News

Jacques Audiard’s musical film Emilia Pérez is the frontrunner at the nomination stage for the 30th edition of France’s Lumière awards.

The prizes, which are regarded as the French equivalent of the Golden Globes, will be voted on by members of the international press hailing from 38 countries this year.

They cover 13 categories spanning film, direction, screenplay, actress, actor, female revelation, male revelation, first film, animation, documentary, international co-production, cinematography and music.

Audiard’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Emilia Pérez has clinched six nominations, followed by Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize this year, and Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, with five nominations each.

Other frontrunners with four nominations each, include François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming and Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail.

The winners will be announced in a ceremony at the Forum des images in Paris on January 20, 2025.

The full...

Except perhaps Souleymane’s Story‘s Abou Sangare biking away with the European Actor award (beating out Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes) there were no surprises at last night’s European Film Awards with Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Pérez winning four of the five prizes it was nominated for. Karla Sofía Gascón won Best Actress, Audiard won Best Screenwriter and Director while the film the top prize of the evening. Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal’s No Other Land continues to dominate the docu awards circuit which means here is a legit shot at a future Oscar. Here are the noms and winners:

European Director:

Winner: Jacques Audiard for Emilia PÉREZ

Andrea Arnold for Bird

Pedro Almodóvar for The Room Next Door

Mohammad Rasoulof for The Seed Of The Sacred Fig

Maura Delpero for Vermiglio

European Screenwriter:

Winner: Jacques Audiard for Emilia PÉREZ

Magnus von Horn & Line Langebek...

Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” won best film, director, screenwriter and actress at the 37th European Film Awards, which were held Saturday in Lucerne, Switzerland.

The best film nominees included narrative features “The Room Next Door,” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” “The Substance” and “Vermiglio,” as well as documentaries “Bye Bye Tiberias,” “Dahomey,” “In Limbo,” “No Other Land” and “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” and animated films “Flow,” “Living Large,” “Savages,” “Sultana’s Dream” and “They Shot the Piano Player.”

The statuette for actress was won by Karla Sofía Gascón for “Emilia Pérez.” The other nominees were Renate Reinsve in “Armand,” Trine Dyrholm in “The Girl With the Needle,” Vic Carmen Sonne in “The Girl With the Needle” and Tilda Swinton in “The Room Next Door.”

The director award went to Audiard for “Emilia Pérez,” who beat Andrea Arnold for “Bird,” Pedro Almodóvar for “The Room Next Door,” Mohammad Rasoulof...

The European Film Awards is taking place in the Swiss city of Lucerne tonight (December 7) and Screen is revealing the winners live from the ceremony, which kicked off at 20.00 Cet.

Scroll down for winners

To read the winners as they are announced, you can refresh the page and scroll down to the full list below.

The ceremony is also being live-streamed below.

Emilia Pérez and The Room Next Door are the front-runners for this year’s awards with four nominations apiece.

Fifteen features compete for the best European film prize, up from five last year. This follows a recent rule...

French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem, whose documentary “Bye Bye Tiberias,” featuring her mother Hiam Abbas (“Succession”), launched positively from Venice and Toronto, is set to make her feature film debut with “Alicante,” a drama starring her sister Mouna Soualem (“Oussekine”) as a young woman on an existential journey that takes her to Spain.

After exploring her Algerian grandparents’ break-up in the doc “Their Algeria” and delving into how Hiam Abbas and her family were displaced from the city of Tiberias by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in “Bye Bye Tiberias,” Soualem will now be putting a somewhat lighter tale on screen, albeit one that continues her exploration of “questions of belonging and transmission and exiles between generations” and “finding your place in the world,” as she puts it.

In “Alicante” Mouna Soualem will play Assia, a 32-year-old Franco-Algerian photographer, who has just broken up with her long-time American partner, with whom she had...

Hiam Abbass (“Succession”), Abderrahmane Sissako (“Black Tea”), Zar Amir Ebrahimi (“Holy Spider”), Adam Bessa (“Ghost Trail”), Yumna Marwan (“The Veil”) and “Anatomy of a Fall” producer Marie-Ange Luciani will join “The Bikeriders” director Jeff Nichols as mentors at this year’s Atlas Workshops.

Running from Dec. 1 – 5 as part of the Marrakech Film Festival, this seventh edition will more than double in duration, welcoming the filmmakers and producers behind 27 projects for an extra day of in-person workshops after four days of online session earlier this month. By the time the filmmakers hit the ground for pitches in Marrakech, they have benefited from co-production panels, acquisition and distribution trend analysis, green production coaching and presentations from international film funds and A-list festivals.

“We’re creating a new dynamic,” says Atlas Workshops director Hédi Zardi. “In order to assist and make known a young generation – to get them into festivals and onto the...

Film-maker Chloe Abrahams combines documentary and memory in candid conversations with the women in her family

The mango taste is bittersweet in this documentary-memoir of family pain and secrets from film-maker Chloe Abrahams. Using a small digital videocamera and her smartphone, Abrahams records intimate, candid conversations with her mother and grandmother, and the resulting movie is a lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.

Abrahams shows the crisis of loyalty and agony of an abusive marriage, but shows also how the generational trauma can be healed when the generations come together. It’s a quietly powerful film to put, perhaps, alongside Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard or Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias. Abrahams is resident in the UK and her family background is Sri Lankan; her mother was abused by her alcoholic stepfather back in the old country – that is,...

Lina Soualem’s Spain-set family tale “Alicante,” Walid Messnaoui’s gangster Western “The Last Beast of Atlas” and Linda Lô’s search-for-identity drama “Lucky Girl” rank as buzz titles at the 7th Atlas Workshops, running Dec. 1-5 at the Marrakech Festival.

“Mud” director Jeff Nichols has already been announced as this year’s Workshops tutor.

They will also unveil first images from three of the most awaited movies from the Arab world – from “Amreeka” director Cherien Dabis and “The Yacoubian Building” helmer Marwan Hamed and Tarzan and Arab Nasser, behind Palestine Oscar entry “Gaza Mon Amour.”

Adding to this, however, are a slew of first or second features by young filmmakers hailing from Morocco, Africa and the Arab world who have already gained Academy Awards or big fest recognition, giving the 2024 Atlas Workshops one of the highest-caliber and exciting lineups of any development program this year.

“Arab and African cinema...

Marrakech International Film Festival (Miff) is deploying a twofold tactic for its upcoming 21st edition to give a boost to its local theatrical distribution sector, and fuel wider global releases for Moroccan, Arab and Pan-African films.

“The idea is not to launch a market, but to create a platform whereby international distributors can discover films premiering in the festival’s selection and the projects at the Atlas Workshops,” the festival’s artistic director Remi Bonhomme tells Screen of the bespoke initiatives spanning both the festival(November 29 – December 7) and its parallel talent incubator the Atlas Workshops (December 1 – 5).

For the first time in its history,...

The 37th European Film Awards, which take place annually in the lakeside Swiss city of Lucerne, have unveiled their nominations for 2024. Unsurprisingly, the list is led by French director Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language cartel musical “Emilia Pérez” with four nominations including European Film and Best Actress for Karla Sofia Gascón. Surprisingly, Audiard, previously a five-time Efa nominee, has never won a prize from the European Film Academy, which boasts more than 5,000 members across the continent. Getting a boost is Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iranian family thriller “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” with three nominations including European Film. It’s Germany’s submission for the International Feature Oscar this year due to its dominantly European production despite filming in secret in banished director Rasoulof’s home country.

European Film Award staple Pedro Almodóvar’s Venice Golden Lion winner “The Room Next Door” notched four noms including European Film, Director, Actress for Tilda Swinton,...

Jacques Audiard‘s “Emilia Pérez” and Pedro Almodóvar‘s “The Room Next Door” topped Tuesday’s 37th European Film Awards nominations with four apiece.

Both are up for Best European Film, Best European Director, and Best European Screenwriter prizes, while their leads, Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Pérez” and Tilda Swinton in “The Room Next Door,” will face off in Best European Actress.

Mohammad Rasoulof‘s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” nabbed three nominations for film, director, and screenwriter. Coralie Fargeat‘s word-of-mouth hit “The Substance” scored two bids for film and screenwriter honors.

For the first time, films nominated for Best European Documentary and Best Animated Feature Film are eligible in the Best European Film category, leading to an expanded list of 15 nominees. Also making the cut for the top prize are Italy’s Oscar entry “Vermiglio,” Senegal’s entry “Dahomey,” and Latvia’s entry and animated film “Flow.

Emilia Pérez and The Room Next Door have emerged as the front-runners for the European Film Awards 2024, with four nominations apiece.

The nominations for the main categories of this year’s awards, which take place on December 7 in Lucerne, were announced this morning by the European Film Academy.

Scroll down for full list of nominations

Fifteen features compete for the best European film prize, up from five last year. This follows a recent rule change which means that films shortlisted for the best documentary and animation categories can also compete in the section.

Emilia Pérez is nominated in the best European film category,...

The European Film Awards has broadened the scope of its prestigious Best European Film category for this year’s ceremony. Documentaries and animated features will now be eligible to compete alongside traditional narrative films for the top honor.

This change is reflected in the nominations announced ahead of the December 7 ceremony in Lucerne, Switzerland. A record 15 films are nominated in the expanded Best European Film category, representing a variety of storytelling formats. This includes narrative films like “Emilia Pérez” and “The Substance,” documentaries such as Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” and Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias,” as well as the animated film “Flow” by Gints Zilbalodis.

The directing category also highlights both established names and newcomers. Past winner Pedro Almodóvar received a nomination for “The Room Next Door,” alongside Jacques Audiard for “Emilia Pérez,” Andrea Arnold for “Bird,” Mohammad Rasoulof for “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” and Maura Delpero for “Vermiglio.

The nominees for this year’s European Film Awards have been unveiled, with “Emilia Pérez,” “The Substance” and “The Room Next Door” all up for best European film.

Movies also in the running for the ceremony’s top award — which was expanded this year to documentaries and animated features — include Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias”; Mati Diop’s “Dahomey”; Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow”; Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra and Hamdan Balla’s “No Other Land”; Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; and Maura Delpero’s “Vermiglio.”

“Emilia Pérez” and “The Substance” lead the nominees overall, with each film scoring four respective nominations. The winners will be revealed during an awards ceremony on Dec. 7 in Lucerne, Switzerland.

See all the nominees below.

European Film

“Bye Bye Tiberias” — documentary film, directed by Lina Soualem, produced by Jean-Marie Nizan, Guillaume Malandrin and Ossama Bawardi

“Dahomey” — documentary film, directed by Mati Diop,...

The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard, The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodóvar, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof are among the nominees for the 2024 European Film Awards (EFAs), organizers unveiled on Tuesday.

Emilia Pérez and The Room Next Door earned four noms each, including for best European film and best director. Sacred Fig is up for the best film, best director, and best screenwriter prizes. The Substance is in the running for the best film and best screenwriter honors.

In the best actress race, Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón faces Renate Reinsve, Tilda Swinton for her role in The Room Next Door, and The Girl With the Needle actresses Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne. For The Girl With the Needle, Magnus von Horn and Line Langebek are also nominated in the best screenwriter category.

Queer star Daniel Craig and...

The European Film Academy has announced the nominees in key categories of the 37th European Film Awards ahead of the ceremony in the Swiss lakeside city of Lucerne on December 7.

French Oscar entry Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard and The Room Next Door by Pedro Almodovar lead the nominations making it into four categories each. Both films were nominated for best European film, director and screenplay as well as actress, for Karla Sofia Gascón in Emilia Pérez and Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door.

Other frontrunners included Germany’s Oscar entry The Seed of the Sacred Fig by exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, which was nominated for best film, director and screenplay.

A slew of films clinched two nominations including Maura Delpero’s Italian Oscar entry Vermiglio, Halfdan Ullmann Tondel’s Norwegian Oscar entry Armand as well as Andrea Arnold’s Bird and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.

For the first time this year,...

U.S. director Jeff Nichols – whose “The Bikeriders” recently made a splash at Cannes and Telluride – is set to be the official patron of the upcoming Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops that will see him mentoring selected projects in various stages from the Middle East and North Africa.

Launched in 2018, the Atlas Workshops are an industry initiative to foster and support the emergence of a new generation of Moroccan, Arab, and African filmmakers that provides an environment for exchanges between global professionals and regional talent.

The Marrakech fest’s industry platform this year comprise 17 projects in development and 10 films in production or post-production, hailing from 13 countries. These works have been selected from more than 300 applications received by the workshop from across the African continent and the Arab world.

Standout projects on display at the workshops include “El Sett” by prominent Egyptian director Marwan Hamed (“‘The Yacoubian Building”). The film,...

U.S. director Jeff Nichols has been named as the 2024 patron of the Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops, as the talent and project incubator also unveils the projects selected for this year’s edition.

Launched in 2018, the initiative has supported a raft of emerging and more established filmmakers and their projects, hailing from Morocco, the Arab world, and Africa.

Nichols – whose filmography includes 2011 Cannes Critics’ Week winner Take Shelter, Cannes Palme d’Or contenders Mud (2012) and Loving (2016) as well as more recent credit The Bikeriders – is the second announced patron.

The role was created last year, with Martin Scorsese due to kick off the inaugural patronship, but he was forced to cancel his Marrakech trip for personal reasons at the eleventh hour.

Nichols will take part in a number of sessions with selected projects in development and post-production. This year’s cohort of filmmakers will be known as the Class of Jeff Nichols.

The 68th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (Lff) is wrapping up Sunday night with Piece by Piece, the animated Lego biopic of Pharrell Williams by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, 20 Feet From Stardom) following the unveiling of this year’s various competition winners, led by Adam Elliot’s claymation feature Memoir of a Snail.

Set in Australia in the 1970s, the movie, which had already won the animation-focused Annecy Film Festival, stars Succession‘s Sarah Snook as Grace Pudel, a shy girl born with a cleft palate who grows up with her wild and occasionally pyromaniac twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) but eventually becomes a lonely hoarder of ornamental snails. Her only friend is a wild octogenarian named Pinky (Jacki Weaver). Eric Bana, Dominique Pinon, and Nick Cave provide supporting voice work. IFC Films has set an Oct. 25 U.S. release date.

Memoir of a...

The 12 feature documentaries in the running for the 2023 European Film Awards (EFAs) have been revealed.

Scroll down for full list of titles

They include Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in February. The film tracks the journey of 26 plundered royal treasures from the former West African kingdom of Dahomey exhibited in Paris, now being returned to Benin. French filmmaker Diop was previously nominated for a European Discovery Award at the EFAs with her Cannes 2019 award-winner Atlantics.

Titles that premiered at Berlin make up nearly half the total selection and also include At Averroes & Rosa...

Mad Distribution has secured all Arab rights to Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us from Paris-based Dulac Distribution, ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The political documentary will screen as part of Giornate delgli Autori, the independent sidebar that runs parallel to the festival from August 28 to September 9, as a Special Event title.

Mad Distribution will handle the release of the film in territories across the Middle East and North Africa in 2025.

The documentary follows five young Sudanese political activists as they struggle to overthrow Sudan’s military regime in the tumultuous years leading up to...

Mad Distribution has secured all Arab rights to Hind Meddeb’s Sudan, Remember Us from Paris-based Dulac Distribution, ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The political documentary will screen as part of Giornate delgli Autori, the independent sidebar that runs parallel to the festival from August 28 to September 9, as a Special Event title.

Mad Distribution will handle the release of the film in territories across the Middle East and North Africa.

The documentary follows five young Sudanese political activists as they struggle to overthrow Sudan’s military regime in the tumultuous years leading up to civil...

Cannes Grand Prix winner Payal Kapadia (“All We Imagine as Light”); U.S. actor Tim Blake Nelson; Italian actor Luca Marinelli; and Belgian producer Diana Elbaum have been recruited for jury duty by the Locarno Film Festival.

They will join the main jury of the prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema which, as previously announced, will be headed by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner.

In other Locarno juries announcements, the jury panel for the Filmmakers of the Present section for emerging directors in their first or second feature, will comprise Nigerian filmmaker C.J. “Fiery” Obasi (“Juju Stories”); French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem (“Bye Bye Tiberias”); and former Cahiers du cinéma editor, academic and artistic director of the Cannes’ Critics’ Week Charles Tesson.

The Leopards of Tomorrow shorts film jury panel consists of: Italian multi-hyphenate Licia Eminenti; Malagasy curator and filmmaker Laza Razanajatovo; and French producer Juliette Schrameck.

The...

RankFilm (distributor)Three-day gross (June 28-30)Total gross to dateWeek 1. Inside Out 2 (Disney) £6m £31.9m 3 2. A Quiet Place: Day One (Paramount) £2.5m £2.9m 1 3. Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (Sony) £650,342 £10.2m 4 4. The Bikeriders (Universal) £585,604 £2.3m 2 5. Kalki 2898 Ad (Dreamz Entertainment) £504,080 £888,603 1

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.27

Paramount’s A Quiet Place: Day One made a positive £2.5m start at the UK-Ireland box office; as Indian action-adventure Kalki 2898 Ad recorded a strong opening and Inside Out 2 topped the charts for a third consecutive weekend.

Inside Out 2 dropped only 23% on its previous session, adding just shy of £6m. The Disney-...

Thriller prequel A Quiet Place: Day One heads the openers at this weekend’s UK-Ireland box office, starting in 660 cinemas through Paramount.

That figure is up on the 526 sites for 2018’s A Quiet Place, which began with £2m from 526 sites at a £3,788 site average.

It is also an increase on the 561 sites of 2021’s A Quiet Place Part II, which was one of the first major releases following the long cinema closures at the start of that year. Part II started with £2.25m at a £4,012 average, providing an impressive increase from the first title in the challenging theatrical climate.

A...

Disney’s “Inside Out 2” added a further £7.7 million ($9.8 million) in its second weekend at the U.K. and Ireland box office, remaining in pole position, according to numbers from Comscore. The smash hit sequel now has a running tally of £23.2 million.

Universal’s “The Bikeriders” debuted in second place with £1.08 million. In third position, in its third weekend, Sony’s “Bad Boys: Ride Or Die” added another £1 million to take its total to £9.06 million.

In fourth place, CinemaLive’s theatrical release of the “Doctor Who” two episode finale (“The Legend Of Ruby Sunday” and “Empire Of Death”) earned £364,353. Trafalgar Releasing’s “Ghost: Rite Here Rite Now” collected £282,961 in its second weekend in fifth position and now has a total of £477,557.

The other debut in the Top 10 was Studiocanal’s “Something in the Water,” which collected £120,341 in 10th place.

Coming up this weekend, the wide release is Warner Bros.’ anticipated...

Exclusive: The Arab Film Club, a popular monthly film club on Arab cinema based in London, is expanding.

Actress and presenter Sarah Agha, the club’s founder and curator, is launching The Arab Film Club Podcast, debuting Wednesday, May 1, with an initial five-episode season. Episodes will drop on Podbean, Apple, and Spotify every second Wednesday after that.

The pod’s first season will be dedicated to Palestinian cinema and highlight five different Palestinian filmmakers through intimate interviews. Featured filmmakers will include Darin J. Sallam, best known for her breakout feature Farha, which was Jordan’s Best International Film Oscar in 2022. Agha will also sit down with Bye Bye Tiberias director Lina Soualem. Scroll down to see the full season one lineup.

Agha, an actress, writer, presenter, and film curator is of Palestinian and Irish heritage. She is perhaps best known for presenting the acclaimed BBC doc The Holy Land And...

On Oct. 7, when the Israel-Hamas war broke out, Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir was just one week away from starting principal photography in Bethlehem, 45 miles from Gaza, on “All Before You.”

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker’s long-gestating project reconstructs the 1936 farmer-led revolt against British colonial rule and the influx of Jewish settlements in Palestine that has been at the root of the conflict. The latest outbreak of violence came after a Hamas-led terror attack that left about 1,200 Israelis dead while 250 were taken hostage, with more than 100 believed to still be held by Hamas.

Now Jacir, who is based in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, is anxiously waiting for a cease-fire that will put an end to the death and destruction and allow her to go back and shoot the drama. “It’s more important than ever to tell this largely forgotten story,” she says.

As hopes of...

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best International Feature Wim Wenders’ ‘Perfect Days’

Weekly Commentary: The United Kingdom is poised to win its first Academy Award with Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and what a deserved win it will be.

But while I have the floor: it’s time for the...

The world premere of Irish director Ross Killeen’s Don’t Forget To Remember scooped the audience award as the 22nd Dublin International Film Festival (Diff) drew to a close on Saturday (March 2).

The Irish documentary is a collaboration with artist Asbestos, and explores the lived experience of Alzheimer’s, and the fragility and fortitude of memory.

Scroll down for the full list of Diff winners

“Although it’s a very personal film, Don’t Forget To Remember holds universal themes of love and loss, but most importantly, it’s about how we remember and shows how fragile those memories can be,...

Fatma Al-Remaihi, CEO of the Doha Film Institute (Dfi), has today called for a ceasefire to bring an end to the “genocide in Gaza”, in her speech to open Qumra, the Dfi’s project and talent lab.

Addressing the 200 Qumra attendees at Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, Al-Remaihi said, “While we celebrate the progress we have made, we are also confronted with a genocide in Gaza; and the ongoing attempts in silencing the voices crying out against it.

“It’s extremely frustrating and disappointing to see creative spaces, once considered safe havens for free expression, become oppressive. This cultural...

Live from a tent on the beach in Santa Monica, California, it’s the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards! This year’s ceremony, which kicked off this afternoon, was hosted by “Saturday Night Live” alum Aidy Bryant and feted the best in indie film and TV.

This year’s pack of nominees included a slew of Oscar contenders and a number of indie gems, all competing for the biggest prizes in the indie sphere.

Celine Song’s “Past Lives” won Best Feature (which the filmmaker picked up just minutes after winning Best Director as well), while “The Holdovers” and “American Fiction” also enjoyed multiple wins, including a Best Performance win for “American Fiction” star Jeffrey Wright and Best Screenplay for writer Cord Jefferson, and a Best Supporting Performance win for “The Holdovers” standout Da’Vine Joy Randolph and a Breakthrough Performance win for newbie Dominic Sessa.

Thanks to the Spirits’ various TV categories,...

Gold Derby is backstage at the 39th Annual Indie Spirit Awards on the beach in Santa Monica, CA on Sunday, February 25, hosted by comedian, actress and “SNL” alumnus Aidy Bryant. We’ll bring you all of the up-to-date details on the presenters, nominees and winners. (See the complete winners list here.) Read on for the 2024 Spirits live blog.

The kudofest is streaming live on IMDb’s YouTube Channel as well as Film Independent’s YouTube and Twitter accounts starting at 2 p.m. Pst/5 p.m. Est.

On the film side, the nominations were dominated by “American Fiction,” “Past Lives” and “May December,” which picked up five nods apiece. Those three films are up for Best Feature along with “All of Us Strangers,” “Passages” and “We Grown Now.” Since 2012, Film Independent and the Spirits have forecast 7 of 12 Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards, including “The Artist” (2012), “12 Years a Slave...

The 39th Independent Spirit Awards will stream live on Film Independent and IMDb’s YouTube channels on Sunday, February 25. Scroll down to see our official odds in all 12 film categories (with our predicted winners highlighted in gold) and be sure to make or update your own predictions while there’s still time.

Heading into the ceremony, which will be hosted by comic actress Aidy Bryant, “American Fiction,” “May December,” and “Past Lives” stand as the year’s nominations leaders with five apiece. They will all face off in the top category of Best Picture, along with “Passages” (four total bids), “All of Us Strangers” (three), and “We Grown Now” (three).

Last year’s Spirit Awards previewed the Oscars success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which left both ceremonies with seven wins including Best Picture. Over the years, only eight recipients of the academy’s highest honor have first clinched the corresponding Spirit Award,...

Specialist UK distributor Tape has acquired Lina Soulem’s feature documentary Bye Bye Tiberias which it will release in UK and Ireland cinemas on June 28.

Soualem, the daughter of actress Hiam Abbass, explores her Palestinian family history in Bye Bye Tiberias which won the BFI London Film Festival’s Grierson award for best documentary in 2023.

Bye Bye Tiberias was the Palestinian entry for this year’s Academy Awards and is sold internationally by Swiss-French sales agency Lightdox.

The documentary premiered in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori in 2023, followed by its North American premiere in Toronto. It has since had an...

Cph: Dox, Copenhagen’s International Documentary Festival, has set the full lineup for its 2024 edition, including 84 world premieres, 32 international premieres, and 9 European premieres.

Running March 13-24, the festival will feature six competition categories: Dox: Award, F: Act Award, Nordic: Dox Award, Next: Wave Award, New: Vision Award, and the new Human: Rights Award.

Musician Pete Doherty will attend the festival for a screening of Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin. The event will take place on March 18 at Bremen Theater, when he and the film’s director Katia de Vidas – who became Doherty’s wife over the ten years she followed him with her camera – openly discuss the substance abuse that has shadowed his entire career. After the screening, Doherty will give an acoustic concert. Other high-profile titles include Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s Gaucho Gaucho, Carla Gutierrez’s Frida, Yance Ford’s Power,...

Gordon Main’s apartheid-era documentary “London Recruits” has been tapped as the opening film at the sixth Joburg Film Festival, which takes place Feb. 27 – March 3 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The film sheds light on a pivotal moment in South Africa‘s history, when the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa developed a new secret weapon. Oliver Tambo hatched a plan to infiltrate young British activists into the country, posing as tourists. Their mission, in the face of brutal lockdown by the racist regime, was to help inspire ordinary South Africans to join a liberation movement that would never give up till freedom was won.

The film is produced by Jacintha de Nobrega (“Deep End”), Robyn Slovo, Geoff Arbourne, Colin Charles (“The Surveyor”), James Barrett (“A Change in the Weather”) and Felix Gill (“78/52″). As Variety previously reported, XYZ Films is repping the doc’s North American sales.

Earlier this week,...

1992 archival footage of Palestinian lake Tiberias opens this feature documentary from Lina Soualem. The images, although mundane, have a very specific function. They link the viewer to the world which is no more. The story of the director's family serves as a lens through which a tale of war-torn country is told.

In theaters in NYC January 12 and Los Angeles January 19

Hiam Abbass, most widely known as a recent “Succession” alumni, moved from Palestine to Paris over 30 years ago to pursue her career in acting. The decision to leave had large repercussions on her life, and alienated her from the town she was raised in. Most importantly, the actress had to practically cut her ties with the rest of her estranged family. In “Bye Bye Tiberias” director Lina Soualem (also Abbass' daughter) triggers a trip down memory lane by confronting the protagonist with old photograph albums, encounters with family members...

As awards season switches up a gear, with the handing out of the Golden Globes and the publication of the Bafta shortlists, one major title stands out in the International categories of both: Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. It would be a reasonable bet for the Oscar win in any year — if it were actually eligible. In lieu of Triet’s film, which fell well within Academy rules in terms of the amount of English spoken, the French selection panel opted instead for period gourmet drama The Taste of Things to do battle for the country’s honor, a move that is sure to cause a lot of confusion in the coming weeks.

Otherwise, the release of the international shortlist came with very few surprises this year, but perhaps chief among them was an unexpected snub for the Palestinian entry Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soulem.

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 category was previously called the Best Foreign Language Film, but this was changed in April 2019 to Best International Feature Film, after the Academy deemed the word “Foreign” to be outdated.

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. For the 96th Academy Awards, the submitted motion pictures must be first released theatrically in their respective countries between December 1, 2022, and October 31, 2023. The deadline for submissions to the Academy was October 2, 2023, and 92 countries submitted a film. The 15-film shortlist will be announced on December 21, 2023, followed by the official nominations on January 23, 2024.

Here are this edition's Asian Submissions for Best International Feature Film.

Exclusive: New York-based Women Make Movies has acquired U.S. rights for Palestinian Oscar entry Bye Bye Tiberias by Lina Soualem.

The intimate work sees Soualem accompany her Palestinian-French actress mother Hiam Abbass back to the Arab village within Israeli borders, which she left in the 1980s to pursue her acting career in Europe.

There, they reflect on her past as well as the lives of Abbass’ mother and grandmother in a powerful work exploring themes of displacement, identity and survival across four generations of women.

Wmm executive director Debra Zimmerman said the film was a “perfect fit” for the label, which aims to put spotlight on the work of female filmmakers.

“It is a beautiful film about four generations of Palestinian women,” she said. “I am thrilled that we have the opportunity to have this film seen widely right now by the diverse audiences that need and deserve to see it.

After “Their Algeria,” a well-received documentary from 2020 about the parents of her actor father Zinedine Soualem, France-born filmmaker-performer Lina Soualem turns her camera on her maternal relatives in “Bye Bye Tiberias,” in particular her mother, the Palestine-born actress Hiam Abbass. By telling their story, she hopes to reclaim and question the personal, historical and visual legacies she inherited and to answer the question “How does a woman find her place when caught between worlds?” a question that applies equally to her and her mother. After its world premiere at the Venice Film Fest, the essay film, with its mix of the personal and the political, has been a festival favorite, going on to win the Grierson award for best documentary in London and the jury prize ex aequo in Marrakech. It represents Palestine in the Oscar international feature competition.

The title gives a clue to what Soualem considers the critical...

Shortlist of 15 films to be announced December 21, nominations out on January 23, 2024.

The Academy has announced eligible features in the categories of international feature film, animation, and documentary for the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024.

The shortlist of 15 films will be announced on December 21, and the nominations announcement is January 23, 2024.

International

Eighty-eight countries or regions have submitted films eligible for consideration in the international feature film category. An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (more than 40 minutes long) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track. Namibia is a first-time entrant.

Academy members...

The Academy has revealed the list of eligible films for consideration in best animated, documentary and international feature of the year, encompassing a broad range of blockbusters and critically acclaimed titles.

GKids’ “The Boy and the Heron,” Pixar’s “Elemental,” Sony’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” are among the 33 animated films in the running. This is up from 27 in 2023, when “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” took home the prize.

The eventual five nominees are determined by members of the shorts and animation branch, and any Academy members outside the branch who wish to participate. The number of outside members who opt in is unknown. All films submitted for animated feature also qualify for the Academy Awards in other categories, including best picture.

Read: Variety’s Awards Circuit for the latest Oscars predictions in all categories.

There are 88 films representing their countries for the international feature Oscar,...

The 2024 Film Independent Spirit Award nominations — see the full list below — were unveiled on Tuesday, December 5, crowning the past year’s achievements in indie film. The actual awards ceremony, taking place on February 24, 2024 in the usual tent on the beach in Santa Monica, is a little less than three months away, but the films nominated today will carry new momentum into the rest of awards season, including the Oscar race. Joel Kim Booster (“Fire Island”) and Natalie Morales (“No Hard Feelings”) were the presenters of the nominees.

“American Fiction,” “May December,” and “Past Lives” led the Indie Spirits noms with five each, including each of them getting a nod for Best Feature. Todd Haynes for “May December” and Celine Song for “Past Lives” also received Best Director nods. Natalie Portman for “May December,” Greta Lee for “Past Lives,” and Jeffrey Wright for “American Fiction” also received Best Lead Performance nods.

Film Independent announced the 2024 Spirit Award nominees in all the film and TV categories on Tuesday, Dec 5. Only American productions with budgets of less than $30 million were eligible for consideration in the film races. Winners will be revealed on Sunday, Feb. 25, 2024, at a ceremony hosted by Aidy Bryant.

Last year, these kudos eliminated the four gendered acting awards and replaced them with just two prizes: lead and supporting performances (each has 10 nominees). It also added a new category, Best Breakthrough Performance, which has five contenders.

See the full list of 2024 Spirit Awards nominations for film and TV below.

Film

Best Picture

“All of Us Strangers”

“American Fiction”

“May December”

“Passages”

“Past Lives”

“We Grown Now”

Best Director

Andrew Haigh, “All of Us Strangers”

Todd Haynes, “May December”

William Oldroyd, “Eileen”

Ira Sachs, “Passages”

Celine Song, “Past Lives”

Best Lead Performance

Jessica Chastain, “Memory”

Greta Lee, “Past Lives”

Trace Lysette, “Monica”

Natalie Portman,...

Further winners included Kamal Lazraq’s ‘Hounds’ and Lina Soualem’s ‘Bye Bye Tiberius’.

Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother Of All Lies won the top award at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival (Fifm) on Saturday, marking the first time a Moroccan film has ever received the coveted Etoile d’Or.

The hybrid documentary recalls the bread riots that shook the working-class Casablanca neighbourhood of director Asmae El Moudir in 1981 and features members of the filmmaker’s family “acting” as themselves. They include her feisty grandmother Zahra, who attended the gala screening of the film.

The feature premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes,...

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir has made history at the 20th edition of Morocco’s Marrakech Film Festival as the first local director to win its top prize with her hybrid documentary The Mother Of All Lies.

Inspired by the bread riots in El Moudir’s home city of Casablanca in 1981, the work uses a replica of the neighborhood where it happened and figurines to explore the lasting trauma of the event.

The film world premiered at Cannes this year, where it shared the Golden Eye prize for the Best Documentary with Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters.

Morocco has since submitted the work as its candidate for Best International Film at the 96th Academy Awards.

In other Marrakech awards, the Jury Prize was shared by Moroccan director Kamal Lazraq’s kidnapping thriller Hounds and French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias, revisiting the story of her...

Asmae El Moudir’s “The Mother of All Lies” won top honors at the Marrakech Film Festival on Saturday, marking festival history as the first Moroccan film to claim the top trophy, while adding Marrakech’s Étoile d’Or to a list of accolades that also includes best director from Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and best film from the Sydney Film Festival.

El Moudir’s hybrid feature — which is also Morocco’s Oscar submission — finds the filmmaker and kin using dioramas and figurines to recreate and reenact painful memories set against the backdrop of the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots, with the unsparing doc serving as art therapy exercise, family exposé and evocation of national trauma.

“Every society has a truth that’s been buried, burned, redacted and erased,” said jury president Jessica Chastain upon announcing the top prize. “But by a collective remembrance, we preserve the stories that cannot be undone…...

Martin Scorsese will no longer attend nor participate in the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops, citing personal reasons.

The award-winning filmmaker was slated to serve as artistic godfather for Marrakech’s industry arm, which spotlights development titles and works-in-progress from dynamic new talents from across the Mena world. Lending his name to this year’s class, Scorsese planned to mentor the selected filmmakers, offering one-on-one artistic and strategic advice for each and every project.

Unable to travel due to personal reasons, and preferring to engage with workshop participants in a more direct way, the filmmaker will take a rain check, promising to return, in person, for a subsequent edition. News broke from sources close to the Atlas team, while neither festival nor filmmaker are expected to make a formal statement.

Despite this recent turn, event organizers promise no further changes to a program that has quickly become a leading incubator for eye-turning fare.