News

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2023, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

The world came back in 2023. The box office, the labor strikes, the raging wars, the Who-declared end of official global emergency, the AI explosion. People were stir-crazy, anxious to act, be it in the name of violence or peace or productivity. It’s been a sobering reminder that life fully lived is defined by bedrock tragedy as much as triumph––that to enter back into open community with the rest of the world is to feel the effervescence of life flowing naturally again while simultaneously laying oneself bare to fresh devastation. It’s been a reminder of the duality of being: that real life is much wilder than the movies and yet the day-to-day is still defined by mundanity and monotony––the amassed in-between moments.

In those in-betweens,...

Stars: João Arrais, Anabela Moreira, Gustavo Sumpta, Leonor Silveira, Miguel Amorim, Ivo Arroja, André Cabral, João Cachola, Vicente Gil | Written and Directed by Carlos Conceicao

For me, it can only be a good thing when I say that Tommy Guns is like no film I have ever seen before. It covers several genres and with the genre shifts, almost feels like it’s changing the story each time – whether it covers wartime drama, zombie flick or art house, it’s always engaging.

The story begins in 1974, just one year before the country’s independence from decades of Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually claim their land back. A tribal girl discovers love and danger when her path crosses that of a Portuguese soldier. Another group of soldiers, completely cut off from the outside world, blindly follow the brutal orders of their commander in the name of serving their country.

It’s tough when you want to like a film a little more. The idea and spirit is present in Tommy Guns, but an overwhelming air of academicism––something that’s sadly begun infecting art cinema in the past decade, its films made more and more by directors self-conscious of the festival circuit tics and requirements––leaves it hard to commend overall.

There’s an intriguing setup: the film takes place in 1974, near the end of the African country Angola being reclaimed from Portugal by insurgent guerrilla forces. Placing us in the middle of proceedings as the colonizer military fights a losing battle, we hone in on the inner workings of an Angolan village. An overly naturalistic make-out scene early in the proceedings, followed by a shocking murder, and then (naturally) a 27-minute-in title-card drop brought worries I was watching Friedberg / Seltzer’s newest spoof Locarno Movie. That said, some...

"S'kwata! S'kwata! S'kwata!" Kino Lorber has revealed the official trailer for a film titled Tommy Guns, made by up-and-coming filmmaker Carlos Conceição. Winner of Best European Film Award at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival, Tommy Guns has elicited comparisons to the work of Claire Denis, Miguel Gomes, and even M. Night Shyamalan, and it announces a bold and exciting new voice in Portuguese and Angolan filmmaking. Described as an "ambitious and exquisitely crafted genre-fluid fantasia." In 1974, after years of civil war, the Portuguese and descendants fled the colony of Angola (in Central Africa) where independentist groups gradually claimed their territory back. A tribal girl discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier. Meanwhile, another group of Portuguese soldiers is barracked inside an infinite wall from which they will have to escape once from the past comes out of the grave to claim its long-awaited justice.

Exclusive: Kino Lorber has struck a deal with Paris-based sales firm Wide for North American distribution rights to Carlos Conceição’s Locarno Film Festival war drama Tommy Guns.

The pic will receive a North American premiere at New Directors/New Films, the annual film festival hosted jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Conceição and actor João Arrais will be in attendance, and a theatrical release via Kino Lorber will follow on April 12.

Billed as “a genre-fluid fantasia” that engages with Angola’s colonial past, the pic opens in 1974, one year before the country’s independence from Portuguese rule. Wealthy colonists are fleeing the country as Angolan revolutionaries gradually reclaim land. It’s against this backdrop that a young tribal girl crosses paths with a Portuguese soldier, which introduces her to a new world of love and danger. At the same time, another group of soldiers, completely...

Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art have set Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama and Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s Sundance Special Jury Award winner Mutt, both debut features, as opening and closing film at the 52st edition of their collaboration, New Directors/New Films, running March 29–April 9 in NYC.

The festival will introduce will showcase 27 features and 11 shorts from 41 directors at theaters in both venues.

Mutt star Lio Mehial was awarded a U.S. Special Jury Award for acting at Sundance Film festival for their portrayal of Feña, a twentysomething trans man contending with an onslaught of aggravation, surprise encounters and emotional choices over the course of a single hectic day in New York City. “We were charmed, seduced, and compelled by this fresh new performer as we watched them navigating the intimate complexities of their everyday life and relationships in his search for acceptance,” the jury citation said.

Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição’s Angolan War of Independence drama Tommy Guns has won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European film at the 75th Locarno Film Festival, running August 3 to 13.

The feature explores the war through the eyes of two youngsters – a local girl and a Portuguese soldier – who are caught up in the conflict.

Under the award, the film will receive the support of the Europa Cinemas Network – representing more than 1,200 theatres in Europe and other territories – with additional promotion and incentives for exhibitors to extend the film’s run on screen.

“Carlos Conceição’s Tommy Guns was an absolutely unanimous choice for us as winner of this year’s Europa Cinemas Label here in Locarno,” said the jury. “We have decided to award this very personal and original film with a plot twist that took us completely by surprise, making us reconsider the whole story until that point through a new perspective.

Nação Valente Review — Nação Valente (2022) Film Review from the 75th Annual Locarno Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Carlos Conceição, starring João Arrais, Anabele Moreira, Gustavo Sumpta, Leonor Silveira, Miguel Amorim, and André Cabral. For all the “both sides” and “it’s complicated” discourse that’s flooded the media with regards to world events this year – particularly [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: NAÇÃO Valente: Historical Revisionism As the Real Horrors of War [Locarno 2022]...

In its first full-on post-pandemic edition, Locarno roared back into action as an industry hub over Aug. 3-9, smashing attendance records with delegates at industry arm Locarno Pro soaring from 2019’s prior record of 1,040 to 1,300.

That reflects the year-round work of festival artistic director Giona Nazzaro and industry head Markus Duffner at Locarno Pro, building on foundations laid by Nadia Dresti over 2010-19. Sky rocketing attendance also says much about the state of the international film industry as it is is rocked by titanic sea change propelled by global, regional and local streaming platforms. Following, 10 takes on Locarno as its turns its final bend towards Aug. 13’s awards announcement.

Latest Deals

A score or more of new deals announced since Sunday in exclusivity to Variety:

*Germany’s Pluto Film has been in negotiations with several theatrical distributors on Locarno Piazza Grande title “Semret,” ahead of its world premiere on Aug.

Portugal’s colonial past in Africa continues to haunt some of the country’s most vital and subversive filmmakers. With his remarkable second feature “Tommy Guns,” Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes — borrowing, perhaps, a measure of the former’s visceral austerity and the latter’s shape-shifting playfulness, but mostly proving his own sly, supple talent. Formally and structurally audacious in ways that build in power and meaning as the film unfolds, this study of a Portuguese military squad gradually unraveling in a remote, bloodied wilderness begins with a clear sense of time, place and space, before collapsing those certainties in a horror-tinged nightmare that nods to the sprawling impact of colonialism across eras.

That brush of genre influence — comparable, in its subtle, dimension-twisting fluidity, to Mati Diop’s recent “Atlantics” — ought to heighten interest around “Tommy Guns...

Exclusive: Paris-based sales company Wide has acquired world sales rights to Angola-born Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição’s Angolan War of Independence drama Tommy Guns, which made a well-received debut in Competition at the Locarno Film Festival on Friday.

Set against the final violent days of the conflict in 1974, the film gives a dual perspective of the conflict through the tale of a young local girl who discovers love and death when her path crosses that of a young Portuguese soldier.

The film is lead produced by Terratreme Filmes, the Lisbon-based collective created by award-winning Portuguese directors João Matos, Susana Nobre, Tiago Hespanha, Pedro Pinho, Leonor Noivo and Luisa Homem in 2008.

Virginie Lacombe and Arnaud Quesada at Paris-based Virginie Films are on board as co-producers and Conceição and Margarida Ventura take associate producer credits under their Portuguese Mirabilis banner.

Wide head of acquisitions Maxime Montagne, who finalised the deal in Locarno...