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Fest unveils Narrative, Documentary, Breakouts, Spotlight, and Unstoppable programming line-ups.

Organisers at the hybrid 29th Slamdance Film Festival have announced that the word premiere of Dimitri Coats’ Free LSD will close the festival on January 20 2023 as they also unveiled Narrative, Documentary, Breakouts, Spotlight, and Unstoppable programming line-ups.

Free LSD follows an adult store owner who takes an experimental drug that provides a glimpse into a parallel universe where he is the leader of a band battling evil aliens over the future of human consciousness. Keith Morris, Coats, Autry Fulbright II, Dh Peligro, and Jack Black are among the cast.

The...

Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival has revealed to Variety the projects that the participants of its 2022 Emerging Producers program are working on. The producers were asked to deliver an elevator pitch for their projects.

Every year since 2010, the festival has selected 18 up-and-coming producers of documentary films (17 European and one representing a non-European guest country), which are then provided with educational, networking and promotional support.

There are almost 200 alumni of the program, many of whom have gone on to win awards at major festivals.

The 2023 participants will be announced by Ji.hlava during the Sarajevo Film Festival on Aug. 15.

“All Roads” (working title)

Producer: Charlotte Hailstone, Hailstone Films (U.K.)

Director: Laura Wadha

Synopsis: A decade after the war began, a Scottish/Syrian filmmaker tries to reconnect with her fractured Syrian family, scattered around the world. She embarks on a journey, exploring the breakdown in communication between loved ones she...

Exclusive: Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber have acquired North American rights to Eva Vitija’s documentary Loving Highsmith, which takes as its focus Carol and The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith. Zeitgeist will release the film theatrically this September.

Loving Highsmith is a unique look at the life of the celebrated American author, focusing on Highsmith’s quest for love and her troubled identity through her personal diaries and the intimate reflections of her lovers, friends and family. The film sheds new light on her life and writings, the best known of which were adapted for the big screen: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol, a partially autobiographical novel and the first lesbian story with a happy ending in 1950s America. Highsmith herself was forced to lead a double life and had to hide her vibrant love affairs from her family and the public, reflecting...

Alliance for Development projects include Isis thriller and comic book story.

The Locarno Industry Days’ Alliance for Development wrapped its third edition today with a handful of potential co-productions catching the eye.

The initiative aims to help foster development and co-production between France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland with projects backed by European funds including France’s Cnc, Italy’s MiBACT and Germany’s Ffa.

Among the nine projects in the programme this year was Gigi Roccati’s (Babylon Sisters) Isis-themed thriller My Kin, which has been boarded in Locarno by Belgian producer Hubert Toint (Gangsters).

Italy’s Pilar Saavedra is the main producer alongside Antoine de Clermont Tonnere of MacT productions in France. The team is aiming for a 2019 shoot on the project, which is in the €2m range.

Also catching the eye was romantic-comedy Comic Book Souls, the project with the biggest estimated budget (€4.5m), about a young man who finds life inspiration through his passion...

With documentaries, you never know how much the director's intentions shifted since the commencement of the shoot. In the case of Concrete Love, Maurizius Staerkle-Drux appears to have been at the right place at the right time. Capturing Gottfried at what must be the near-end to his architecture career, Staerkle-Drux focuses on just how sloppy the baton hand-off between generations can become, especially in the absence of the family's ever-present matriarch.

TwitchFilm is proud to present an exclusive clip from the Slamdance selected Concrete Love, a documentary by Maurizius Staerkle Drux about the Böhms, a renowned family of German architects in their third generation. The film is a marvel of filmmaking, an intimate and immaculate portrait of a fascinating family. My full review can be read here, and you can watch the clip below, where patriarch Gottfried visits his brother for a game of ping pong....

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

We all wish to be immortalized in some way. To be remembered for something extraordinary or meaningful. Most of us will be remembered by the way we loved, who we loved and how we loved. It is what we do spurred on by such degrees of love that sets the rest in motion. Young Swiss Documentarian Maurizius Staerkle Drux measures these motions through the Böhms, a renowned family of German architects in their third generation. The result is Concrete Love, an extraordinary sensory portrait of the family, both intimate and immaculate in design.We enter the Böhm's lives as matriarch Elisabeth falls ill. Her husband Gottfried, though by most accounts retired for years, continues to work diligently everyday on new designs with pencil and charcoal. He...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Finnish documentary expert Leena Pasanen has been appointed as the first non-German in the almost 60-year history of Dok Leipzig to succeed Claas Danielsen as its festival director.

Pasanen previously worked in documentary programming at public broadcaster Yle and as the director of the European Documentary Network in Copenhagen, among others.

She will take up her post on January 1, 2015 with an initial five-year contract .

Claas Danielsen, who has headed Dok Leipzig as festival director for the past ten years, will open his swansong edition on Oct 27 with Citizenfour, the final part of Laura Poitras’ 9/11 trilogy, centred on Nsa whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan and Ulrich Seidl’s Im Keller are among 12 titles selected for the International Competition for Feature Documentaries to compete for the €10,000 Golden Dove.

Other films in this competitive section include Fernand Melgar’s The Shelter, which premiered at Locarno in August; Zuzanna Solakiewicz’s 15 Corners Of The World; Giovanni Donfrancesco’s [link...