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Madrid-based distributor Atalante is ramping up its heritage cinema titles in Spain, where it’s set to release Vera Chytilová’s 1966 Czechoslovakian dark comedy “Daisies” and Kavery Kaul’s 1988 calypso music documentary “One Hand Don’t Clap.”

“Daises,” which Atalante is releasing in November, “is maybe one of the most iconic modern European films that we are very proud to put in theaters,” Atalante CEO Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro told Variety at the Lumière Film Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France.

While the company had previously released one or two heritage films a year, 2024 saw an extraordinary number of releases, Ledo added.

Indeed, Atalante’s releases this year included the 4K restoration by Toho of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1950 Japanese drama “The Munekata Sisters,” which premiered last year in Cannes; the new restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1975 U.S. drama “Not a Pretty Picture,” a reconstruction of sexual...

Everything is ready for the 14th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine Unam (Ficunam), which will take place from June 13 to 20 in Mexico City. As part of the Atlas section, we will finally be able to see Harmony Korine’s new experimental film in Cdmx: Aggro Dr1ft, starring rapper Travis Scott and notorious for having been “shot entirely through termal lens.” This section, dedicated to international auteur cinema, also includes recent works by Wang Bing (Youth (Spring)), Mati Diop (the documentary Dahomey), Tsai Ming-liang (Abiding Nowhere), Kleber Mendoça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Pedro Costa (The Daughters of Fire), and Hong Sang-soo (A Traveler’s Needs). Straight from Cannes comes Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix-winning drama All We Imagine as Light. This Mumbai-set film is part...

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

God bless everyone who truly thought David Lynch announcing “something for you to see and hear” portended a fourth season of Twin Peaks or new feature. I long for anything even within the vicinity of such optimism, but longtime completists knew the safe money was on more music. Lo and behold: today brings the official unveiling of his next album Cellophane Memories, recorded with longtime collaborator Chrystabell, featuring contributions from the late Angelo Badalamenti, and arriving August 2 via Sacred Bones Records.

According to Spin, Cellophane Memories emerged from Lynch’s vision experienced “during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light” that became Chrystabell’s voice, and in turn “revealed a secret to him.”

Great news for those of us who can hum BlueBOB tracks. Those wanting something more cinematic will have a little bit to chew on: with...

As we continue to explore the best in 2023, today we’re taking a look at the articles that you, our dear readers, enjoyed the most throughout the past twelve months. Spanning reviews, interviews, features, podcasts, news, and trailers, check out the highlights below and return for more year-end coverage as well as a glimpse into 2024.

Most-Read Reviews

1. Body Parts

2. The Exorcist: Believer

3. Barbie

4. Beau Is Afraid

5. Priscilla

6. Suzume

7. Hypnotic

8. No Hard Feelings

9. The Zone of Interest

10. The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Most-Read Interviews

1. Claire Simon on Capturing the Female Body and What Sets Her Apart From Frederick Wiseman

2. “I Don’t Think Directors Should Be Amenable”: Erik Messerschmidt on Shooting The Killer and David Fincher’s Simple Process

3. Richard Kelly on Creative Heartbreak, Political Cinema, and Future Projects

4. Christopher Blauvelt on May December, Formatting for Netflix and 35mm, and Life Lessons from Harris Savides

5. Brandon Cronenberg on Infinity Pool,...

In 1951, a volcano erupted on Fogo, one of the Cape Verde islands. That incident is the starting point for The Daughters of Fire, an experimental short by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa splits the screen into panels portraying three women—Adelaide, Clotilde, and Irodina—singing over an arrangement of Biagio Marini’s “Passacaglia (Opus 22).” The film ends with footage from A Erupcao do vulcao da ilha do Fogo, a 1951 documentary by ethnologist Orlando Ribeiro. The films are part of Canción de Pedro Costa, a museum exhibition currently touring Europe. In museums the films are projected separately in three different […]

The post “Why Make It Simple?” Pedro Costa on The Daughters of Fire first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In 1951, a volcano erupted on Fogo, one of the Cape Verde islands. That incident is the starting point for The Daughters of Fire, an experimental short by the Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa splits the screen into panels portraying three women—Adelaide, Clotilde, and Irodina—singing over an arrangement of Biagio Marini’s “Passacaglia (Opus 22).” The film ends with footage from A Erupcao do vulcao da ilha do Fogo, a 1951 documentary by ethnologist Orlando Ribeiro. The films are part of Canción de Pedro Costa, a museum exhibition currently touring Europe. In museums the films are projected separately in three different […]

The post “Why Make It Simple?” Pedro Costa on The Daughters of Fire first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Rarely does a short generate interest like The Daughters of Fire, an ink-to-runtime ratio that could best be explained by its status as Pedro Costa’s first project since 2019’s Vitalina Varela. But it merits that bandwidth. Speaking by phone earlier this month, Costa described Fire with clarity, conviction, and care that wouldn’t suggest his film runs, sans credits, just seven minutes and primarily consists of three shots spread across a single wide frame. Nothing less should be afforded a work that yields so much each time through: new textures in its seemingly rigid design, new resonances in musical arrangement, and perpetual surprise when it cuts, in the final moments, to archival images shot by Portuguese historian Orlando Ribeiro.

Our interview started with Fire before expanding to a cosmology of Costa: the joy of Stevie Wonder, the pain of film festivals, and memories of Jacques Rivette. The Daughters of Fire...

We are less than a year removed from Robert Redford’s provocative declaration, at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival’s opening presser, that “there are too many film festivals.” It was a comment that itself came a year after Redford’s even more contentious comment that, as far as he knew, his Park City annual was the only festival in the world that could claim to be “purely independent.” Most of the world’s film festivals are still in revival mode following more than three years of cancellations, hybridizations, shutterings and overhauls, and the persistent question of whether or not they’re still necessary to cinema culture should arguably begin with the regional film festival—a category that contains more than 95% of the world’s festivals, and also does not include Sundance. Without getting too hung up on the terms “regional” and “independent”—the latter, in particular, is prone to very...

Victor Erice’s “Close Your Eyes” won best film at the 17th edition of Leffest Lisboa Film Festival, which announced awards Saturday night.

Marking Erice’s first feature film since his 1992 docudrama “The Quince Tree Sun” and garnering almost universal positive reviews – Variety called it “an aching ode to film, time and memory” – following its world premiere at Cannes, “Close Your Eyes” has screened at Toronto, Busan, BFI London and New York.

During Leffest, in a session moderated by Paulo Branco, 83-year old Erice took part in a conversation with preeminent 64-year old Portuguese helmer, Pedro Costa, whose short “The Daughters of Fire,” was a Cannes Special Screening and also had its Portuguese premiere at the fest.

Erice remarked during the event, one fest highlight, that both he and Costa are working in the shadow of two great filmmakers – “Don Luis Buñuel” and “Don Manoel de Oliveira” – and he added...

When we spoke last week, Pedro Costa described his latest project The Daughters of Fire with a clarity, conviction, and care that wouldn’t suggest his film runs, sans credits, just seven minutes and mostly consists of three shots spread across a wide frame. But nothing less should be afforded a work that yields so much each time through: new textures in its seemingly rigid design, new resonances in musical arrangement, and perpetual surprise when it cuts, in the final moments, to archival images shot by Portuguese historian Orlando Ribeiro.

That footage––which Costa described as the necessary closing “breather”––is the locus of Daughters‘ official trailer, which he’s personally edited and we’re honored to debut ahead of the short’s theatrical premiere (at Metrograph) on December 1. Cinema Guild will screen it with Hong Sangsoo’s In Water as part of the “Fire+Water” double-bill, a pairing Costa approves by telling me,...

2023’s second Hong Sangsoo release (third if The Novelist’s Film came your way a bit late) is In Water, his shortest-ever feature at 61 minutes and wildest formal gambit: the entire film is out-of-focus, hardly aswim with plot to begin with. A unique sell that Cinema Guild will heroically make by pairing In Water with Pedro Costa’s fantastic short The Daughters of Fire for a “Fire+Water” double-bill that begins its run at Metrograph on December 1. With exactly one month between now and then, there is a trailer.

As Rory O’Connor said in his review out of Berlin, “Narratively it’s nothing if not succinct, and whatever In Water lacks for plot it more than makes up for in mood and ideas, as well as a kind of raw artistic honesty––regarding his work, yes, but also his sense of mortality. All of which only makes you wonder: might...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.The Deep Blue Sea.REMEMBERINGTerence Davies has died, aged 77. Michael Koresky, who wrote a monograph on Davies in 2014, penned a beautiful Sight & Sound obituary, in which he wrote that “no one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation, inviting viewers to join him in the burnished darkness of a past about which he felt complex, contradictory feelings.” Last year, Dan Schindel wrote for Notebook about the role of poetry in Benediction (2022), and in 2012, Michael Guillen interviewed Davies about The Deep Blue Sea (2011). "The problem with film is that it's always in the eternal present,” says Davies. “But it's closest, I think, to music. You don't have to be a musician to follow a symphonic argument. If you love the music,...

The Jio Mami Mumbai Film Festival is set to return from October 27 for 10 days of a loaded line-up of films from across the world to treat the cinephiles. It will feature 250 films from October 27 to November 5. Farhan Akhtar, Rana Daggubati, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Vikramaditya Motwane, Zoya Akhtar, Rohan Sippy, Ajay Bijli and Anupama Chopra unveiled line-up whhich includes over 40 World Premieres, 45 Asia Premieres, and 70+ South Asia Premieres.

This time, the festival received over 1000 submissions for the South Asia programme. The festival promises to spotlight contemporary films and new cinematic voices from South Asia. The main competition at the festival this year is the South Asia Competition.

This competitive section aims to showcase breakthrough contemporary South Asian films, will see 14 films from debutant and second-time filmmakers from across India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, as well as diaspora filmmakers from the UK and Germany. South Asian films are also part of a...

The Jio Mami Mumbai Film Festival is set to return from October 27 for 10 days of a loaded line-up of films from across the world to treat the cinephiles. It will feature 250 films from October 27 to November 5. Farhan Akhtar, Rana Daggubati, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Vikramaditya Motwane, Zoya Akhtar, Rohan Sippy, Ajay Bijli and Anupama Chopra unveiled line-up whhich includes over 40 World Premieres, 45 Asia Premieres, and 70+ South Asia Premieres.

This time, the festival received over 1000 submissions for the South Asia programme. The festival promises to spotlight contemporary films and new cinematic voices from South Asia. The main competition at the festival this year is the South Asia Competition.

This competitive section aims to showcase breakthrough contemporary South Asian films, will see 14 films from debutant and second-time filmmakers from across India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal, as well as diaspora filmmakers from the UK and Germany. South Asian films are also part of a...

The festival has dropped its international competition in favour of a South Asia focus.

The Jio Mami Mumbai Film Festival has unveiled a South Asia-focused revamp for its first in-person event since 2019, set to run October 27 to November 5.

The festival has dropped its international and India Gold competitions and will launch its first South Asia competitive section as part of a new approach to become a hub for cinema and talent from the region and diaspora.

The 14 films in the South Asia Competition are from first and second-time filmmakers from India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal as well as diaspora filmmakers from the UK and Germany,...

After a three-year hiatus, the Jio Mami Mumbai Film Festival is returning with a larger lineup and an expanded focus on South Asian cinema.

The festival will feature 250 films including 40 world premieres, 45 Asia premieres and 70 South Asia Premieres. The opening and closing films have not been finalized yet.

The festival’s new vision is to become a hub for South Asian and South Asian diaspora cinema and talent and, in keeping with this, the main competition is for 14 films from the region. These include the world premieres of Leesa Gazi’s “A House Named Shahana” (Bangladesh-u.K.), Dibakar Das Roy’s “Dilli Dark” (India), Sumanth Bhat’s “Mithya” (India) and Fazil Razak’s “The Sentence” (India). The new focus will also include 46 non-competition films from South Asia.

The Icons South Asia strand features Anand Patwardhan’s Toronto title “The World is Family”; “Indi(r)a’s Emergency” by Vikramaditya Motwane...

Pedro Costa has made the latest in a long line of festival trailers commissioned by the Viennale from leading auteurs. This one stars Elizabeth Pinard, star of his newest short, The Daughters of Fire, singing a Brecht song. This year’s Viennale runs from October 19 to 30.

The post Trailer Watch: Pedro Costa’s Viennale Trailer first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Pedro Costa has made the latest in a long line of festival trailers commissioned by the Viennale from leading auteurs. This one stars Elizabeth Pinard, star of his newest short, The Daughters of Fire, singing a Brecht song. This year’s Viennale runs from October 19 to 30.

The post Trailer Watch: Pedro Costa’s Viennale Trailer first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Following the first three section announcements, the final film section of the 61st New York Film Festival has been unveiled with Currents. Complementing the Main Slate, tracing a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices, the section presents a diverse offering of productions by filmmakers and artists working at the vanguard of the medium.

Highlights include Currents Opening Night selection Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, Thien An Pham’s Cannes winner Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, a special program featuring Jean-Luc Godard, Wang Bing, and Pedro Costa––with Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, Man in Black, and The Daughters of Fire (As Filhas do Fogo), respectively––and much more.

“The filmmakers in this year’s Currents lineup range from well-known veterans to prodigious newcomers,...

In one of their festival announcements, Toronto International Film Festival have unveiled some of the most exciting international offerings of the year with Wavelenghts. Featuring Jean-Luc Godard’s posthumous short Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, Pedro Costa’s Daughters of Fire, Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Bas Devos’ Here, Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, Phạm Thiên’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Angela Schanelec’s Music, and much more, it’s quite an eclectic lineup.

“Wavelengths is a testament to the range of cinema celebrated at TIFF,” stated Anita Lee, Chief Programming Officer, TIFF. “It is also evidence that artist-driven experimental films are thriving and growing a new generation of cinephiles.”

“The increasing necessity to support artists willing to take risks, break rules, and challenge the status quo — especially in our over-saturated media landscape — bears repeating,...

A 4K uncut restoration of Chen Kaige’s 1993 Palme d’Or winner “Farewell My Concubine” is a highlight of the Toronto International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Classics strand while Jean-Luc Godard’s last film will feature in Wavelengths.

The Classics strand also includes Canadian producer-director Brigitte Berman’s Oscar-winning feature documentary “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), portraying the life of the clarinettist and bandleader, and, after decades of oblivion Jacques Rivette’s New Wave classic “L’amour fou” (1969), whose original celluloid elements were damaged in a fire. A 50th anniversary screening of “Touki Bouki” (1973), from Sengal’s Djibril Diop Mambéty and Ousmane Sembène’s “Xala” (1975), presented in 4K, complete the program. Classics is curated by Robyn Citizen, director of programming and platform lead, with contributions from Andréa Picard.

The Wavelengths strand has 12 feature films and 19 shorts, as well as a suite of four restored early films by...

Classics includes restored version of Jacques Rivette’s New Wave film L’amour Fou.

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced selections in the Wavelengths and Classics programmes ahead of the festival (September 7-17).

The expanded Wavelengths section offers 11 features and 19 shorts including the world premiere of Canadian artist and filmmaker Isiah Medina’s deconstructed heist tale He Thought He Died (pictured), Denis Côté’s Mademoiselle Kenopsia, and Angela Schanelec’s retelling of the Oedipus myth, Music.

“Wavelengths is a testament to the range of cinema celebrated at TIFF,” said Anita Lee, TIFF’s chief programming officer. “It is also evidence...

The Toronto International Film Festival has added an additional 17 films to its 2023 lineup, with the new entries the work of a variety of bold international directors, from Radu Jude and Kleber Mendonca Filho to the late Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman.

The Wavelength section contains 12 features, two films paired in a single program and 19 shorts grouped in three separate programs. It is devoted to “artist-driven experimental films,” in the words of TIFF Chief Programming Officer Anita Lee. “Wavelengths continues to be a celebration of subversion, personal expression, and the vast, inexhaustible capabilities of cinema to enlighten, inspire, awe, resist, disrupt, and propose new ways of seeing and being in the world.”

Films in the section include “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” from the fiery Romanian satirist Radu Jude, “Here” from Belgian director Bas Devos,” the “Oedipus” retelling “Music” from Angela Schanelec, Brazilian Kleber Mendonca...

Ask any short-film director and they’ll tell you the same thing: finding distribution for short films absolutely sucks. Ask any distributor and they’ll tell you the same thing: we want to release more short films but properly distributing them absolutely sucks.

Due credit to Cinema Guild for engineering a neat workaround: they’ve acquired Pedro Costa’s nine-minute short The Daughters of Fire off its Cannes premiere and will pair it with Hong Sangsoo’s 61-minute In Water––naturally branding the experience Fire+Water, at last giving Barbenheimer its reckoning. As Cinema Guild’s Peter Kelly noted, “There are too few opportunities for short films to play theatrically, but no recent short is more demanding of a theatrical experience than Pedro Costa’s monumental new work.” Apologies to everyone hoping they might watch the latest from one of our great imagemakers on their 13-inch MacBook Air. [Deadline]

The Daughters of Fire,...

Exclusive: Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights for Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s short film The Daughters of Fire, following its buzzy world premiere in Cannes this year.

Set against the backdrop of Costa’s stomping ground of the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde, the film follows three sisters who are separated by the eruption of the local Fogo Volcano.

They remain bound in spirit, singing the same words: one day, we will know why we live and why we suffer.

The Daughters of Fire received an enthusiastic reception in Cannes when it played as Special Screening Jean-Luc Godard’s Trailer of the Film that Will Never Exist: “Phony Wars” and Wang Bing’s 2023 Palme d’Or contender Man in Black.

For its North American theatrical release in late 2023 or early 2024, Cinema Guild is planning to play the short alongside Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s Berlinale 2023 Encounters title In water,...

The Daughters of Fire.Three square images, placed side by side on the screen. The full frame is as wide as CinemaScope, which Fritz Lang famously said was only suitable for snakes and funerals. On the left, a woman stares forward as she stalks, like a Jacques Tourneur character, toward no certain destination; as she does so—singing, half her face shrouded in shadow—she passes through a seemingly endless corridor of ash, an ever-rotating carousel of clay streaked with wisps of fire. In the center frame, another woman lies prone, bent over on the shores of a volcanic beach. The sea laps in apocalyptic, dusky light behind her, the horizon stretches out to the limits of vision; uncertainly, she heaves her body upright to sit as she sings. In the far-right frame, another woman peers out from around a doorframe, staring into the camera, also singing in direct counterpoint with the other two women,...

Argentina’s Gentil Cine and El Borde, Brazil’s Vitrine and Punta Colorada, Spain’s Doxa and French company 4a4 Productions have teamed for Albertina Carri’s seventh feature “White Roses, Fall!,” a gender-themed road-trip where the main characters include a porn filmmaker, a trans grandmother, non-binary grandchildren and lesbian clairvoyant vampires.

“White Roses, Fall!” centers on Violeta, a young film director who once made an exultant lesbian porn movie and is now hired to make a mainstream and ecological porn feature. She struggles with her ideas about genre and gender, which prevent her from shooting. Then she goes on the run with her feature debut’s actresses, finds a singular island and is struck by a new idea–she now wants to make a documentary about new formulas to express love.

Conceived as a collective project, this feature “requires multiple wills and resources. It will be shot in Argentina and Brazil,...

Curzon has reshuffled its releases to strengthen its streaming schedule.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth has retained its lead as the most-watched title on Curzon Home Cinema (Chc) as the UK streaming platform prepares to strengthen its schedule of new releases.

The Truth, starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, held the top spot on the platform for the third consecutive weekend. It is on track to overtake Chc’s most successful title to date, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, as audiences continue to seek out new releases at home due to the closure of cinemas in...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Albertina Carri's The Daughters of Fire is exclusively showing March 23 - April 21, 2020 in Mubi's Undiscovered series.Dating back to making shorts in the late 1990s, Albertina Carri has become a significant iconoclast in Argentine cinema in both realms of fiction and non-fiction films. Film and politics run in her blood and have long informed her confrontational and subversive sensibilities. As a queer woman, sex and gender amid homophobia, sexism, maschismo culture, and the male gaze also inform her work and career, which in addition to filmmaking also has her working within Argentine film culture as a major creative force behind Argentina’s Lgbtq film festival, Asterisco. Her most recent feature, The Daughters of Fire, is provocative in its explicit scenes among a group of queer women in which sex is presented in shockingly honest and upfront detail in fully pornographic splendor.

More than 5,000 people watched Curzon’s first in a new series of live-streamed Q&As.

Curzon has revealed that Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is now it’s most successful title to date on its streaming platform as UK audiences flock online in the wake of cinema closures.

Celine Sciamma’s romantic drama had been performing strongly in theatres for Curzon, grossing £557,000 at the UK box office, before theatres closed their doors amid the coronavirus crisis.

It has now become the most purchased title on Curzon Home Cinema (Chc), which overall recorded a 27% increase on premium VOD week-on-week from...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe Cannes Film Festival in 2019, by Jean-Paul PelissierThe Cannes Film Festival has officially announced its indefinite postponement, with one potential option being to hold the festival during the end of June through the beginning of July. In an interview with Variety, Spike Lee says, "This is no joke. It’s not some movie. People are dying.”Recommended Viewinga breathtaking trailer for Mondo Macabro's Blu-ray debut of Shinya Tsukamoto's Gemini (1999), a haunting, timely horror film about a Meiji-era doctor who treats plague victims who encounters a mysterious doppelgänger. Recommended Reading A Horse is Not a Hammer by Barbara Hammer (2008)"Barbara Hammer’s cinema is a talking cinema in its most disarming sense: talking about cinema, talking with cinema, learning how to talk." An obituary for the late Barbara Hammer by Gabriella Beckhurst of Another Gaze.

After 37 years as the nation’s premier Lgbtq film festival, Outfest shows no signs of slowing down. The 2019 festival, scheduled to take place in Los Angeles from July 18-28, has just announced its full schedule. The lineup features a combination of festival favorites and rarely-seen foreign films, placing Lgbtq cinema in a truly global context.

The festival opens on July 18 with “Circus of Books,” the Tribeca hit about a daughter’s learning about her parents’ groundbreaking gay porn shop. It closes out with Sundance breakout “Before You Know It,” and will feature 28 world premieres during its run.

From features and documentaries to shorts and episodic content, this is truly an all-inclusive launching pad for Lgbtq filmmakers. The festival continues to push the boundaries of progress, with a majority of this year’s films directed by filmmakers from groups underrepresented in queer film.

“As my tenure comes to an end I...