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Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity headed the winners at the second edition of Georgia’s Eliso film awards.

Holy Electricity received the best film prize, from a seven-person jury that included Agnieszka Holland and Carlos Reygadas.

Scroll down for the full list of winners

The film follows two cousins who discover abandoned crosses in a Tbilisi scrapyard, turning them into neon art which they sell across the Georgian capital. It debuted at Locarno film festival last summer, going on to play Thessaloniki, Tallinn, Goteborg and Rotterdam among others.

Kotetishvili also won the best cinematography award for the film, while he was nominated for best director.

The Cinevesture International Film Festival (Ciff) is set to return for its second edition in Chandigarh, India, from March 20-23, 2025. With an extensive lineup of international and regional films, as well as an expanded industry platform, the festival aims to solidify its place on the global cinema calendar.

French director Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” an Oscar-winning film, will be among the headliners of the World Canvas section, alongside Magnus von Horn’s Oscar-nominated Danish drama “The Girl with the Needle.” The festival opens with the Indian premiere of “A Normal Family,” the Korean drama by Hur Jin-ho that made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. The opening night will also include a special screening of the Punjabi short “The Cycle” by Arpita Mukherjee.

Ciff’s World Canvas section will showcase 15 international features, while the India Unveiled category will highlight 17 homegrown titles. Special screenings and student films will complement the festival’s programming.

The Cinevesture International Film Festival (Ciff) has revealed a diverse lineup for its second edition, set to run March 20-23 in Chandigarh, India, featuring notable Oscar winners and nominees alongside celebrated regional cinema.

Jacques Audiard’s Oscar-winning “Emilia Perez”headlines the World Canvas section, alongside Magnus von Horn’s Oscar-nominated Danish drama “The Girl with the Needle.”

The festival will open with the India premiere of Korean feature “A Normal Family,” directed by Hur Jin-ho, which first bowed at the Toronto International Film Festival. A special screening of the Punjabi short film “The Cycle” by Arpita Mukherjee will accompany the opening night festivities.

For its sophomore outing, Ciff has assembled a lineup featuring 15 international features in its World Canvas section and 17 titles in the India Unveiled category, with additional special screenings and student films rounding out the program.

The Indian selection features several significant titles by renowned filmmakers, including Dibakar Banerjee’s “Tees,...

The 55th International Film Festival of India (Iffi) has unveiled its main competition lineup, with 15 features vying for the Golden Peacock award carrying an INR4 million prize purse, notably featuring nine films directed by women.

Among the world premieres are Manijeh Hekmat and Faeze Azizkhani’s Iranian drama “Fear & Trembling,” exploring an older woman’s struggles with isolation, and Nikhil Mahajan’s “Raavsaheb,” an Indian crime thriller examining man-animal conflict in tribal lands.

The slate includes festival circuit standouts like Louise Courvoisier’s “Holy Cow” (France), which nabbed the Un Certain Regard Youth Prize at Cannes 2024, and Saulė Bliuvaitė’s “Toxic” (Lithuania), winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno 2024. Bogdan Mureșanu’s Romanian revolution drama “The New Year That Never Came” arrives fresh from winning Venice’s Horizons and Fipresci awards.

The lineup also includes Belkis Bayrak’s “Gulizar” (Turkey), which played at Toronto and San Sebastian, and George Sikharulidze’s “Panopticon” (Georgia-u.

Georgian director George Sikharulidze presents a complex portrait of a young man grappling with himself in Panopticon. We meet Sandro as an awkward 18-year-old thrust into navigating desire in a conservative society. His father has departed for a monastery while his mother resides abroad. Caught between religious tradition and modern values, Sandro exhibits confusion through troubling behaviors.

Sikharulidze crafts a layered protagonist. Early on, Sandro comes across as a “creep,” touching girls inappropriately. But the screenplay imbues him with nuance, showing how Georgian youth face conflict between progressivism and toxic norms. Sandro finds affection from Natalia, his friend’s mother, yet clings to toxic purity ideals regarding women. His developing interest in far-right politics stems from his susceptibility to online radicalization, with no support system to guide him.

Challenges emerge as Sandro’s character shifts late in the film. Some find his redemption unconvincing due to unbelievable changes. Yet Data Chachua...

Mark Cousins’ portrait of a British modernist painter, “A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things,” took the Karlovy Vary Film Festival top prize Saturday, winning over a jury that included Christine Vachon and Geoffrey Rush with its perceptive take on art and seeing.

Cousins said the film’s subject, painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, “lived completely, truly and utterly – let’s try to do that.”

Norwegian divorce story “Loveable” won the Crystal Globe jury prize, as well as three other awards categories, taking home the Fipresci, ecumenical and Europa Cinemas Label prizes with its nuanced look at a woman morphing into a new life.

Director Lilja Ingolfsdottir scored big with her first feature-length drama with “Loveable,” telling the audience at the Hotel Thermal Grand Hall the story helped her “find barriers we have built against connections.”

The directing prize went to Nelicia Low for the Singapore/Taiwan/Poland production “Pierce,” an intricate account...

The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 28 to July 6) boasted not one but two competitions, the Crystal Globe and Proxima, presided over by the festival president Jiří Bartoška, artistic director Karel Och, and executive director Kryštof Mucha. The festival is the main summer event in the country, which attracts many sponsors and patrons who want to attend, and faces none of the financial hardships of such festivals as Berlin, Toronto, and Sundance. 130 films are shown, with 140,000 tickets sold. There is no room for growth, given the limited venues, from the many screening rooms at the festival hub, the Hotel Thermal, where juror Christine Vachon mixed Negronis for her fellow jurors between screenings, to the colorful arthouse Kino Drahomira, named after a revered Czech woman director.

The Eastern European festival falls between Cannes and Venice, and programs many films in its Crystal Globe Competition that did not make the cut at Cannes,...

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, Mark Cousins‘ documentary essay about Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and her neurodiversity, including diary passages narrated by Tilda Swinton, won the Grand Prix – Crystal Globe, the top award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Saturday. Clive Owen was honored with a Kviff award at the closing ceremony.

A Sudden Glimpse is “exploring the pivotal 1949 experience atop Switzerland’s Grindelwald glacier that reshaped British modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s artistic perspective for decades to come.” The Crystal Globe comes with a $25,000 prize. “I did not expect this in a million years,” Cousins said in accepting the honor. About Barns-Graham, he said: “She didn’t change the world. But she lived completely, fully and utterly. Let’s try to do that.”

The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival‘s closing ceremony also honored the Norwegian marital drama Loveable, directed by Lilja Ingolfsdottir, with its special jury prize,...

The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 28 – July 6) came to a close this evening with an awards ceremony that saw Mark Cousins’ essay film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things win the main prize in the festival’s Crystal Globe competition. Narrated by Tilda Swinton and — in Cousins’ familiar, idiosyncratic style, exploring themes of gender, climate change and creativity — the UK film offers a creative biography of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). Coming what most have been a close second to take the Jury Prize — and Best Actress Award for its star, Helga Guren — was Norway’s acclaimed divorce drama Loveable, directed by Lilja Ingolfsdottir.

Also taking the stage tonight was Czech actor Ivan Trojan, already perhaps the country’s most garlanded performer, who received the Festival President’s Award for Contribution to Czech Cinema. And following hot on the heels of Viggo Mortensen and Daniel Brühl, British actor...

Cinema has always had a way of opening unfamiliar places up to the world––if not always for a visit, then at least in the imaginations of those watching. The success of Georgian cinema in the last few years has come at a time when the country’s political future (and the possibility for that openness) seems up for grabs: on one side, a new generation leaning toward the West; on the other, a ruling party (improbably named Georgian Dream) attempting to buck the trend––and with an ally in the East willing to lend a hand. In the new film Panopticon, that fraught political moment is mirrored in a young man’s coming-of-age as he attempts to swim against the sexual, religious, and societal forces threatening to pull him under.

The story takes place in a village near Tbilisi, where the 18-year-old Sandro (Data Chachua) lives alone with his elderly grandmother,...

To begin with, Georgian writer-director George Sikharulidze’s debut feature places us mercilessly right into the last place on earth most of us would ever want to find ourselves: the lanky, concave frame and warped, self-loathing mindset of an incipient incel.

Eighteen-year-old Sandro (remarkable newcomer Data Chachua) is a creep: a surreptitious groper in public places, a gawky loner at the football club where he trains, and a sulky checked-out student in his final year of high school. But Sikharulidze’s clever screenplay soon deepens and complicates his characterization, making him quietly emblematic of the masculinity crisis being navigated by Georgia’s younger generation, in which modern, progressive values do battle with sexism, right-wing ideology and a strain of ancient religious hypocrisy that leaches like a toxin into the bloodstream of the body social. “Panopticon” may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.

George Sikharulidze’s feature debut “Panopticon” is, the director says, a very personal movie.

The film, screening as a world premiere in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s main competition, is a coming-of-age story about a young man floundering to find himself in the absence of any meaningful parental authority.

Sikharulidze, who grew up in a rough neighborhood of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, in the 1990s, where he lived with his grandmother, mother and sister, says he was inspired to draw on his own experiences in his first film by watching François Truffaut’s seminal 1959 film “The 400 Blows.”

“I am a graduate of New York University’s Media and Communications program,” the New York-based director tells Variety. “At the time, I was not sure that I wanted to make films, but saw a couple of movies, including the Truffaut, that led me to go to Columbia Film School to study directing.

“I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for me,” Viggo Mortensen quipped to an Italian journalist Sunday morning before a press conference at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The comment was a reference to the European Football Championships, currently taking place over the Czech border in Germany, and dominating talk on the ground at the festival.

Mortensen’s Denmark and Italy both crashed out of the tournament on Saturday after bruising 2-0 defeats. The Lord Of The Rings and Green Book actor had promptly exited a dinner hosted in his honor by the fest that evening to catch the game, which had been delayed due to bad weather in Germany. Mortensen had been in town to receive the festival’s Honorary President’s Award and present his latest feature The Dead Don’t Hurt.

On Sunday night a private dinner was held by the contingent of Georgian filmmakers at...

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has unveiled the official selection for its 58th edition, including new features by Mark Cousins, Noaz Deshe, Oleg Sentsov and Beata Parkanova.

The festival, which runs from June 28-July 6 in the Czech spa town, has selected 34 films for its official selection, which spans the main Crystal Globe Competition, the Proxima Competition and Special Screenings.

Scroll down for full selection

There are 11 world premieres and one international premiere in the Crystal Globe Competition. UK director Cousins world premieres A Sudden Glimpse To Deeper Things, a documentary portrait of British painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a leading figure in...

What will be your first movie of 2023? If you’re reading this it’s likely you put some (let’s be honest: too much) thought into what commences the cinematic year. The Criterion Channel’s January lineup will put some good things front and center: they’re launching a 20-film cinema verité series that highlights all major figures of the form; an eight-film Mike Leigh retrospective that focuses on his little-seen, lesser-discussed BBC features produced between 1973 and 1984; a series on Abbas Kiarostami’s studies of childhood; and because you’ve either seen Eo or have it marked to watch, Jerzy Skolimowski’s three most-acclaimed films should be of equal note.

Another 2022 favorite, Il Buco, will have its streaming premiere alongside Kamikaze Hearts, the Depardieu-led Cyrano de Bergerac, and the recent restoration of Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane. The sole Criterion Edition for this month is 3 Women, while some notable recent documentaries—The American Sector,...

Attendance figures remained steady year-on-year despite virus crisis.

Australian comedy-drama Babyteeth was awarded the top prize at the 19th Transylvania International Film Festival, which went ahead as physical event with Covid-19 safety measures in place.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The film, which marks the debut feature of Australian theatre and TV director Shannon Murphy, won the Transilvania Trophy and €10,000. First seen in competition at Venice last year, the bittersweet comedy also picked up the audience award at the festival in the Romanian city of Cluj, which ran from July 31 to August 9.

TIFF marks the first major film...

The Transilvania Pitch Stop, a workshop and co-production forum that marks one of the industry highlights of the Transilvania International Film Festival, will present a host of new projects from the Black Sea and beyond during this year’s edition of the festival, which runs July 31-Aug. 9. Among the standouts is Romanian director Adina Pintilie’s follow-up to her Golden Bear-winning “Touch Me Not.”

Launched in 2014 as a workshop for first- and second-time directors from Romania and Moldova, the Pitch Stop expanded in 2017 to include a co-production market presenting new feature film projects from across Southeastern Europe and neighboring countries. Most are presented publicly for the first time, with one taking home the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, which comes with a €20,000 cash prize.

“Filmmakers from countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Greece, Turkey or Georgia, all share the same struggles of getting their film projects financed, produced and appreciated by general audiences,...

Teenagers struggling with sexual identity, women fighting to reconcile their multi-faceted roles in society, and men grappling with the destructive constraints of masculinity are among the themes to be explored in the 2020 edition of the TorinoFilmLab’s FeatureLab, an intensive annual workshop focused on first and second feature film projects at advanced stages of development.

The 10 projects selected to participate include seven debut features, spanning the globe from the sweltering jungles of the Amazon to the sun-soaked islands of Greece, from the mountains of Montenegro to the shores of Australia.

“We are proud to present a very diverse selection,” said TorinoFilmLab curator Vincenzo Bugno. “Ten projects with an original artistic identity coming from very different parts of the world, all of them representing somehow the complexity of this planet (and) the state of things in a challenging political-cultural situation.”

Bugno heralded a selection that features a new generation of filmmakers...