News

With the Sundance Film Festival coming to a close, Oscar nominations out and Specialty distributors looking ahead, this weekend will have more new limited releases than the last few, post-holidays weekends. Bleecker Street is opening Joe Penna’s Arctic starring Mads Mikkelsen as a man stranded near the North Pole following a plane crash. The Orchard is opening The Unicorn by Robert Schwartzman, who hosted an event at Sundance last weekend. Starring Nick Rutherford who also co-wrote, The Unicorn will head out to theaters this weekend before going on-demand next week. The ‘widest’ Specialty roll out on this continent this weekend will be Bollywood’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga from Fip, which will take the title by director Shelly Chopra Dhar to 192 locations in North America. And Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger was at the Sundance Film Festival with doc Cold Case Hammarskjöld, but the director has also...

“Focus: Nordic Comedy is a tribute to the contemporary Nordic comedy and an attempt to try to understand humor’s social and political role in today’s culture,” says Göteborg fest artistic director Jonas Holmberg. He admits that it was partially conceived as an antidote to the fest’s other focus on the Apocalypse. He says, “The Apocalypse was the first one we came up with. It really engaged us, but we were worried that it might seem too dark or too hopeless.”

He added: Then we realized that the last four out of five winners of the European Film Awards for best comedy came from the Nordic countries; that they were films whose success was not just in their home territories.”

It’s true. Nordic comedies are becoming as popular world-wide as Nordic noir. The Swedish film “A Man Called Ove,” adapted from the popular book by Fridrik Backman and directed by Hannes Holm,...

There’s something profound about Danish director Mads Brügger’s documentaries due to his entering dangerous countries under false pretext to capture a result. Whether it’s heading to North Korea as a vaudeville act or the Central African Republic as a Liberian ambassador attempting to infiltrate the illegal blood diamond trade, he creates politically motivated art with an intellectually subversive edge that proves as entertaining as it is enlightening. He’s an edgy, thinking man’s Sacha Baron Cohen in that regard, building characters to go undercover in volatile places where any threat to his wellbeing must be taken with the utmost severity and therefore able to deliver an authentic picture of rampant corruption. It may have taken seven years, but he’s finally back with The Saint Bernard Syndicate.

The difference this time around, however, is that Brügger has branched out into the realm of fictional narratives with a script by Lærke Sanderhoff.

The film is the feature debut from Rasmus Kloster Bro.

LevelK has taken on world sales rights for Rasmus Kloster Bro’s debut feature Cutterhead.

The Danish survival drama is about a PR coordinator documenting construction of the Copenhagen Metro. When an accident occurs, she takes refuge in an airlock with a Croatian miner and a worker from Eritrea; they must put their lives in each other’s hands.

LevelK will present Cutterhead as a closed market screening in Cannes on May 10,

The film is produced by Amalie Lyngbo Quist for Beo Starling, and written by Rasmus Kloster Bro and Mikkel Bak Sørensen,...

Audience Awards to be announced on April 28.

April 28 Update: Top brass at the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival announced the audience award winners on Saturday night (April 28) after unveiling the juried award winners last week, which include Kent Jones’ Diane, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature and best screenplay prize.

Shawn Snyder’s To Dust won the audience award for best narrative film, while United Skates from Dyana Winkler and Tina Brown earned the documentary award. Both awards sponsored by At&T carry a $10,000 cash prize.

Alia Shawkat was named best actress in a Us narrative feature for Duck Butter,...

New York City – The 17th Edition of the Tribeca Film Festival continues through April 29th, 2018, but the main jury awards were announced on April 26th at Awards Night ceremonies. “DIane,” directed by Kent Jones, was awarded Best U.S. Narrative Feature. “Smuggling Hendrix” took the honors for Best International Narrative Feature, and “Island of Hungry Ghosts” was Best Documentary Feature.

Awards were distributed in the following feature film competition categories – U.S. Narrative, International Narrative, Documentary, New Narrative Director, The Albert Maysles New Documentary Director, and the Nora Ephron Prize, honoring a woman writer or director. Awards were also given in the short film categories – Narrative, Documentary, Student Visionary and Animation. For the sixth year, Tribeca awarded innovation in storytelling through its Storyscapes Award for immersive (Vr) storytelling.

Jury Awards for the 17th Tribeca Film Festival Took Place on April 26th, 2018

Photo credit: Tribeca Film Festival

“It is rewarding to honor...

Three Tribeca Film Festival Awards for Diane, written and directed by Kent Jones Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Kent Jones's Diane, starring Mary Kay Place, is the big winner at the Tribeca Film Festival Awards, taking home Best Us Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography for Wyatt Garfield. Best International Narrative Feature went to Marios Piperides for Smuggling Hendrix and Best Documentary Feature to Gabrielle Brady for Island Of The Hungry Ghosts.

Tribeca Best New Narrative Director winner Shawn Snyder for To Dust Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Best New Narrative Director goes to Shawn Snyder for To Dust, starring Matthew Broderick and Géza Röhrig. Best Actress in a Narrative Feature went to Alia Shawkat for Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter and Best Actor to Jeffrey Wright in Madeleine Sackler’s O.G.. Best International Narrative Actress to Joy Rieger in Keren Ben Rafael's Virgins and Best Actor to Rasmus Bruun in...

Audience Awards to be announced on April 28.

Kent Jones’ Diane won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature and won best screenplay honours as top brass at the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival announced the juried awards on Thursday evening (April 26).

Alia Shawkat was named best actress in a Us narrative feature for Duck Butter, while best actor honours went to Jeffrey Wright for O.G. Best Cinematography in a Us narrative feature Film went to Wyatt Garfield for Diane.

The Nora Ephron Award awarded a $25,000 prize to writer-director Nia DaCosta for Little Woods. The award was created six years...

Top honors at the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival have gone to Diane for the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature, Smuggling Hendrix for Best International Narrative Feature, and Island of the Hungry Ghosts for Best Documentary Feature. On the acting side, Alia Shawkat won Best Actress in a U.S. Narrative Feature Film for Miguel Arteta’s Duck Butter, and Jeffrey Wright took the Best Actor honor for O.G.

First-time narrative director and writer Kent Jones (who is also the executive director of the New York Film Festival) won two prizes at Tribeca for Diane, and the film starring Mary Kay Place won three. Estelle Parsons, Andrea Martin, Deirdre O’Connell and Jake Lacy co-star in the film, about a widowed, altruistic seventysomething woman whose life is dictated by the needs of others, and who finds herself forced to look at her own identity.

Screenings of...

“Diane,” writer-director Kent Jones’ drama starring Mary Kay Place, and actors Jeffrey Wright and Alia Shawkat were among the winners of the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival’s slate of juried awards.

“Diane,” the first narrative feature from New York Film Festival director Jones, centers on a 70-something woman (Place) and the relationships and memories she’d rather not confront, and won awards for narrative feature, cinematography and for screenplay (U.S. narrative). Wright (“Westworld”) scored a trophy for “O.G.,” in which he plays a maximum-security prison inmate, and Shawkat (“Arrested Development”) earned her award for her turn in “Duck Butter,” about a romantic experiment between two women.

Also on the list of Tribeca award recipients were international narrative feature winner “Smuggling Hendrix,” Marios’ Piperides movie about a washed-up musician trying to rescue his dog, and “Island of the Hungry Ghosts,” Gabrielle Brady’s winning documentary feature about a detention center on Christmas Island.