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Causeway Films, the Australian film production house behind recent breakout “Talk to Me,” has opened a U.K. operation.

The company has hired Daniel Negret, formerly of Head Gear Films, as its CEO.

Causeway Films was established by producers Kristina Ceyton and Samantha Jennings in 2014, launching with Jennifer Kent’s Sundance hit “The Babadook.” It followed that by producing Kent’s follow up feature “The Nightingale,” which won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.

Innovative horror film, “Talk to Me,” from filmmaking duo Danny and Michael Philippou screened in Sundance, Berlin and SXSW 2023 and was acquired by A24. It became A24’s top genre release in North America with a box office of $48.1 million to date, taking the film’s global box office to over $89 million.

In 2020-21 Causeway completed four other features. These included “You Won’t Be Alone,” by the Serbian Australian director Goran Stolevski...

Sales include re-release deal for ’Welcome To The Dollhouse’ in UK.

Visit Films, which is jetting in to Berlin to launch EFM sales on Berlinale section Dreams’ Gate among other titles, has announced a wave of deals on recent festival hits including a US deal and multiple territories on last year’s Berlin Silver Bear winner Robe Of Gems.

Natalia Lopez’s tale of redemption, family and violence in Mexico will open in the US this summer through Monument Releasing and has also gone to Madman Entertainment for Australia and New Zealand, as well as Mubi for Italy, Baltics, Africa,...

New York Times bestselling author turned TV creator Taiye Selasi captivated a packed theater at the Joburg Film Festival this week, acknowledging that the deck is stacked against Black female creators in Hollywood, but insisting that the power of African women remained in their ability to overcome any obstacle in bringing their stories to the screen. “There is nothing that can stop, has ever stopped, or will ever, ever stop an African woman,” she declared to a rapt audience.

Selasi spoke in front of a full house at Johannesburg’s Theater on the Square on Friday as part of a day-long celebration of African women in film. During a rousing session in which she shared lessons from her experience at the helm of Cocoa Content, the TV production company she founded in 2019, Selasi weighed in on the growing demand for African talent in Hollywood while also unpacking the “hype” about...

Laugh all you want but the success of filmmaker Brett Michael Innes’ first foray into mockumentary territory with “Daryn’s Gym” is part of a growing South African slate flexing its muscles within a comedy genre no longer considered “too refined” for local audiences’ taste.

The Nostalgia Productions mockumentary feature – a David and Goliath battle between the hapless owner of a family gym squaring off against the ruthless owner of a multinational fitness center plotting a takeover – is included in the film lineup currently on show at the 5th Joburg Film Festival with Innes, who served as writer and director, attending.

Made for eVOD, the nascent streamer of the commercial South African broadcaster e.tv, Innes tells Variety that on a financing level “Daryn’s Gym” was “one of the easiest things to do” since the gym-set tale was a full commission from eVOD.

“They told us to be bold and risqué,...

The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ended its 6th edition last Thursday with the sold-out closing night East Coast Premiere of Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness at Nitehawk Cinema and announced today its jury and audience award winners. Launching on October 14th with the NY Premiere of Mlungu Wam (Good Madam), Brooklyn Horror is proud to have welcomed back an eager and excited audience who packed the cinemas after a one year pandemic related hiatus and hosted a majority of sold-out screenings, with special highlights being the festival’s 35mm projection of Session 9, presented for its 20th anniversary with lead actor and co-writer Stephen Gevedon in attendance, and the US Premiere of local filmmaker Edoardo Vitaletti’s debut The Last Thing Mary Saw, with Rory Culkin and Vitaletti present for the Q&a.

Further highlights of the festival include the world premieres of Adam Randall’s Netflix Original vampire feature Night Teeth...

“It’s not that Mama doesn’t like this house — this house doesn’t like Mama,” explains Tsidi to her young daughter Winnie about the roomy, comfortable Cape Town pad in which they’ve recently taken up residence. Tsidi knows the place well. For as long as she can remember, it’s been home to her mother Mavis, which is not to say it’s Mavis’s house: A live-in domestic servant, she has been dutifully maintaining the place for decades for her well-to-do white madam, living and aging and even raising children — her own and otherwise — within walls that at once contain her and eternally reject her. The socially ingrained politics of South Africa’s master-servant culture are ultimately what haunt the house in Jenna Cato Bass’ crisp, chilling chamber piece “Good Madam.”

A quiet, tightly wound horror film, Bass’ fourth and most briskly accomplished feature might flirt with the supernatural,...

Today the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is announcing the lineup for their in-person event being held in North Brooklyn next month from October 14th through 21st. Going into its sixth year the festival will open with the psychological horror Good Madam from South Africa and close on an upbeat note with the audcious horror from Taiwan, The Sadness.    Earwig will be the centerpiece film of the fest while current faves like The Feast, What Josiah Saw, When I Consume You and The Last Thing Mary Saw round out a program that includes two world premieres: Ego from Spain and American vampire flick Night Teeth. All the films and banger short film blocks are below in the gallery.    As we are seeing with any...

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

Winner has earned Oscar best picture nomination in last 11 years.

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast has won the 2021 TIFF People’s Choice audience award in a boost to its award season prospects.

Winners of the award have gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination in the past 11 years with last year’s Nomadland and some years prior Green Book and Slumdog Millionaire winning the ultimate prize. Jamie Dornan, Caitriona Balfe, Jude Hill, Judi Dench and Ciarin Hinds star in Northern Ireland-born Branagh’s childhood memoir set during the onset of The Troubles.

‘Belfast’: Review

Scarborough from Shasha Nakhai...

Kenneth Branagh’s black-and-white drama “Belfast” has won the People’s Choice Award at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF announced on Saturday.

The gentle drama, which is based on Branagh’s childhood growing up in Northern Ireland, won over Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s “Scarborough,” a story of three low-income children that finished second, and Jane Campion’s revisionist Western “The Power of the Dog,” which finished third.

In its review of the film from TIFF, TheWrap wrote, “Visually stunning, emotionally wrenching and gloriously human, ‘Belfast’ takes one short period from Branagh’s life and finds in it a coming-of-age story, a portrait of a city fracturing in an instant and a profoundly moving lament for what’s been lost during decades of strife in his homeland of Northern Ireland.”

Other films in competition for the award included “Dear Evan Hansen,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “The Guilty.

For the first time in its 46-year history, a Tanzanian film is part of the official selection of the Toronto Film Festival, as Amil Shivji’s “Vuta N’Kuvute” (Tug of War) prepares to bow at the Canadian fest on Sept. 13.

Set in colonial-era Zanzibar, “Tug of War” is the story of a young freedom fighter and a runaway bride whose romance blossoms against the backdrop of a political uprising in the final years of British colonial rule.

The film is produced by Steven Markovitz (Big World Cinema) and Shivji, who co-wrote with South African director Jenna Bass, who also debuts her latest feature, “Mlungu Wam” (Good Madam), in Toronto’s Platform section.

Based on the Swahili novel by Shafi Adam Shafi, “Tug of War” is a story that captivated the director when he first laid his hands on it. “I picked it up and couldn’t put it down,...

South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass might not seem like the obvious choice to direct a horror movie. For most of her life, the 35-year-old helmer has steered clear of scares. “I was really sensitive as a kid,” she tells Variety. Even the sight of a character getting shot was too grisly for her to bear. “Horror was out of the question.”

Bass was in her twenties when she began dipping into the genre. She found herself fascinated by the form — what people found scary, and why — even while she puzzled over why most horror movies were about supernatural menaces, ancient curses or mysterious creatures from the deep: nothing that was “real or rooted in our world.”

That question would eventually lead to “Mlungu Wam” (“Good Madam”), a psychological thriller that world premieres at the Toronto Film Festival. Set in the suburbs of Cape Town, it follows a series of...

A matriarch passes and the family swarms to poach whatever they can in the aftermath. Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa) tells herself it won’t matter—she’s been the one taking care of her grandmother and thus has a claim over that which she has called her home for years, but “fair” doesn’t factor where tradition is concerned. Her uncle (the eldest) allows Tsidi’s cousins to put her in her place as new construction plans made while the recently departed was still alive become colored as some sort of hostile takeover. And then he joins the chorus by telling her what she did means nothing. He decides who gets the house. Tsidi subsequently packs her things, steals her grandmother’s coat, and leaves with her daughter Winnie (Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya).

Where’s she to go, though? She and Winnie’s father (Khanyiso Kenqa’s Luthando) are no longer together,...

Fox Fire Films, Sanusi Chronicles, Causeway Films produced.

Visit Films will kick off world sales later this week on South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass’s TIFF genre title Good Madam (Mlungu Wam) which gets its world premiere in Platform on Thursday (September 9).

Set in the suburbs of Cape Town Good Madam tells of Tsidi, a single parent who moves back in with her estranged mother Mavis, a live-in domestic worker who has been employed by her bedridden white “Madam” for 30 years.

When Tsidi experiences disturbing events that have plagued her mother she uncovers the dark truth behind the relationship Mavis has with her employer.