News

Paris-based Reel Suspects has boarded international sales for Cambodian-Japanese psychological horror thriller Tenement ahead of the film’s world premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Big Screen competition.

The first feature from Cambodian writer-directors Inrasothythep Neth and Sokyou Chea follows a Japanese-Cambodian manga artist who travels to Cambodia on a quest to find herself after her mother’s death, but instead finds a family she has never known and an old tenement building full of dark secrets.

The genre-bending psychological thriller drama blends supernatural and human psychology with a story about family and identity. The film uses minimal immersive sound,...

It’s clear from the opening moments why the narrative feature debut of Kavich Neang, finally arriving in the US nearly two years after its 2021 Venice premiere, caught the attention of its co-producer Jia Zhangke. Like much of the Chinese filmmaker’s internationally-lauded work, Neang’s debut dives into the effects of gentrification on a younger population struggling to get by as their country cautiously opens its arms to international developers. But the similarities end there: where Jia’s films can double up as grander state-of-the-nation addresses, Neang doesn’t widen his focus beyond the characters; they’re at risk of displacement from the city they’ve always known, but this critique of gentrification largely remains implicit, visible only allegorically through their daily struggles.

This semi-autobiographical film is set against the backdrop of the titular White Building, an apartment block in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh that was eventually...

Arthouse distribution, streaming and production company Mubi has taken all rights for the U.K., Ireland, Italy, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia (excluding the Philippines and theatrical rights in Cambodia) for Davy Chou’s “Return to Seoul,” which plays in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. MK2 films is handling international sales.

Sony Pictures Classics recently picked up rights in North America, Latin America, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand.

The film centers on 25-year-old Freddie, who on an impulse to reconnect with her origins, returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. The headstrong young woman starts looking for her biological parents in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions.

The film stars Park Ji-Min, Oh Kwang-Rok, Guka Han, Kim Sun-Young, Yoann Zimmer and Louis-Do De Lencquesaing.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary the Helsinki Cine Aasia festival will once again present a selection of the latest films from East and South-East Asia. Along with better known film countries like Korea and Japan, the program also includes films from countries like the Philippines and Cambodia. Many of the festival’s films have been seen at international festivals and have received awards. The opening film is Anatomy of Time (2021) from Thailand, and altogether the program includes 20 films from eight different countries.

Familiar filmmakers

Japanese film director Ogigami Naoko’s newest film Riverside Mukolitta comes to Helsinki Cine Aasia in May. Ogigami became well known to the Finnish audiences with her film Kamome shokudō (2006) which was shot in a restaurant at Punavuori, Helsinki where the story was also set. Ogigami has since become known for the unique characters in her stories. Her latest visit to Finland was in 2019 during the retrospective...

Neang Kavich's White Building is showing exclusively on Mubi starting April 13, 2022 in most countries in the series Viewfinder.During the demolition of the White Building in May 2017, I asked my father about his feelings while he watched everyone in the building, including his family, pack their belongings to move out of their homes. He sat in the wooden chair, rubbing his prosthetic leg and observing my family members cleaning up the house after finishing all the packing. He looked a little tired and emotional.I asked him, “How are you feeling when you see your home like that?” He didn’t hide his feelings, but it took some time for him to express in words that he was not feeling well after living in the building for nearly four decades since 1980, and suddenly he had to move to another home.He said to me, “You should burn incense as an offering to the house.

Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art has set Audrey Diwan’s Happening and The African Desperate by Martine Syms will bookend the 51st edition of their collaboration, New Directors/New Films running April 20–May 1 in NYC.

The festival will introduce 26 features and 11 shorts and total of 39 directors — 21 of which are women.

“Portraits of individuals and communities navigating uncertain and turbulent circumstances in pursuit of freedom, self-determination, and survival set a remarkably contemplative tone to the lineup,” said La Frances Hui, curator of MoMa’s film department and event co-char.

Happening (L’Événement), winner of the 2021 Venice International Film Festival’s Golden Lion, is the portrait of a young woman attempting to secure an illegal abortion in 1960s provincial France. It was acquired by IFC Films and will be released May 6.

The African Desperate, a debut feature from Syms, rushes through 24 hours in the life of protagonist Palace...

Golden Lion winner “Happening” will open the 2022 New Directors/New Films Festival, Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art announced Tuesday.

Now in its 51st year, the New Directors/New Films Festival screens the best films made by young filmmakers, many of which tend to be their debut features. The festival has served as an early showcase for many notable directors, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Kelly Reichardt, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Lee, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Wong Kar Wai, Guillermo del Toro and Luca Guadagnino. This year, the festival will screen 26 features and 11 shorts.

“Portraits of individuals and communities navigating uncertain and turbulent circumstances in pursuit of freedom, self-determination, and survival set a remarkably contemplative tone for the lineup,” 2022 Nd/Nf co-chair and MoMa department of film curator La Frances Hui said in a statement. “This year’s new directors look inward and draw on events past and present...

Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s “Drive My Car,” Japan’s entry to the Academy Awards’ international category, looks to be the odds on favorite from Asia to win the category.

The drama with a theater world backdrop follows the trajectory of South Korean four-statuette winner “Parasite” in that it began its winning ways at Cannes and is festooned with awards en route to the Oscars. “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or, which “Drive My Car” did not, with that honor this year going to Julia Ducournau’s “Titane,” which became France’s entry to the category. It also recently won at the New York Film Critics Circle.

Nevertheless, “Drive My Car” won three awards at Cannes and has the added advantage of U.S. distribution, where it is currently on theatrical release.

The 2008 win for Takita Yojiro’s “Departures” remains Japan’s only win since the category was made competitive in 1956.

While...

The eponymous edifice of Cambodia’s International Feature Oscar entry, White Building, is barely white at all by the time we encounter it. A low-rise apartment block in Phnom Penh — the sort of teeming anthill of humanity familiar to anyone who has spent time in a South East Asian city — it is stained with tropical rain, its cement falling off in chunks, its cat’s cradles of improvised electrical wiring truly shocking, in every sense of the word. Director Kavich Neang grew up here.

The building was demolished in 2017 to make way for something more profitable but, before that happened, Neang filmed it from every angle. His film gives it a second, fictional life as the center of a story of a community in quiet crisis. Most of the people living in the white building’s apartments are current or retired government employees and their families; inner urban life is all they know.

The Bangkok Asean Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday evening with the screening of “One Second” Zhang Yimou’s homage to cinema and veiled critique of China’s Cultural Revolution.

The festival runs Dec 8-13 and is one of the first major cultural showcases to take place in person after Thailand has opened its borders to welcome visitors. Fully-vaccinated international visitors to Thailand no longer needs to go through quarantine, though they are required to have a Pcr test upon arrival.

Coincidentally, it is taking place in the week that film trade show and convention CineAsia was to have taken place in the city. CineAsia was canceled due to the uncertainty of Thailand’s Covid response and anticipated travel difficulties.

The non-competitive feature film part of the program includes: the Locarno-winning “Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” by Indonesian director Edwin; Cambodian Kavich Neang’s Venice entry “White Building...

Screen gets the lowdown on this year’s eight projects.

Eight projects have been pitched to international festival directors, sales agents, distributors and producers during the Coming Soon night at TorinoFilmLab’s (Tfl) 2021 Meeting Event this week.

The films are all at the final stages of production and have either been developed through one of the TorinoFilmLab’s programmes or been the recipients of one of Tfl’s awards.

The event was held in-person at the Scuola Holden school in Turin.

Previous Coming Soon selections of recent years have included Carlo Francisco Manatad’s Whether The Weather Is Fine (Featurelab...

Every year since its creation in 1956, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) invites the film industries of various countries to submit their best film for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The award is presented annually by the Academy to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States that contains primarily non-English dialogue and that was released theatrically in their respective countries between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2021. The shortlist of fifteen finalists is scheduled to be announced on 21 December 2021. The final five nominees are scheduled to be announced on 8 February 2022.

Here are the Asian Submissions for Best International Feature Film. There are some excellent movies in this bunch and we have seen and reviewed already some of them.

Armenia

“Should the Wind Drop” by Nora Martirosyan

Azerbaijan

“The Island Within” by Ru Hasanov

Bangladesh

“Rehana” by Abdullah Mohammad Saad

Bhutan

“Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom...

Les Films du Losange has announced the French release of the film White Building, directed by Cambodian Kavich Neang, on December 22. It is co-produced by Davy Chou, himself a Franco-Cambodian director.

White Building tells the story of 20-year-old Samnang, who lives in a historic building in Phnom Penh. He faces the departure of his best friend, the illness of his father and the imminent demolition of his lifelong home; pressures which all arise and intersect at this moment of sudden change. Piseth Chhun, the main actor, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor for his role as Samnang at the 78th Venice Film Festival this year.

A sensual and scintillating ode to youth, the film also addresses the issues of the transmission of culture, globalization and the transformation of the Asian continent.

With five short films under his belt since 2011, White Building is director Kavich Neang’s first feature film.

These are the submissions for the international film Oscar by country. The deadline for entries was Nov. 1. A shortlist of 15 films will be announced Dec. 21 and the nominations will come out Feb 8. The 94th Academy Awards will take place on March 27 at the Dolby Theatre. The Academy has not yet released a final list of entries; Variety compiled this list from individual country’s announcements.

Albania

Two Lions Heading to Venice

Dir. Jonid Jorji

Key cast: Vasjan Lami, Alessandra Bonarotta

Logline: A pair of filmmakers heading to the Venice festival are sidetracked from their destination after meeting two adult film actors.

Prodco: Bajo Films

Algeria

Heliopolis

Dir. Djaafar Gacem

Key cast: Souhila Mallem, Mehdi Ramdani, Cesar Duminil

Logline: True story of an uprising in the Algerian town of Guelma that was violently put down by the colonial French rulers.

Prodco: Hewes Pictures

Argentina

The Intruder

Dir. Natalia Meta

Key cast: Guillermo Arengo,...

The Singapore International Film Festival is to be held as an in-person event this year, after operating as an online-offline hybrid in 2020. It will open with Indonesian filmmaker Edwin’s “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” and run Nov. 25- Dec. 5, 2021.

With a new program director, Thong Kay Wee the festival will be aligned as five new thematic strands: Foreground, Milestone, Standpoint, Undercurrent and Domain. It will also maintain its Singapore Panorama section dedicated to local works and its familiar Asian feature competition and Southeast Asian short film competition.

The competition includes: Palestinian director Mohamed Diab’s “Amira”; Thai director Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s “Anatomy of Time”; Aizhan Kassymbek’s “Fire”; Panah Panahi’s ”Hit The Road”; Chinese director Qiu Jiongjiong’s “A New Old Play”; Indian Oscar-contender “Pebbles,” by P.S. Vinothraj; Bangladesh’s Oscar contender “Rehana” by Abdullah Mohammad Saad; “Whether the Weather is Fine,” by Filipino director Carlo Francisco Manatad...

China’s Pingyao International Film Festival got under way on Tuesday with the gala screening of Zhang Lu’s new drama film “Yanagawa.” The festival will unspool Oct. 12-19 with a familiar package of competition screenings a work in progress section, a film lab, a project market and a tribute section dedicated to Tsui Hark.

Organizers announced an ambitious twelve-title competition section (“Crouching Tigers”) for first second and third films from around the world.

These include: “Amparo,” directed by Simón Mesa Soto; “As Far As I Can Walk,” directed by Strahinja Banovic; “Feathers,” directed by Omar El Zohairy; “Mama, I’m Home” directed by Vladimir Bitokov (Russia); “Pedro” directed by Natesh Hegde (India); “Playground” (Un Monde) directed by Laura Wandel (Belgium); “Prayers for the Stolen” (Noche de Fuego) directed by Tatiana Huezo; “Rehana” (Rehana Maryam Noor) directed by Abdullah Mohammad Saad; “The Tale of King Crab” (Re Granchio) directed by...

Festival, which opens today, also annouced its Crouching Tigers and Hidden Dragons competition sections.

This year’s Pingyao International Film Festival (Octobner 12-19) will open with Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Yanagawa and close with Xu Lei’s The Great Director.

Starring Ni Ni, Zhang Luyi and Xin Baiqing, Yanagawa revolves around two brothers who travel to Japan in search of the woman they both loved in their youth. The film, which is receiving its world premiere at Busan in the Icons section, is produced by Midnight Blur Films and sold internationally by Hishow Entertainment. The Great Director is described...

There is an eerie, otherworldly beauty to the opening shot of Kavich Neang’s “White Building.” Accompanied by the pressure-cooker whine that introduces the more uncanny sections of Jean-Charles Bastion’s score, a drone camera, steady as though it were mounted on tracks in the sky, drifts over the eponymous structure, looking down. Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh .

Seen from this angle, the building — Neang’s childhood home, which recurred in his shorts and documentaries, and of which he amassed quite a bit of footage before it was demolished in 2017 — looks like an intricately scruffy map of an abandoned continent. It’s crazy-paved in cracked concrete and crisscrossed with electrical wires, with drifts of sooty trash gathering in its corners and dirty vents staring into dangerously haphazard fuse boxes, and it is not immediately clear if anyone still lives inside. But as soon as we see it from the side,...

Documentary Exposure from The Babushkas Of Chernobyl director Morris gets its world premiere.

The 57th Chicago International Film Festival has unveiled its international competitions line-up, a roster that includes Venice Silver Lion winner The Power Of The Dog, Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers For The Stolen, and the world premiere of Holly Morris’s documentary Exposure.

The programme includes the international premiere of Franziska Stünkel’s The Last Execution. The festival runs October 13-24 and is the longest running competitive festival in North America.

The International Feature Competition line-up comprises: Péter Kerekes’s 107 Mothers (Slo-Czech-Ukr); Mohammed Diab’s Amira (Egy-Jor-uae-Saud...

HappeningIn Competition(Jury: Bong Joon-ho, Saverio Costanzo, Virginie Efira, Cynthia Erivo, Sarah Gadon, Alexander Nanau, Chloé Zhao)Golden Lion – Happening (Audrey Diwan) | Read our reviewSilver Lion (Grand Jury Prize) – The Hand of God (Paolo Sorrentino) | Read our reviewSilver Lion (Best Director) – Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) | Read our reviewCoppa Volpi for Best Actress – Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers) | Read our reviewCoppa Volpi for Best Actor – John Arcilla (On The Job: The Missing 8)Best Screenplay – Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter)Special Jury Prize – The Hole (Michelangelo Frammartino) | Read our reviewMarcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress – Filippo Scotti (The Hand of God)Orizzonti(Jury: Jasmila Žbanić, Mona Fastvold, Shahram Mokri, Josh Siegel, Nadia Terranova)Orizzonti Award for Best Film – Pilgrims (Laurynas Bareisa)Orizzonti Award for Best Director – Éric Gravel (A Plein Temps)Special Orizzonti Jury Prize – El Gran Movimiento (Kiro Russo) | Read our reviewOrizzonti Award for Best Actress...

by Nathaniel R

I was hoping to catch at least one feature in Venice that would be selected by its home country as an Academy Award submission and I did! Kavich Neang's debut feature (after several shorts) White Building will represent Cambodia for the next Oscar race. I'm already hoping it makes the finals both because the Academy is far too stingy with Asian cinema and because it's very good.

White Building impresses immediately with an aerial shot over a tenement building that looked like a cross between a Rauschenberg and a Pollock, a messy collage of patchwork color and intricate city grime and electrical wiring of the world we’re about to descend into. The building is not white given years of decay but surely once was. We initially have fun with a trio of young men including Samnang (Piseth Chhun) as they share a motorbike around the city,...

The drama is Kavich Neang’s feature debut.

Kavich Neang’s feature debut White Building has been selected to represent Cambodia in the best international feature film category for the 2022 Academy Awards.

Screen can also reveal the first trailer for drama, which is set to premiere in the Horizons strand at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

It follows 20-year-old Samnang and his group of friends in a landmark tenement housing block in Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, called White Building. The boys harbour dreams of dancing on television talent contests, while their parents lead more traditional lives. When the White Building faces demolition,...

The programme for the 2021 Venice Film Festival has been unveiled, and includes new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Campion, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michelangelo Frammartino, Pablo Larraín, Paul Schrader, Ridley Scott, and more.Parallel MothersCOMPETITIONParallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar)Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (Ana Lily Amirpour)Un Autre Monde (Stephane Brize)The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion)America LatinaL’Evenement (Audrey Diwan)Official CompetitionThe Hole (Michelangelo Frammartino)Sundown (Michel Franco)Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli)The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal)Spencer (Pablo Larrain)Freaks Out (Gabriele Mainetti)Qui Rido Io (Mario Martone)On The Job: The Missing 8 (Erik Matti)Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matuszyński)Captain Volkonogov EscapedThe Card Counter (Paul Schrader)The Hand of God (Paolo Sorrentino)Reflection (Valentyn Vasyanovych)The Box (Lorenzo Vigas)Out Of COMPETITIONFeaturesDune (Denis Villeneuve)Il Bambino Nascosto (Roberto Andò)Les Choses Humaines (Yvan Attal)Ariaferma (Leonardo Di Costanzo)Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green...