from South Africa, who prepares his first feature length film Days of Cannibalism. Edkins previously made The Gangster Project, a 55-minute documentary/fiction hybrid that was selected for Fid Marseille and Iffr 2012. In Days of Cannibalism, Edkins again uses a clever mix of documentary and fictional elements to focus on the expanding trade relations between China and the African continent.

Milagros Mumenthaler, Golden Leopard-winner for her Hubert Bals Fund-supported first feature film Abrir puertas y ventanas (Back to Stay), has been granted digital production support for Pozo de aire (Air Pocket). This second film, backed again by the ‘Abrir’-team in Argentina and Switzerland, is a more low budget and experimental take on female lead characters and the notion of absence.

When finished in time, the films receiving postproduction grants are expected to screen at the 2013 International Film Festival Rotterdam. One of these is Yang Tidak Dibicarakan Ketika Membicarakan Cinta (What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love), second feature film project by Mouly Surya, one the most promising female directors in Indonesia. Her film is a both sensitive and sensual examination of the dynamics among a group of teenagers played by visually and aurally impaired actors.

The harvest of newly finished Hubert Bals Fund-supported films will be screened during the next International Film Festival Rotterdam (23 January – 3 February 2013). The next application deadline for Hubert Bals Fund support is 1 March 2013. All information about the Fund may be found here.

The line up of the Iffr’s Hubert Bals Fund Fall 2013 Selection Round in full:

Post-production & final-financing

Noche (Night) / Leonardo Brzezicki / Argentina

O Rio nos pretence (Rio Belongs to Us) / Ricardo Pretti / Brazil

O Uivo da Gaita (The Harmonica’s Howl) / Bruno Safadi / Brazil

On Mother’s Head / Kusuma Widjaja Putu / Indonesia

Yang Tidak Dibicarakan Ketika Membicarakan Cinta (What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love) / Mouly Surya / Indonesia

Larzanandeye Charbi (Fat Shaker) / Mohammad Shirvani / Iran

Something Necessary / Judy Kibinge / Kenya

Penumbra / Eduardo Villanueva / Mexico

Digital Production

A Corner of Heaven / Zhang Miaoyan / China

Pozo de aire (Air Pocket) / Milagros Mumenthaler / Argentina

Script and project development

Otra madre (Another Mother) / Mariano Luque / Argentina

Tabija / Igor Drljaca / Bosnia and Herzegovina

Elon Rabin Não Acredita na Morte (Elon Rabin Doesn’t Believe in Death) / Ricardo Alves Jr. / Brazil

Tarde para morir joven (Late To Die Young) / Dominga Sotomayor / Chile

Oscuro animal (Obscure Animal) / Felipe Guerrero / Colombia

Court / Chaitanya Tamhane / India

The Room on a Tree / Amit Dutta / India

Extraño pero verdadero (Strange But True) / Michel Lipkes / Mexico

Tempestad (Tempestuous) / John Torres / Philippines

Days of Cannibalism / Teboho Edkins / South Africa

Rüzgarli Bir Güne Agit (Requiem for a Windy Day) / Özcan Alper / Turkey

Distribution

Atambua 39° Celsius / Riri Riza / Indonesia

Workshops

Naas Training Workshop / Egypt

Digital Cinema Workshop Series / Morocco

Cinema Land / Vietnam

Profile of the Hubert Bals Fund

The Hubert Bals Fund (Hbf), along with the CineMart, is part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr). The 42nd Iffr will take place January 23 – February 3, 2013. Year-round news on Iffr, Hbf and CineMart can be found on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com.

The Hubert Bals Fund is designed to bring remarkable or urgent feature films and feature-length creative documentaries by innovative and talented filmmakers from developing countries closer to completion. The Hubert Bals Fund provides grants that often turn out to play a crucial role in enabling these filmmakers to realize their projects. Although the Fund looks closely at the financial aspects of a project, the decisive factors remain its content and artistic value. Since the Fund started in 1989, hundreds of projects from independent filmmakers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe have received support. Approximately 80% of these projects have been realized or are currently in production. Every year, the Iffr screens completed films supported by the Fund.

The Hubert Bals Fund is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Media Mundus, Dutch non-governmental development organization Hivos Culture Foundation, the Doen Foundation and the Dioraphte Foundation and Lions Club Rotterdam: L’Esprit du Temps.

Grants and selection rounds

Annually, the Hubert Bals Fund is able to make individual grants of up to Euro 10,000 for script and project development, Euro 20,000 for digital production, Euro 30,000 for post-production, Euro 15,000 towards distribution costs in the country of origin or Euro 10,000 for special projects such as workshops. Selection rounds take place twice a year and have application deadlines on March 1 and August 1.

Hubert Bals Fund-supported films in Iffr and on DVD/VOD

Most of the films supported by the Hubert Bals Fund throughout the year are screened during the International Film Festival Rotterdam in attendance of the filmmaker. Subsequently, part of the Hbf-supported films is released by the Iffr on DVD or VOD, available on www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com (VOD for viewers in the Benelux only).

A Sundance favorite, a follow-up to a budget-less art house hit, and an anticipated Israeli film are a few of the highlights from the announced lineup for the 2011 Critic's Week (aka Semaine de la Critique), the oldest sidebar in Cannes. The selection only admits films which are either debut or sophomore efforts, so we'll be going in knowing scant details on what to expect, and likely coming out with some new major voices to follow. As we can see in the quintet of posters, past Critic's Week discoveries includes cinema gods Wong Kar-wai and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as Jacques Audiard and Barbet Schroeder. As this is the sidebar's 50th anniversary, there might be even more treats to be announced in the near future. Yesterday, we reported that Hagar Ben Asher's The Slut had been selected for competition, and this was corroborated this morning. Ben Asher is an alumni of...