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Mubi and Hay Festival have inked a partnership to launch a cinema screening series at this year’s edition of the literary event.

The screening series will run daily at Hay and take place at The Mubi Cinema, a new venue that will launch this year at the festival.

Some of the films set for the fest include Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun. The festival will also hold an onstage in-conversation session on Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, which Rebecca Lenkiewicz has adapted for the screen for Mubi. The film debuted at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

“We are excited to bring some of our very best Mubi Releases to Hay Festival, as we believe that great cinema transcends traditional spaces,” Tsari Paxton, Director of UK Marketing at Mubi said in a statement. “We hope the thought-provoking films we champion inspire audiences...

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off its 75th anniversary edition February 13 with the opening-night world premiere screening of The Light, Tom Tykwer’s politically charged film that takes stock of German society in the first quarter of the 21st century. It starts 11 days of debuts including for movies starring Jessica Chastain, Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Rupert Friend, Marion Cotillard, Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Emma Mackey and more.

The 2025 Berlinale runs through February 23.

Keep checking back below as Deadline reviews the best and buzziest movies of the festival. Click on the titles to read the full reviews.

Blue Moon

Section: Competition

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott

Deadline’s takeaway: Richard Linklater’s Broadway chamber piece looks back to a lost time and mourns a lost soul in Lorenz Hart as the booze is about to consume him. In a bravura theatrical performance, Ethan Hawke...

A daughter cares for her mother’s enigmatic condition while seeking freedom from familial expectations. The film reveals a somber story set against a coastal European landscape, where the relentless sea reflects the internal struggles of its characters.

The environment communicates through muted tones, with barren shores and overcast skies serving as silent observers of a life defined by care and limitation. The adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel explores the reversal of caregiver roles: the nurturer becomes dependent, and caregiving evolves into a quiet, oppressive experience.

The story unfolds within a landscape as significant as its characters. The coastal setting, cold and indifferent, deepens the film’s contemplative essence, creating a space where despair and subtle hope intersect. The director, transitioning from crafting screen narratives, creates a visual experience that moves between moments of raw insight and shadowed uncertainty.

The tension between fragile family connections and the unforgiving external...

Perhaps no one is more excited about the Berlinale than Fiona Shaw.

The Irish actress is no stranger to the German capital — she’s directed a performance at the city’s opera house, Deutsche Oper Berlin — but it is a first appearance at the film festival.

“I’m just going to see everything I can see in any moment I’m not needed by the press,” Shaw, famed for roles in Harry Potter, Jane Eyre and Killing Eve, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m excited that a festival exists in which a lot of people are going to turn up in order to see films. I just admire that that is still what we do.”

This year, attendees will be turning up to see Shaw as the wheelchair-bound Rose in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut, Hot Milk. Based on the bestselling novel by Deborah Levy, (though, as Shaw points out,...

There are numerous first time directors at this year’s Berlinale, but few come with the sort of indie film credits on Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s resume.

The British playwright and screenwriter had worked on the script for Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning “Ida” alongside the director, on “Disobedience” with Sebastián Lelio and on “Colette” with Wash Westmoreland, before going it alone to turn Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about their industry-shaking Harvey Weinstein expose into the script that would become Maria Schrader’s “She Said” in 2022.

But with “Hot Milk,” which bowed at the Palaste on Friday, she moved closer to the camera and made it her directorial debut. Adapted (by Lenkiewicz) from Deborah Levy’s book and shot in Greece, the story is set under the hot Spanish summer and follows Sofia, a young woman (Emma Mackey) in a co-dependent relationship with her wheelchair-bound mother Rose (Fiona Shaw...

A cantankerous Shaw undercuts her daughter’s summer sexual awakening in this interestingly elusive adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel

Dramatist and film-maker Rebecca Lenkiewicz presents Berlin with a complicated, interestingly elusive Valentine’s Day present: her adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk, which appears to anaesthetise emotional pain with the sensual languour of a summer sexual awakening, that title perhaps alluding to the overheated, unwholesome quality of the mother’s milk metaphorically involved in a parent-child relationship. Or perhaps it ironically inverts the idea of a placidly bedtime drink of northern climes, which is of no earthly interest in the film’s passionately sunny, southern European settings.

Fiona Shaw gives an excellent performance as Rose – querulous, cantankerous, witty – an Irish woman in her 60s using a wheelchair due to some mysterious ailment or psychosomatic condition. If it is the second, what is the cause? She has brought...

The Eternal Daughter: Lenkiewicz Ladles the Milk of Sorrows

Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz makes her directorial debut with Hot Milk, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s comically menacing 2016 novel about a daughter tethered to a mysteriously ailing mother. Or, rather, it’s narrative about the point of un-tethering, fashioned a bit like the reverse situation of the Joseph Conrad novella The End of Tether (1902), wherein an aging sea captain lives solely for the happiness of his child. Having penned a number of high profile femme centered scripts, such as Disobedience (2017) for Sebastian Lelio and She Said (2022) for Maria Schrader, Lenkiewicz returns to a distilled, sinister sense of uneasiness which she mined so eloquently in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), where a relationship between women remains weighted down by a past they’ve been unable to articulate.…...

Sofia takes a picture of Ingrid, her summer friend, at her sewing table. “Your August in Almeria…” murmurs Ingrid (a wonderfully feline Vicky Krieps) as she takes pliant Sofia (Emma Mackey) in her arms. But Almeria doesn’t look much of a romantic idyll here, at least wherever Sofia chooses to go: it’s all industrial sites, mean little lean-to cafes, rocky breakwaters and concrete boxes of holiday shacks, besieged by mosquitoes.

Even the sea, her cool blue refuge, teems with poisonous tentacles. “We should have rented somewhere else,” sniffs her mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) from her wheelchair. “I like it here,” says Sofia mutinously. It’s a very low-level mutiny. Fetching and carrying for her mother is Sofia’s life.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation of Deborah Levy’s award-winning 2016 novel hums with tension from the first moment we see tourists on a strip of beach in front of bald,...

A mother-daughter relationship is rarely a love story, at least not in any of the ways art has dramatized it thus far. Sure, a mother loves her daughter deeply (and vice-versa), but it is a sentiment defined by ambivalence and often laced with resentment. British writer Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel Hot Milk speaks to the very core of that ambivalence; seasoned screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz has now adapted the acclaimed book into her first foray as a director. Set during a hot and heavy summer in Almería on the southeastern coast of Spain, the blistering Hot Milk follows 25-year-old Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her partially paralyzed mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) as they navigate everyday ailing and maternal traumas, always together and somehow always apart.

“My mom stopped walking when I was four,” Sofia tells the unconventional healer Dr. Gómez (Vincent Perez), who is the reason for their Spanish trip. Rose suffers...

“I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you it was wonderful,” reads the epigraph of Hot Milk. That quote is almost too easy to turn back against the film, but sometimes the simplest way to dismiss something is also the easiest. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut feels like hell to endure, and none of its mother-daughter drama is wonderful, not least because the screenplay is too self-conscious in its avoidance of verbalization to propel the narrative forward. Lenkiewicz counts on her collaborators to sell the deliberate ambiguities of the story, but nothing sticks to the nebulously designed framework of the film.

Adapted by Lenkiewicz from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel of the same name, the film never gains momentum within its cascading rhythm of staccato sequences that establish just how out of sync its central mother-daughter pair is. The ailing Rose (Fiona Shaw) suffers from an illness that feels too conveniently metaphoric.

When Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) glides up to Sofia (Emma Mackey) on horseback like a manic-pixie mirage, Sofia immediately allured, or when Ingrid tells Sofia, “Do you have cigarettes? Ok, let’s go,” even though they’ve just met, you want to believe they’re riding on some hidden code of desire, psychically linked strangers sun-baking on the Iberian peninsula of Spain. Ingrid, a German expat styled in a flowy headscarf like a breezy lesbian pirate or swashbuckling bar wench, is such a void of a woman in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut “Hot Milk” that this study of sapphic malaise along the Mediterranean becomes oddly sizzle-less.

Adapting Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, whose title unsubtly conjures images of breastfeeding among other bodily activities related to reproduction, the “She Said” and “Disobedience” screenwriter casts Mackey and Krieps as lovers among the ruins of Fiona Shaw’s distress. The great Irish actress plays Rose,...

Sex Education star Emma Mackey has described starring in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk as a “baptism of fire.”

The movie premiered at the Berlin Film Festival today and is the debut directing project for She Said scribe Lenkiewicz.

Mackey said filming was tough but she heaped praise on Lenkiewicz. “We had to come in on a baptism of fire – it was hot and we didn’t have much time – but [Lenkiewicz] created that environment and surrounded yourself with the right amount of people.”

Based on the novel by Deborah Levy, Hot Milk sees Mackey play Sofia, who embarks on a journey to a Spanish clinic in a search of a medical cure for her mother Rose’s paralysis. Rose is played by Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps stars as Ingrid in the movie, which is distributed by Mubi.

Mackey said there was a “huge amount of trust” on set, which “helped me feel freer.

When Emma Mackey met Vicky Krieps, she couldn’t help but blush.

The two actors play love interests Sofia and Ingrid in “Hot Milk,” Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s feature directorial debut that premieres at Berlin Film Festival on Friday, and the first scene they shot together also marked the first time they’d truly interacted.

“I didn’t get to meet her before we started shooting, and I remember the first scene we shot was on the beach. It’s the first time Sofia sees Ingrid, and Vicky looked at me and I blushed,” Mackey tells Variety. “And that just tells you — I was like, ‘Wow, how did she do that?'”

Based on Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel of the same name, “Hot Milk” follows a daughter and mother — played by Mackey and Fiona Shaw, respectively — who “wrestle with co-dependency and desire by the Spanish seaside,” according to the synopsis. “Yearning for freedom,...

Rebecca Lenkiewitz’s debut feature Hot Milk, based on Deborah Levy’s novel, will arrive in cinemas this May. More on the film below.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz is best known as a writer, having penned the scripts for films like Ida and She Said, but she’s now moving behind the camera.

Her first feature is Hot Milk, a story of a mother and daughter under the hot Spanish sun. The film has quite the cast too; Fiona Shaw, Emma Mackey and Vicky Krieps, alongside Vincent Perez star in Lenkiewitz’s debut.

Lenkiewicz has also written the script based on Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name.

Hot Milk will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on 14th February where it’ll screen as part of the festival’s official competition. Ahead of the premiere, Mubi has acquired the film and will be bringing the film...

Emma Mackey y Vicky Krieps protagonizan la película. © Caramel Films

Ya se han dado a conocer las películas que competirán por el Oso de Oro en el Festival Internacional de Cine de Berlín –más conocido como Berlinale– en su 75 edición, que se celebrará del 13 al 23 de febrero.

Entre las películas a concurso está Agua salada, el debut como directora de Rebecca Lenkiewicz, la guionista detrás de títulos como Ida, Al descubierto y Colette.

Esta ópera prima, basada en la aclamada novela Leche caliente de Deborah Levy, se traslada –o más o menos, porque la grabación fue en Grecia– al abrasador paisaje almeriense. Almería se convierte en un lienzo épico para una íntima exploración del sexo, el amor y los lazos que nos unen a todos.

El filme sigue a Sofía y su madre, Rose, en su viaje desde Gran Bretaña hasta la costa de Almería. Lejos de la rutina y el control de su madre,...

The Berlin International Film Festival has revealed an impressive selection of films for its upcoming 75th edition, blending Hollywood star power with global cinema. The event, known as the Berlinale, will run for 11 days starting February 13.

The festival will open with “The Light,” a refugee drama by German director Tom Tykwer. Nineteen films will compete for the coveted Golden and Silver Bear awards, with new festival director Tricia Tuttle steering the program toward films that balance artistic merit with audience appeal.

Hollywood heavyweight Richard Linklater leads the high-profile entries with “Blue Moon,” starring Ethan Hawke. The film tells the story of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart and features a strong supporting cast including Margaret Qualley and Andrew Scott.

Jessica Chastain headlines Michel Franco’s new drama “Dreams,” playing a socialite who falls for an immigrant ballet dancer. This marks the second partnership between Chastain and Franco, following their work on “Memory.

Mubi has added additional territories on Rebecca LenkiewIcz’s directorial debut Hot Milk, selected today for its world premiere in Competition at the Berlinale.

Mubi will now release the film in Germany, Austria and India. The distributor had previously acquired rights for UK-Ireland, Italy, Latin America and Turkey.

HanWay Films handles international sales on the film, with deals already in place for iFC Films in North America; Metropolitan Films in France; Caramel and Karma in Spain; The Searchers in Benelux; Nos in Portugal; Scanbox in Scandinavia; M2 in Eastern Europe; Front Row in the Middle East; Shaw in Singapore; and...

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival (February 13-23) has unveiled the 19 titles set to play in its official Competition and films selected for its new competitive Perspectives strand.

Scroll down for full list

New films from Richard Linklater, Hong Sangsoo, Michel Franco and Radu Jude are among those selected for the main competition, with stars including Margaret Qualley, Ethan Hawke, Jessica Chastain, Claes Bang and Marion Cotillard.

It marks the first Competition lineup from new festival director Tricia Tuttle, who announced the titles alongside co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz in Berlin today (January 21).

All Competition titles...

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival (February 13-23) has unveiled the 19 titles set to play in its official Competition and films selected for its new competitive Perspectives strand.

Scroll down for full list

New films from Richard Linklater, Hong Sangsoo, Michel Franco and Radu Jude are among those selected for the main competition, with stars including Margaret Qualley, Ethan Hawke, Jessica Chastain, Claes Bang and Marion Cotillard.

It marks the first Competition lineup from new festival director Tricia Tuttle, who announced the titles alongside co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz in Berlin today (January 21).

All Competition titles...

Emma MacKay is set to star alongside Glen Powell (The Running Man) and Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) in the new mystery box movie from J.J. Abrams. The actress is best known for starring in Netflix’s Sex Education, which wrapped up its four-season run last year.

Plot details are being kept under wraps (big surprise). It was previously speculated that the film would involve time travel, but sources have said that’s not the case. Damn you, mystery box! The project is expected to kick off production next year with Abrams directing from a script he wrote. He will also produce through his Bad Robot banner. This will mark Abrams’ first feature film since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which was released in 2019.

Related Sex Education season 4 trailer will do anything for love

Since breaking onto the scene with Sex Education, MacKay has appeared in Death on the Nile, played...

British actress Emma Mackey (“Barbie”) has landed the female lead opposite Glen Powell in J.J. Abrams’ forthcoming, untitled Warner Bros. movie.

Details about both Mackey’s role and the project in general are being kept under wraps. The film also stars Jenna Ortega.

Not much is known about Abrams’ new film except that it is not a time travel movie (as had been previously speculated) and that Abrams both wrote the script and will be directing. The project will be produced by Abrams and his production company Bad Robot.

Mackey, who first broke out with her role as Maeve Wiley on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” most recently starred in Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-winning “Barbie.” She is also the 2023 recipient of BAFTA’s Rising Star Award,

Other credits include playing famed novelist and poet Emily Brontë in Frances O’Connor’s Warner Bros drama “Emily,” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile.

BAFTA winner Emma Mackey (Barbie) is set to star opposite new A-listers Glen Powell and Jenna Ortega in J.J. Abrams’ still-untitled mystery movie for Warner Bros and his Bad Robot, Deadline has learned.

Mackey’s role is under wraps, as is the film’s plot, though we hear it’s not a time-travel film, as some have conjectured. Abrams will direct from his own script, with Bad Robot producing.

A 2023 recipient of BAFTA’s Rising Star Award, Mackey has most recently seen in Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-winning Warner Bros phenom Barbie, prior to that taking on the lead as famed novelist and poet Emily Brontë in Frances O’Connor’s Warner Bros drama Emily. Breaking out with her role as Maeve Wiley on Netflix’s Sex Education, Mackey has also previously been seen in Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile. Upcoming, she’ll star opposite Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps...

As far as hit Netflix reality TV shows go, The Circle is arguably one of the best. Season 7 is going out with a bang since it’s full of attention-grabbing cast members who’ve been captivating the attention of Netflix viewers since Episode 1. If you’re unfamiliar with the rules of The Circle, just know that it’s incredibly similar to participating in a popularity contest based on your social media presence. But, who’s gearing up to take home the cash prize this time around?

The Circle Season 7’s Potential Winner

There’s been a lot of speculation about who will come out on top by the conclusion of this latest season of The Circle. According to The Direct, there are nine contestants left who might win Season 7. Some folks are playing as themselves in the lineup, while there are also a handful of catfishes sprinkled into the mix.

There is a subgenre that basks in the creaturely natures of girls and women. Forget the ethereal sisters of “The Virgin Suicides” for here are some hot messes. Found in the literature of Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter and Deborah Levy and in films by Josephine Decker and Luna Carmoon, this is a mode of characterisation that delights in stripping away the illusion of a “fairer sex” in order to marinate in the feminine grotesque.

Ariane Labed’s entry to this canon, her directorial feature debut “September Says,” is infused with her own history as a Greek New Wave actress. There are shades of her break-out role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ claustrophobic family drama “Dogtooth” and a callback to her animal impressions in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s sublime, underrated “Attenberg.” Otherwise, Labed follows the sketchy map laid out by Daisy Johnson’s source novel, “Sisters.”

September (Pascale Kann) is older than her...

Jumper, Justin Anderson’s first short, opened on a naked man bathing in a pool. Conceived in 2014 for the tenth anniversary of British fashion designer Jonathan Saunders, the film was a riff on Pasolini’s Teorema; it followed a lunar stranger who shows up uninvited at a luscious Spanish villa and upends the frigid lives of its tenants. Ten years later, the same idea and shot survive more or less intact in Anderson’s feature debut, Swimming Home, based on a 2011 Man Booker-shortlisted novel by Deborah Levy. Except this time the setting is a summer home on an unidentified Greek island, the nude intruder a young woman, and her target is not a whole family but its taciturn, haunted patriarch.

His name his Josef (Christopher Abbott); hers is Kitti (Ariane Labed). He’s a poet and she’s a botanist––but this is his story, not hers, and for all...

There’s a luxuriantly sensuous quality to the prose of British novelist Deborah Levy — a tactile grasp of land, weather and flesh — that feels intensely cinematic while reading it, as well as an elliptical, concentrated interior psychology that feels liable to trip up any potential adapters. Those rewards and risks hold true in “Swimming Home,” a seductive but opaque adaptation of Levy’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name, in which the author’s knack for epigrammatic character portraiture and hothouse emotional conflict yields more superficially enigmatic results on screen. In his feature directing debut, British video artist Justin Anderson carries over a chicly serrated, off-kilter audiovisual sense from his commercials and short-form work; his scripting is less assured, as is his command of a fine but under-tested ensemble led by Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis and Ariane Labed.

Recently premiered in competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival, “Swimming Home...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Rotterdam film festival: A self-conscious adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel makes glib reference to the Bosnian war while it focuses on unsexy erotic tension at a luxury villa

Lugubrious, laborious and ridiculous – this movie version of Deborah Levy’s celebrated novel Swimming Home is frankly uncomfortable in the most wrong way possible. Film-maker and artist Justin Anderson has established himself as a creative visual talent but for this feature debut he has somehow conjured awful, torpid performances from his excellent cast, perpetually crowding up to them with pedantic, over-determined closeups. His film insists on a bafflingly unsexy and uninteresting type of erotic tension and conflates the result with a supposed repressed agony from the Bosnian war – which is invoked in the most glib and perfunctory way.

Joe (Christopher Abbott) is a famous poet of Bosnian extraction arriving at a luxurious holiday villa in Greece with his American wife Isabel...

Marriage Story: Justin Anderson Serves Up An Enigmatic Challenge Is His Feature Debut

A marriage in crisis cooks under the summer sun in filmmaker Justin Anderson’s enervating feature debut Swimming Home. Stripping away the narrative thrust and many of the characters in his adaptation of Deborah Levy’s excellent acclaimed novella, the director attempts to grapple more directly with the enigmas at its haunted core. But saddled with deliberately alienating and obfuscating symbolism, the resulting effort is a tedious, overly earnest po-faced slow burn.

Vacationing in a luxe villa in the Greek countryside, Joseph (Christopher Abbott), his wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), and their teenage daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) have barely had time to welcome the arrival of family friend Laura (Nadine Labaki) when the mysterious Kitti (Ariane Labed) is found pleasantly floating naked in their swimming pool.…...

Award-winning artist Justin Anderson’s debut feature “Swimming Home” has its world premiere in competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam. Variety has secured access to the first clip from the film.

The film, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, centers on poet Joe (Christopher Abbott) and war photographer Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), whose marriage is dying when Kitti (Ariane Labed), a naked stranger found floating in the pool at their sunny holiday villa in Greece, is invited to stay. Oscar nominated Lebanese actor-director Nadine Labaki plays a significant role in the film as does emerging actor Freya Hannan-Mills.

In 2014, Anderson directed “Jumper,” a short inspired by Pasolini’s “Teorema,” about a man emerging from a pool and standing naked in the window during a family dinner. A friend saw the film and suggested that he read Levy’s novel. The book resonated with Anderson and he contacted Levy.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) opens this evening with New Zealand director Jonathan Olgilvie’s coming-of-age tale Head South set against the late 1970s, post-punk music culture of his home city of Christchurch.

IFFR previously selected Olgilvie’s sci-fi thriller Lone Wolf for its Big Screen Competition in 2021.

“It’s the first time we’re going to meet him in person because it was during Corona,” says IFFR Artistic Director Vanja Kaludjercic of the first selection.

“When you put the two films side by side, you ask how can one filmmaker make two such different films,” she adds. “We really admire his creativity and ingenuity.”

Over the course of the next 10 days, Rotterdam will screen some 440 works.

The Main Competition for this 53rd edition is characteristically diverse.

The 14 features in the running for the main Tiger Award include Brooklyn-based filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, exploring the life of the titular,...

M. Raihan Halim’s “La Luna” will close the 53rd edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam, which has also revealed the lineup of its Tiger competition section, a platform for up-and-coming filmmakers, and Big Screen Competition, a program for more established talent.

“La Luna,” which has its European premiere at the festival, is a comedy about a conservative Malaysian village shaken by the arrival of a lingerie store.

Among the Tiger competition films is British director Justin Anderson’s “Swimming Home,” starring Mackenzie Davis, Christopher Abbott and Ariane Labed. Adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel, it centers on Joe and Isabel, whose marriage is dying when Kitti, a naked stranger found floating in the pool at their holiday villa, is invited to stay. Kitti collects and eats poisonous plants, and Nina their teenage daughter is enthralled by her. The film, which is being sold by Bankside Films, is described as...

‘Swimming Home’ is directed by Justin Anderson and stars Mackenzie Davies, Christopher Abbott and Ariane Labed.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has unveiled the Tiger and Big Screen programmes for the 3rd edition, taking place January 25 – February 4, 2024 in the Netherlands.

Justin Anderson’s Swimming Home, starring Mackenzie Davies, Christopher Abbott and Ariane Labed, is among the titles world premiering in the Tiger Competition.

Scroll down for full line-up

The drama is adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel about a woman who implores the help of a naked stranger found floating in her pool. It is produced by Emily Morgan’s UK outfit Quiddity Films,...

Our most anticipated feature debut films for this year is indeed ready but it’ll be dropping in 2024 instead. Perhaps a fest that is big on debut films might lasso Justin Anderson‘s Swimming Home. The commercials director grabbed the rights to adapt the book by (Deborah Levy) a good decade ago and managed to land quite the producing team and quartet of indie-auteur-world-cinema vets Ariane Labed, Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis and Nadine Labaki for what is a vacation film in Greece that takes a turn for the best/worst? Production took place in October of last year.

Gist: This is a dark comedy about a troubled married couple and their teenage daughter whose holiday is transformed by the naked stranger they find floating in the pool of their villa.…...

A group of 200 internationally renowned writers, publishers, directors and producers have signed an open letter sounding the alarm over the implications of AI for human creativity.

“Several generative models of language and images have recently appeared in the public and private domains; they are developing at breakneck speed, accessible to all for any task which involves writing and creating,” read the letter, published online on Tuesday.

“These models are shaping a world where, little by little, creation can do without human beings, thereby hastening the automation of many creative and intellectual professions formerly deemed inaccessible to mechanization.”

The letter, initiated by European translation professionals under the banner of “Collective For Human Translation – In Flesh And Blood”, comes amid growing concern about the impact of generative AI technology on professionals working in the creative industries.

Signatories from the literary world included Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux (Happening) as well as best-selling...

“Emily” star Emma Mackey has joined the cast of “Hot Milk,” the adaptation of the bestselling novel by Deborah Levy.

The BAFTA winner will lead the cast alongside Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve”), Vicky Krieps (“Corsage”), Vincent Perez (“Shantaram”) and Patsy Ferran (“Living”). HanWay Films has worldwide sales rights and will shop the pic to buyers in Cannes next week.

“Hot Milk” marks the directorial debut of award-winning writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz. It will start shooting in July in Greece in co-production with Heretic Films.

The film explores the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship against the hot and atmospheric backdrop of Almería in Spain.

The story centers on Rose (Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Mackey), who travel to a seaside resort in Spain, to consult with the shamanic Dr Gomez (Perez), a physician who could possibly hold the cure to Rose’s mystery illness, which has left her bound to a wheelchair.

The deals include on titles ‘Talk To Me’, ‘Swimming Home’ and ‘Raised Eyebrows’

London-based sales agent Bankside Films has closed numerous deals off the back of Cannes, on titles including Talk To Me, Swimming Home and Raised Eyebrows.

Horror Talk To Me is directed by Australian YouTube sensations Danny and Michael Philppou (aka RackaRacka), and is in post-production.

It has sold to Altitude (UK-Ireland), the Gp Cinema (Baltics), Premiere Distribution (Benelux), McF (Former Yugoslavia), Alba Films (France), Capelight (Germany), Vertigo Media (Hungary), Koch (Italy), The Coup (Korea), M2 (Poland), Scanbox (Scandinavia), Praesens (Switzerland), A Really Good Film Company (Taiwan and...

Screen is rounding up the key packages launched before and during this year’s Cannes Marche du Film (which runs May 17-25).

Screen is rounding up the key packages launched before and during this year’s Cannes Marche du Film (which runs May 17-25).

Refresh the page for latest updates.

May 18 Stone Mattress

Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh have signed on to star in Lynne Ramsey’s new thriller. The project is based on a short story by Margaret Atwood and is produced by John Lesher and JoAnne Sellar. Amazon are handling domestic rights. Studiocanal and Film4 are in final negotiations to board the project.

IFC Films has acquired U.S. distribution rights from HanWay Films on Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s “Hot Milk,” starring Academy Award nominee Jessie Buckley, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps.

Streaming service Mubi has also agreed a multi-territory deal for the film in the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Latin America and Turkey. Meanwhile, HanWay has also sold the pic into Metropolitan Films (France), The Searchers (Benelux), Scanbox (Scandinavia), M2 (Eastern Europe), A-One (Baltics), Front Row (Middle East) and Shaw (Singapore).

The film marks the directorial debut for acclaimed screenwriter Lenkiewicz, whose writing credits include Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning “Ida,” Keira Knightley-led biopic “Colette” and the forthcoming Harvey Weinstein drama “She Said.”

“Hot Milk” is based on the bestselling novel by Deborah Levy and centers on the relationship between single mother Rose (Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Buckley), who travel to southern Spain in order to see a medical consultant that might...

Following the tragic passing of Gaspard Ulliel, one of the projects he was attached to has found a new actor. 1917 star George MacKay will now lead Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast alongside Léa Seydoux, Variety reports. Set to begin in August, the decades-spanning dystopian romance thriller is set in both Paris and California and will film in French and English. “Set in the near future where emotions have become a threat,” the synopsis reads, “Seydoux stars as Gabrielle, a woman who has finally decided to purify her DNA in a machine that will immerse her in her past lives and rid her of any strong feelings. But when she meets Louis (Mackay) and although he seems dangerous she feels a powerful connection to him as if she’d known him forever.”

After news broke earlier this year that Bong Joon-ho’s next film would be an adaptation of Edward Ashton...

The adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel will be directed by Justin Anderson.

Ariane Labed, Christopher Abbott and Mackenzie Davis have signed to star in Justin Anderson’s directorial debut Swimming Home, which Bankside Films is introducing to international buyers at Cannes. US rights are being co-repped by UTA Independent Film Group and WME Independent.

The film is an adaptation of the Man Booker Prize-nominated novel of the same name by Deborah Levy and is a dark comedy about a troubled married couple and their teenage daughter whose holiday is transformed by the naked stranger they find floating in the pool of their villa.

Jessie Buckley Set to Return to the Screen for Film Based on a Novel — Jessie Buckley has been cast in a new dramatic film called Hot Milk which is based on a novel by Deborah Levy. Irish actress Jessie Buckley is a true movie star in every sense of the way. She gave the performance [...]

Continue reading: Hot Milk: Jessie Buckley Cast in Upcoming Film Based on Deborah Levy’s Novel...

Jessie Buckley, Fiona Shaw and Vicky Krieps have signed on to star in “Hot Milk,” the debut directorial feature from “Colette” screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

The film is based on Deborah Levy’s best-selling novel about a mother and daughter, Rose and Sofia, who travel to a Spanish clinic in the hoping of finding a cure for Rose’s paralysis.

Shaw (“Killing Eve”) will play Rose, while Buckley, who recently appeared in “The Lost Daughter,” will play her daughter Sofia. Krieps (“Phantom Thread”) will appear as an “enigmatic traveller” called Ingrid whom Sofia becomes friendly with, much to her controlling mother’s ire.

The film explores the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship against the hot and atmospheric backdrop of Almería in Spain.

“Hot Milk” is in pre-production and will start shooting in Almería in Sept. 2022. Sales will launch at the European Film Market with HanWay Films representing worldwide sales rights.

Lenkiewicz is known for writing “Disobedience,...

It is the debut feature from UK writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

Fiona Shaw, Jessie Buckley and Vicky Krieps are set to star in Hot Milk, the directorial debut of UK writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, for Christine Langan’s Bonnie Productions, FIlm4 and HanWay Films.

Hot Milk is based on the novel by Deborah Levy, and will see Shaw play a woman with a mystery illness that has left her wheelchair bound. She travels to the Spanish seaside down of Almería with her daughter (Buckley) to consult with a physician who could possibly hold a cure. The daughter befriends a traveller (Krieps), and...

Cast has been set for Hot Milk, the feature directing debut of Rebecca Lenkiewicz, whose credits as a screenwriter include Ida, Disobedience, and Colette.

Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve) and Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) will lead the movie, which is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel. The Spain-set story chronicles the complexities of a relationship between a singular mother and daughter.

Rose (Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Buckley) travel to the Spanish seaside town of Almería to consult with the shamanic Dr Gomez, a physician who could possibly hold the cure to Rose’s mystery illness, which has left her bound to a wheelchair. But in the sultry atmosphere of this sun-bleached town Sofia, who has been trapped by her mother’s illness all her life, finally starts to shed her inhibitions, enticed by the persuasive charms of enigmatic traveller Ingrid

Hot Milk was developed...

“Black-ish” showunner Courtney Lilly looks back on the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic of being stuck inside as being like “Groundhog Day.” Having just moved into a new house in February 2020, he set up an office in the guest house, which is a converted garage, so he and his partner, who is a professor, could have their own designated space. “Being Gen X, the idea of two separate spaces, where I live is separate from where I work, it’s part of my operating system,” he says. The space is “like a studio apartment,” which means that along with a desk there is a bed and kitchen appliances — and random gifts stored there. But he did what he could to make it a “no-frills” environment because “work is supposed to be hard, so the more comfort I put into a space, the more it makes me feel like I’m not working,...