News

Warsaw-based New Europe Film Sales has closed a raft of deals on the animated feature film “Yuku and the Himalayan Flower,” from directors Rémi Durin and Arnaud Demuynck.

The children’s animated feature, with graphics by Paul Jadoul, tells the story of Yuku, a little mouse who lives with her family in the basement of a castle and decides to embark on a quest to find the legendary Himalayan flower.

The film, which premiered at the Annecy fest and played in the Locarno Kids strand of the Locarno Film Festival, is produced by Artémis Prods. (“Mandibules”) and co-produced by Vivement Lundi! (“Flee”), La Boîte Prods. (“March of the Penguins”), Les Films du Nord and Nadasdy Film.

Pic has sold to Germany (Eksystent Distribution), Spain and Andorra (Pack Magic), Poland (Stowarzyszenie Nowe Horyzonty), Sweden (Smorgasbord Picture House), Denmark (Angel Films) and Latvia (Riga International Film Festival distribution).

Previous territories sold include...

Mubi's series Hypnotic Incantations: A Marguerite Duras Focus is showing September - October, 2020 in the United Kingdom and United States.In 1955, Jacques Rivette famously wrote that Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy “opens a breach… that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through.” For Rivette and many others, the film heralded nothing less than the arrival of a modern cinema—and not five years later, Alain Resnais, with a screenplay from Marguerite Duras, took up this challenge with Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Following the film’s seismic premiere, Eric Rohmer declared it either “the most important film since the war” or “the first modern film of sound cinema,” its overture of tangled, ash-covered limbs even echoing the embalmed couple Ingrid Bergman turns away from in Voyage to Italy’s memorable Pompeii-set passage. With her seminal script, Duras could thus claim to have widened the gap opened by Rossellini,...

By Michael Atkinson

One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation's coolest hotshot filmmakers and encouraging them to whack off and make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable -- never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying -- but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962's "The Seven Deadly Sins," 1963's "RoGoPaG," and 1969's "Love and Anger," all of which feature the era's most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) They're still being made: the Korean New Wave collection "If You Were Me" (2003) is a knockout,...