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According to former cop and convicted kidnapper Davud, an old legend about guiding cranes home through dark forests with carefully placed lanterns doubles as a trap for hunters to locate them. That’s an apt metaphor for both characters and Crane Lantern (‘Durna Cıragı‘) itself, Azerbaijani writer-director Hilal Baydarov’s second release in roughly a year, after the Venice bow of In Between Dying in 2020.

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and actor Danny Glover return as producers on some fairly familiar material. If it weren’t already clear from his first two features, Crane Lantern cements Baydarov’s place among current cinema’s most ethereal, existentially focused ...

According to former cop and convicted kidnapper Davud, an old legend about guiding cranes home through dark forests with carefully placed lanterns doubles as a trap for hunters to locate them. That’s an apt metaphor for both characters and Crane Lantern (‘Durna Cıragı‘) itself, Azerbaijani writer-director Hilal Baydarov’s second release in roughly a year, after the Venice bow of In Between Dying in 2020.

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and actor Danny Glover return as producers on some fairly familiar material. If it weren’t already clear from his first two features, Crane Lantern cements Baydarov’s place among current cinema’s most ethereal, existentially focused ...

Producers are Elşən Abbasov, Carlos Reygadas and Baydarov, with Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes executive producing.

Screen can unveil the first trailer for Hilal Baydarov’s Crane Lantern, which is set to world premiere in the main competition at the 2021 Tokyo international Film Festival.

The film is about a law student’s interviews with a serial kidnapper whose female victims never press charges. The lead actors include Orkhan Iskandarli and Elshan Abbasov.

Producers are Elşən Abbasov, Carlos Reygadas and Baydarov, with Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes executive producing. It a co-production between Azerbaijan’s Ucqar Film, Mexico’s Splendor Omnia Studios and US-based Louverture Films.

The Hong Kong International Film Festival has unveiled a familiar lineup of titles, talks and retrospectives for its 45th edition, which will return to its normal springtime slot after disruptions last year caused by the coronavirus.

“For the first time in our history, we will be presenting a hybrid festival consisting of both in-theatre and virtual screenings and events. While our belief in watching films communally on a big screen is unwavering, recent lockdowns and social distancing measures have accelerated our need to explore uncharted waters by embracing an additional online component,” said Hkiff Society executive director Albert Lee.

“The program is well balanced and covers a broad spectrum, from rarely-seen silent classics to contemporary filmmakers’ latest work. I am particularly thrilled to note that the festival will open with two significant Hong Kong films for the first time in recent years. So much for the talks of the demise of Hong Kong cinema!

Movies were already facing a distribution crisis before the pandemic. With only a handful of deep-pocketed buyers dominating the festival markets, and many buyers wary of anything save for safe commercial bets, it has become increasingly difficult for daring international cinema to break through the North American market. At the same time, the pandemic has forced a lot of distributors to rethink their role in film culture, as they’ve worked within the constraints of home viewership to reach eager audiences beyond those with easy access to the arthouse.

Early innovation by companies such as Kino Lorber and Oscilloscope helped pioneer the notion of the “virtual cinema” release that brought recent acquisitions to national audiences while creating a modest pipeline for theaters. Companies like IFC and Magnolia, well-entrenched in the VOD space for over a decade, churned along. Neon and Bleecker Street embraced their Hulu output deals while others, from Array to Grasshopper and Mubi,...

Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” won the top prize at Mexico’s Los Cabos Film Festival, adding the award to a brace of trophies dating back this year to a Silver Bear at Berlin and the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award in Sundance.

Tipped as a contender in 2021’s Oscar race, teen drama “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” was hailed by Variety as a “quietly devastating gem,” “both of a piece with, and a significant step forward from” Hittman’s prior youth-in-crisis works “Beach Rats” and “It Felt Like Love.”

Mexican writer-director Bruno Santamaría Razo’s “Things We Dare Not Do” won Los Cabos’ Cinecolor-Shalalá Award. The second doc feature from Bruno Santamaría Razo whose debut “Margarita” won a Mezcal Prize special mention at the 2016 Guadalajara Festival, “Things We Dare Not Do,” sits on the borderlands between documentary and fiction, it tells the story of a gay teen...

Above: New OrderNow we know: It's possible to have a film festival almost the usual way even during these Covid-laden months. Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato and Venice's Mostra internazionale d'arte cinematografica (which this year ended and opened seamlessly one after the other) did demonstrate this splendidly, offering therewith a pattern for others to emulate.So what did Bologna and Venice do? Il Cinema Ritrovato used several more cinemas, some of them longish walks away from the established center on and near Via delle Lame, which saw to a lot of people missing one another—those who focused on silent films were all day at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna and could spend the whole week without ever meeting somebody who'd spend her or his days at the Cinema Jolly. Patrons of the latter were watching the wonderfully composed if very much by-the-book selection on Early Women Directors in the Soviet...

Japanese comedy-drama “Hold Me Back” was Monday announced as the winner of the Tokyo International Film Festival. Azerbaijan drama, “In Between Dying” was named winner of the Tokyo Filmex Festival, which this year cooperated and overlapped with TIFF.

Among the changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, TIFF festival this year ditched its regular prizes decided by a jury. It replaced them with a single audience award.

“Hold Me Back” is the story of a woman who lives on her own and is guided through life by a consultant hard-wired into her brain. Matters become complicated when she falls in love with a salesman and questions the consultant’s guidance.

Directed by Ohku Akiko (“Tokyo Serendipity”) the film had its world premiere in the festival’s Tokyo Premiere section, which was a one-off mashup of the festival’s international competition, Asian future and Japanese cinema splash sections, with 32 films from...

The largest festival for creative documentary films in Central and Eastern Europe has handed out accolades but continues streaming films until 8 November. The 24th edition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, which was transformed into a virtual affair owing to the outbreak of the pandemic (see the news), maintained its original structure and handed out its awards on Saturday 31 October. The main Opus Bonum competition was judged by one sole juror, the director of In Between Dying, Hilal Baydarov. Baydarov picked White on White, a film by Slovakian director Viera Čákanyová, as Best World Documentary Film 2020. Baydarov said he picked the film for the top prize for “being a very honest, brave and inspirational film. The feature shows us how difficult and almost impossible it is to make a film about oneself.” White on White is the sophomore feature by Čákanyová, a follow-up to her feature...

16 international titles competed in the fourth edition unfolding in Egyptian Red Sea resort.

Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanic’s drama Quo Vadis, Aida? has scooped the top prize at the fourth edition of the El Gouna Film Festival (October 23-31), its $50,000 Golden Star for best narrative film.

The feature, which revisits the events leading up to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, world premiered in competition in Venice and has since been selected as Bosnian’s entry for the best international category at the 2021 Oscars.

Jasna Duricic also won the El Gouna Star for best actress for her performance in the film as a...

Jasmila Žbanic’s “Quo Vadis, Aida?” won the El Gouna Star for best narrative film at the El Gouna Film Festival, carrying a $50,000 prize. The film’s star, Jasna Duricic, also took home the best actress award, for her startling eponymous turn. Based on a true story, the 1995-set drama tells the story of a Un translator attempting to save the lives of her husband and son after the Army of Republic Srpska takes over the city of Srebrenica.

Other winners announced by jury president Peter Webber at the striking new open-air Festival Plaza included Ali Suliman as best actor for his turn as a Palestinian trying to reunite with his family in Ameen Nayfeh’s “200 Meters,” a film which also won the Cinema for Humanity Audience Award. Hilal Baydarov’s “In Between Dying” won the Netpac Award for best Asian film.

Other big winners on the night included...

Hilal Baydarov, the sole juror of Ji.hlava’s main competition, the Opus Bonum section, has a back story with the fest dating to its screening of his 2018 film “Birthday” in the Docu Talents from the East section.

He later found a collaborator at the festival who worked with him on two films that traveled to the IDFA and Nyon doc fests: Georg Tiller, who came up through Ji.hlava’s Emerging Producers development program. This year, Baydarov’s “In Between Dying,” a somnambulant road movie set in his native Azerbaijan, screened in the main competition in Venice, drawing strong reviews internationally for its powerful imagery and ambiguous, sometimes violent characters.

How can Ji.hlava help shape the start of filmmakers’ careers and how important a role does it play these days in the doc world?

Ji.hlava gives a huge space to new voices. It is so important to discover new talents.

“Love Mooning,” a drama by veteran Japanese director Manda Kunitoshi, has been set as the opening film of Tokyo Filmex. The festival announced the line-up for its 21st edition on Thursday.

Filmex, which has long specialized in Asian art films and usually starts in late November, will be held Oct. 30-Nov. 7 this year. It will be operated in partnership with the Tokyo International Film Festival, whose dates are Oct.31-Nov. 9.

“Love Mooning,” charts the troubled romance between the head of a mental health clinic and one of his patients. Manda also chairs the festival’s five-person jury.

The closing film will be Elia Suleiman’s “It Must Be Heaven,” a 2019 Cannes selection about a director, played by Suleiman himself, who finds himself comically trapped in Palestine even when he is in New York and Paris. Suleiman is also the subject of the festival’s Filmmaker in Focus section, which will...

In the new Azerbaijani film In Between Dying, a man goes on the run after shooting a low-end criminal. Over the course of a day, he encounters a number of women who have been beset by various miseries. In flashback, we meet what might be his wife and son. He says he is trying to find them.

The film is by Hilal Baydarov, a 33-year-old director who comes with no shortage of clout. It is an attractive story: Born in Baku in 1987, Baydarov twice won the national mathematics award while still in school before earning an M.A. in computer science. More stable and lucrative paths surely awaited but while in university he saw Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and decided to become a filmmaker. He was accepted into the Sarajevo Film Academy where he studied under Béla Tarr and, since 2018, has released a whopping six movies––one narrative and five documentaries,...

“Enigmatic” doesn’t begin to describe Hilal Baydarov’s “In Between Dying,” a koan-like story that follows a day in the life — or the life in a day — of a young man searching the empty Azerbaijan countryside for love, and bringing death with him wherever he goes. Or is he searching the winding roads and shallow valleys of his homeland for death, and bringing love to all of the strangers he encounters along the way? Such broadly philosophical questions saturate the still and expectant atmosphere of Baydarov’s seventh film in the last two years (his first “narrative” feature since 2018’s “Hills Without Names”), their answers as uncertain as two distant figures walking through a thick sea of mist.

But . It’s opaque, to be sure — it opens with a poem written by a six-year-old about a teacher looking for a lost class of students in a hallway with 1,000 doors,...

The existential road movie gets an offbeat, elliptical yet peculiarly compelling Transcaucasian makeover in director Hilal Baydarov’s second fiction feature, “In Between Dying.” Set against the striking, often purgatorially stark backdrop of Azerbaijan’s rural landscapes, with their striated mountains, autumn forests, fog-shrouded fields and silvery pebbled lakesides, it’s a film indebted to its influences. Baydarov was a student of Bela Tarr’s, although the additional imprints of Carlos Reygadas (who produces), Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Andrei Tarkovsky, with even a little Godardian absurdity thrown in for good measure, at least ensure this particular admixture eventually emerges as its own singular animal — in this case, a frequently glimpsed white horse, whose heroic associations are offset by its increasing dirtiness and apparent despondency.

The narrative eventually emerges as a kind of hero’s quest, which is surprising given the protagonist, Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli), initially seems very far from anyone’s idea of a hero.

Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

The Azerbaijan-Mexican coprod (filmmaker Carlos Reygadas is one of the producers) will have to fight to find space outside festivals, even after its bow in ...

Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

The Azerbaijan-Mexican coprod (filmmaker Carlos Reygadas is one of the producers) will have to fight to find space outside festivals, even after its bow in ...

“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Baydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals. “In Between Dying” is the story of one epochal day in the life of Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli), a young man who constantly dreams of finding his ‘real’ family, a hypothetical wife and child who will understand him and bring him a sense of fullness. His constant aspiration to an idealized existence makes him alienated from his own life, in which he grouchily shares a small house with his mother.

Read More: 2020 Venice Film Festival Preview: All The Must-See Films To Watch

Davud’s fateful day starts, appropriately, in a cemetery overlooking Baku. Davud kills a man after hearing an insult, mere feet away from an underworld leader, and flees, inaugurating a day of strange,...

In the Mood for Love: Baydarov Searches for a Real Love in Enigmatic Road Trip

All you need is love, if you can find it, that is. Or so seems to be part of the sometimes- inscrutable intention of In Between Dying, the sophomore narrative feature of Azerbaijanian director Hilal Baydarov. Following his 2018 debut Hills Without Names, Baydarov has embarked on a flurry of documentary projects, releasing five titles since then, which includes the thematic “Katech” trilogy, making him one of the most prolific voices in contemporary cinema from his country.

An elliptical love story which plays like a prophetic fable, it is also a narrative peppered with jolting moments of both violent liberations and considerable resilience with feminist subtexts hinting at cultural reconsiderations of gender norms and agency which unite in an intoxicating metaphorical fate.…...

Tehran-set drama is first film in a planned trilogy revolving around the theme of secrets and lies.

Berlin-based Pluto Film has boarded sales on Iranian director Farnoosh Samadi’ s drama 180° Rule ahead of its premiere in TIFF’s Discovery section.

The film is based on real events and is about a school teacher who is preparing to attend a wedding in northern Iran. When her husband suddenly forbids her from attending, she makes a decision that will impact her life forever.

180° Rule is writer-director Farnoosh Samadi’s first feature after three successful shorts including the 2018 Gaze, which premiered in Locarno,...

The Venice Film Festival will kick off early next month entirely in person and among our most-anticipated premieres is coming from a new voice in filmmaking backed by some impressive names. Director Hilal Baydarov (When The Persimmons Grew) will premiere In Between Dying in competition at the festival, a drama co-produced by Carlos Reygadas and Joslyn Barnes, executive produced by Danny Glover, and supported by Cristian Mungiu.

Following a man on a journey of self-discovery through rural Azerbaijan, the first trailer has now arrived and it displays no shortage of gorgeous imagery. “[Baydarov] sent me his films and I found them to be so rooted in a tradition of cinema that is today an endangered species – and at the same time so mystical,” Reygadas said. “I felt grateful for the depth and the originality of this vision and thought I would be lucky if I could contribute in any way to...

While the coronavirus pandemic put a halt to both the Cannes and Telluride film festivals, seen as essential stops on the road to awards season glory, both the Venice and Toronto film festivals are going ahead.

For its 77th celebration of film that starts September 2, the Venice Film Festival will open with Daniele Luchetti‘s drama “Lacci,” the first Italian film to kick off the event in 11 years. While “Lacci” is not competing for the Golden Lion, which was won by “Joker” last year, one title to keep an eye on is “Nomadland,” directed by Chloe Zhao (“The Rider”). The drama starring two-time Oscar-winning Best Actress Frances McDormand will premiere on September 11 at Venice and Toronto.

SEEFrances McDormand movies: 15 greatest films ranked from worst to best

Cate Blanchett is serving as the president of this year’s Venice competition jury. Other selections vying for the fest’s top prize beyond “Nomadland” are:

“In Between Dying,...

While the coronavirus pandemic has canceled major festivals such as Cannes and Telluride, the 2020 Venice Film Festival is moving ahead as planned and will be the world’s first major film festival since Sundance and Berlin at the start of the year. Venice 2020’s main selection will be split into three sections: Venezia 77 (aka the main competition), Out of Competition, and Horizons. The titles selected for the main competition will compete for the Golden Lion, which was awarded last year to Todd Phillips’ “Joker.”

As previously announced, Daniele Luchetti’s drama “Lacci” will open the 77th Venice Film Festival on September 2. The movie is the first Italian title to open Venice in 11 years. The last Italian opener was Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Baarìa” at the 2009 festival. “Lacci” is included in this year’s Out of Competition section. Chloe Zhao’s “The Rider” follow-up “Nomadland” was also confirmed for a world premiere...

The Venice Film Festival is unveiling the lineup of its 77th edition, which, barring complications, will be the first major international film event to hold a physical edition following the coronavirus crisis.

Previously announced titles include Chloé Zhao’s road drama “Nomadland,” starring Frances McDormand, which will screen at Venice and Toronto simultaneously on Sept. 11, in both cases preceded by virtual introductions.

The out-of-competition opener will be Italian director Daniele Luchetti’s anatomy of a marriage drama “Lacci” (“The Ties”) (pictured) starring Alba Rohrwacher (“Happy as Lazzaro”) and Luigi Lo Cascio (“The Traitor”) as the couple at the film’s center.

The virtual press conference is scheduled to begin at 11am Cet. This post will be updated live as films are revealed.

Venice Film Festival Lineup

In Competition

“In Between Dying,” Hilal Baydarov

“Le Sorelle Macaluso,” Emma Dante (Italy)

“The World to Come,” Mona Fastvold (U.S.)

“Nuevo Orden,” Michel Franco

“Lovers,...