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Leonor Serraille’s “Ari,” one of the most anticipated European films slated to world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, has been boarded by Pamela Leu’s Be For Films.

“Ari” marks Serraille’s follow up to “Mother and Son” (“Un petit frere”) which competed at Cannes in 2022. Her feature debut, “Jeune Femme,” won the Golden Camera at Cannes in 2017.

Be For Films will kick off sales on the film at the European Film Market running alongside the Berlinale.

Serraille’s third feature, “Ari” revolves around a 27-year-old student teacher who collapses right in the middle of a school inspector’s visit. “Angry with him for being a failure, his father kicks him out of the house. Emotionally raw, and alone in the city, Ari reluctantly forces himself to rekindle his relationships with old friends. As his memories of the previous months successively ebb and flow, Ari discovers...

Max has revealed the trailer for its first French four-part limited series, The Confidante, which will debut on the streaming service on Friday, October 11. New episodes will debut weekly.

Inspired by true events, this psychological thriller follows Christelle “Chris” Blandin, a rock music-obsessed Parisian who, after witnessing the harrowing November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks, quickly latches onto a community of survivors.

Claiming that her best friend Vincent was one of dozens critically injured at the Bataclan Theatre, Chris becomes an indispensable resource for the group, working her way into a prominent role in a survivors’ association.

Though her commitment seems relentless, discrepancies begin to pepper her story – raising serious doubts among the true victims of the tragedy. A thought-provoking series, The Confidante questions the very nature of truth… and the web of lies left in one woman’s wake.

The cast of this psychological thriller includes Laure Calamy Arieh Worthalter (Le procès...

Paradise Australian Spinoff

Filming has begun on “Return to Paradise,” an Australian spin-off series of the global hit murder mystery franchise “Death in Paradise.” With filming in locations across Sydney and the Illawarra coastal region, the six-part whodunit is produced by BBC Studios Productions Australia with Red Planet Pictures for the ABC in association with the BBC. The BBC will screen the series on BBC One and iPlayer in the U.K. It will be distributed globally by BBC Studios.

“Return to Paradise” follows detective inspector Mackenzie Clarke who reluctantly returns from the U.K. to Australia and the small town where she ditched her fiancé. But once a case lands on her desk, her tenacity and endurance means she can’t rest until the killer is in handcuffs.

Taking charge as the franchise’s first lead female detective is Anna Samson. Unravelling the murder mysteries alongside her is the ensemble cast of Lloyd Griffith,...

Also new this weekend: Dreamworks animation ’Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ and ’La Syndicaliste (The Sitting Duck)’, starring Isabelle Huppert.

Disney is leading the pack this weekend with Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny out at 743 venues, the widest UK-Ireland release of 2023 so far.

It opens ahead of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which debuted at 732 sites in May. The Cannes premiere, the fifth instalment in the franchise, sees James Mangold take the reins from Steven Spielberg. Harrison Ford returns as the titular adventurer, this time in 1969. Jones is living a quieter life, until his estranged goddaughter – played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge...

Also new this weekend: Dreamworks animation ’Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ and ’La Syndicaliste (The Sitting Duck)’, starring Isabelle Huppert.

Disney is leading the pack this weekend with Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny out at 743 venues, the widest UK-Ireland release of 2023 so far.

It opens ahead of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which debuted at 732 sites in May. The Cannes premiere, the fifth instalment in the franchise, sees James Mangold take the reins from Steven Spielberg. Harrison Ford returns as the titular adventurer, this time in 1969. Jones is living a quieter life, until his estranged goddaughter – played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge...

Mother and Son was met to great critical acclaim when it premiered in Cannes last year, and finally it now makes its way to audiences this side of the Channel, and to mark the occasion we had the pleasure in speaking to filmmaker Léonor Serraille in Paris at the beginning of the year.

We discuss the themes of the film, the casting of her leading woman Annabelle Lengronne, and exploring the socio-political situation in France in regards to the relationship between the establishment and minorities. We also talk about the success of her preceding feature Jeune Femme, and what sort of impact that had on this project.

I was reading that this story has been with you for some time, why was now the right time to tell it?

It was my second movie and I was very stressed and I maybe wanted not to make another movie, so my...

"You're in France now. We're here to help. We're family." Picturehouse in the UK has revealed the official trailer for a French indie drama titled Mother and Son in English, originally known as Un Petit Frère in French. This first premiered at last year's 2022 Cannes Film Festival in the competition (though it didn't win anything), and will open this summer in UK cinemas. Beautifully tender and deeply moving, Mother and Son is a vibrant portrait of a family told from multiple perspectives. Centred on a young mother and her two sons after their move from the Ivory Coast to France, the film is an impassioned tale of shifting tensions and identity from writer-director Léonor Serraille (also of Jeune Femme). It also played at the Vienna and Stockholm Fests, and at the American French Film Festival last fall. Starring Annabelle Lengronne as Rose, with Stéphane Bak, Kenzo Sambin, Sidy Fofana, Ahmed Sylla,...

Abbott Elementary, Atlanta and Better Call Saul are among the winners from the fourth night of the NAACP Image Awards‘ non-televised ceremonies.

Winners during Thursday’s night virtual ceremony encompassed the TV writing, TV directing and podcasting categories.

Brittani Nichols won best writing in a comedy series for Abbott Elementary, while Marissa Jo Cerar took the drama series writing award for Women of the Movement.

Angela Barnes won directing honors for the comedy series Atlanta, while Giancarlo Esposito won an NAACP Image Award for directing Better Call Saul.

Winners in the the podcasting categories included The Daily Show and LeVar Burton.

NAACP recognized winners in non-televised categories in virtual ceremonies over multiple nights. Beyoncé and Rihanna were among the winners from night one; Jennifer Hudson, Trevor Noah and Viola Davis were among those winning during night two; and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Quinta Brunson and Keke Palmer were among the night three winners.

Drama is co-directed by Riley Keough and Gina Gammell.

Picturehouse Entertainment has secured all UK and Ireland rights to Riley Keough and Gina Gammell’s War Pony, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes on Saturday (May 28).

The deal was closed with UK outfit Protagonist Pictures, which is handling international sales.

Inspired by true events, the US drama follows two boys living in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, as they face the difficult realities of growing into adulthood. The two central roles are played by Jojo Bapteise Whiting and Ladainian Crazy Thunder.

It marks the directorial debut of Keough,...

This year, the Cannes Film Festival kicked off with a restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 ménage à trois scandal “The Mother and the Whore” and concluded with a screening of controversial Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” creating an odd kind of symmetry for the event’s 75th anniversary edition. Made half a century apart, Eustache and Östlund’s rhyming triangles were hardly the only parallels to be found at Cannes — though anyone who’s ever binge-watched movies at a major festival knows the feeling of such connections, often just a fluke of the order in which you see movies whose images and ideas inevitably resonate with one another.

Masked in screening rooms full of Covid-defiant strangers, I somehow managed to screen all 21 films in competition this year, and such similarities were myriad, while the masterpieces were scarce.

Consider this could-be coincidence: Roughly midway through Östlund’s diamond-sharp, influencer-skewering...

Life in Rouen: Serraille Stacks Perspectives in Muted Tale of Immigration and Identity

After taking home the Camera d’Or for her 2017 feature Jeune Femme, director Léonor Serraille takes on an ambitious trifecta of perspectives in Un petit frère (Mother and Son) regarding a family immigrating from the Ivory Coast to Paris in 1989. The difference between the original French language title, Un Petite Frere, or ‘my little brother,’ and its English language slant hints at the difficulty in defining the exact focus of this saga spanning over twenty years.

Although defying the usual slant of miserablism often underlining many tales of immigration, especially when they’re reflected through the prism of white privilege, this somewhat gentle tale also neglects its three main characters in sticking to superficiality as it flits between the three of them across time periods.…...

And the last film in competition is another sophomore feature film. Léonor Serraille of course won the Camera d’Or for Jeune Femme (aka Montparnasse Bienvenüe) — that film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section. Mother and Son (Un petit frère) stars Annabelle Lengronne in the lead matriarch flawed role. Hélène Louvart was the cinematographer on the film.

Set over the course of decades, we see two brothers grow up under a mother who doesn’t really have her act together — it leads them to different settings and dwellings – the result: adult children who have their own issues.

As expected, some of our jury folk made their way back home and so with thirteen votes in we’re looking at another 2.8 grade average.…...

MK2 Films has locked major territory deals on Leonor Serraille’s drama “Mother and Son” which world premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered strong reviews.

“Mother and Son” charts the lives of a young African woman, Rose, and two of her four children, Jean and Ernest, who come to France from the Ivory Coast in the 1980s with high ideals. Juggling her parenting responsibilities and low-paying jobs, Rose still aspires to find true love and to fulfill her own desires, but she ultimately struggles to reach a balance between her roles as a mother and a woman. Jean and Ernest, meanwhile, will take different paths to fitting into French society while coping with their identity conflicts and their mother’s life choices.

MK2 Films has sold the movie to the U.K. (Picture House), Spain (Vertigo), Italy (Teodora), Sweden (Triart), Benelux (Cherry Pickers), Greece (One From the Heart...

Kelly Reichardt’s ’Showing Up’ lands third on Screen’s Cannes jury grid.

Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave finishes on top of Screen’s Cannes jury grid with an average of 3.2 after Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up and Léonor Serraille’s Mother And Son fail to match its score.

Reichardt’s Competition debut Showing Up landed in third place with an average of 2.7 after receiving five scores of three (good) from our jurors.

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The film, starring Michelle Williams, centres on a New York artist preparing for a show who must balance professional demands with...

Quentin Dupieux’s film debuted out of Competition.

Picturehouse Entertainment has made Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing its latest Cannes 2022 acquisition, buying UK-Ireland rights for the out of Competition title.

Smoking Causes Coughing debuted as a Midnight screening on the Croisette; it is sold by France’s Gaumont.

The film follows a team of five avengers known as the Tobacco Force. After a devastating battle against a diabolical turtle, they are sent on a retreat to strengthen their cohesion, which goes well until Lezardin, Emperor of Evil, decides to annihilate planet Earth.

Gilles Lelouche, Vincent Lacoste, Anais Demoustier, Jean-Pascal Zadi and Oulaya Amamra star.

Here’s a fun bit of symmetry: Of the four French titles competing for this year’s Palme d’Or, the first to screen was “Brother and Sister” and the last was “Mother and Son.” (Presumably daughters and grandparents will get their due next year.) Of the two, “Mother and Son” director Léonor Serraille bests her colleague Arnaud Desplechin in the family-saga sweepstakes, delivering a decade-spanning immigration drama that plays on the most intimate of registers.

The film closed out the Cannes competition on Friday, providing it an auspicious berth. This year’s jury will go into deliberations with actress Annabelle Lengronne fresh in mind; should the actress win, she won’t have far to travel.

She isn’t entirely the lead, as the triptych follows a Franco-Ivorian family in chapters dedicated to each member. We open in 1989 on Rose (Lengronne), a young mother of four who leaves her two...

While the evening belonged to castmembers Ahmed Sylla, Annabelle Lengronne, Stephane Bak and director Leonor Serraille, Helen Mirren and Andie MacDowell provided an entertaining diversion at the Cannes screening of Mother And Son (Un Petit Frere). The glamorous duo did an impromptu dance together as they made their way up the red carpet, providing yet another memorable moment in Cannes’ 75th edition.

Click on the photo above to see a gallery of images from the Mother And Son screening and many other Cannes 2022 red carpets.

Launch Gallery: Cannes Red Carpet Photos: Opening Ceremony Draws Eva Longoria, Julianne Moore And Volodymyr Zelensky...

When his mother spoke, Ernest remembers, everything sounded important. “I cling to her light,” he tells us in voiceover, an adult remembering how that felt. The Ernest he is recalling is just a little boy (Milan Doucansi), snuggled against Rose, with his grave and clever older brother Jean (Sidy Fofana) sitting opposite on a train taking them from Cote d’Ivoire to a new French life.

Mother and Son is the story of that life – less story, perhaps, than a tapestry of carefully embroidered details – over 25 years, focusing on each of the three characters in turn. The writer and director, Leonor Serraille, is a young white woman educated at the Sorbonne; she returns to Cannes in competition after winning the Camera d’Or with Jeune Femme in 2017. Nevertheless, the film has the feel of autobiography, piled high with memories. Everything here clearly sounded important to Serraille,...

Nobody who has lived their entire life in one country can fully understand the strange, intimate disruption of emigrating as a family. For a time, parents and children are united and equal in disorientation, the adults’ authority on hold as all parties mutually wander and fumble their way through new cultures, geographies and social circles — a shared rite of passage, cutting through separating decades. Eventually, everyone finds their feet, traditional roles are reasserted, and stable family life resumes — except when it doesn’t, as depicted in Léonor Serraille’s delicate but wrenching second feature “Mother and Son.” An unsentimental but stoically anguished portrait of a tough single mother and two vulnerable sons settling (or not) in France from the Ivory Coast, it shows how the immigrant experience can equally tighten the knot between parent and child, or permanently unravel it.

An unassumingly ambitious drama, plainly but poetically told in three...

Competition titles from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lukas Dhont and Albert Serra face our jurors.

Albert Serra’s Pacifiction and Lukas Dhont’s Close landed mid-pack on Screen’s Cannes jury grid, while Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker disappointed our jurors.

Serra’s Pacifiction averaged 2.6, it tells the story of a high commissioner on the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, navigating local concern about French nuclear testing. The film took five threes (good) and two ones (poor) from our jurors. Le Monde’s Mathieu Macheret awarded the Catalan filmmaker a four (excellent) whilst Positif’s Michel Ciment gave it a zero (bad).

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The 2022 Cannes Film Festival is nearing its conclusion, and soon the jury will be selecting awards for this year’s impressive, albeit quieter, slate of films. After last year’s “Titane” from Julia Ducournau made history as the first female-directed film to fully win the Palme d’Or (Jane Campion’s “The Piano” tied with “Farewell My Concubine” in 1993), at this point in the festival, it doesn’t seem likely that a woman-directed project will walk away with it this year.

“Forever Young” by French-Italian director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi seems to be the only film directed by a woman that has so far invoked any passion for bringing it to the finish line. Claire Denis’ “Stars at Noon,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” Leonor Serraille’s “Mother and Son” and Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen’s “Eight Mountains” are the other titles directed by women among the 21 contending features.

It has picked up Cristian Mungiu’s ’R.M.N.’ and Dominik Moll’s ’The Night Of The 12th’.

UK-Ireland distributor Picturehouse Entertainment has added two further Official Selection selections to its ever-growing swag bag of Cannes titles.

It has picked up Cristian Mungiu’s Competition drama R.M.N. from Wild Bunch International and Dominik Moll’s The Night Of The 12th, which is screening in Cannes Premiere, from Memento International.

R.M.N. follows a man who quits his job in Germany to return to his multi-ethnic Transylvanian village and becomes involved in an ongoing drama. It is...

MK2 Films, which is presenting six movies at the Cannes Film Festival, will be attending the market with a pair of hot new titles, French director Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” and Israeli helmer Maya Dreifuss’s “Highway 65.”

“Anatomy of a Fall” stars Sandra Hüller, the critically acclaimed German actor of “Toni Erdmann,” as an enigmatic German novelist who is arrested after the mysterious death of her husband at their chalet in the French Alps. The court case examines every aspect of the relationship she had with her husband, while her visually impaired son is called to testify as a witness.

The movie will re-team MK2 Films with Triet, whose latest film “Sybil” competed at Cannes. Fionnuala Jamison, MK2 Films’s managing director, described the film as a “Hitchcockian tale of suspense.” “We were hooked on the script, the complexities of Sandra’s character, and its original premise...

The Cannes Film Festival has added two more films to the Official Selection of the 75th edition, which will kick off on May 17.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “As Bestas,” a French-Spanish movie, has been added to Cannes Première, the new section dedicated to world premieres for movies that are slightly more mainstream, similarly to the out-of-competition strand. Sorogoyen previously earned an Oscar nomination with his 2017 short film “Madre.”

Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs star as a middle-aged French couple moves to a local village, seeking closeness with nature and end up sparking outright hostility and shocking violence with the small community.

“Salam,” a documentary directed by Mélanie Georgiades aka Diam’s, Houda Benyamina (“The Eddy”) and Anne Cissé (“Buck”), is set to play in the Special Screenings section.

Following its April 14 presser, the festival also added three movies competition: Léonor Serraille’s “Un Petit Frere,” Albert Serra’s “Tourment sur les iles...

The Cannes Film Festival has added a string of new titles to its Official Selection, including three movies in competition: Léonor Serraille’s “Un Petit Frere,” Albert Serra’s “Tourment sur les iles” and “Le Otto Montagne” by Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix Van Groeninge.

Other movies that have been added to the lineup include Serge Bozon’s “Don Juan” and Emmanuel Mouret’s “Chronique d’une liaison passagère,” which have been added to Cannes Premiere, a new section launched last year; while actor-director Louis Garrel’s “L’innocent,” a drama starring Garrel, Anouk Grinberg and Noémie Merlant, will play out of competition.

“Don Juan” is a musical romantic comedy with Tahar Rahim and Virginie Efira, who will also be at Cannes to emcee the opening and closing ceremonies.

“Chronique d’une liaison passagere” is also a romantic comedy-drama revolving around an adulterous relationship, starring Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Macaigne.

With the new additions,...