‘Beautiful Beings’ Duo Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson & Sturla Brandth Grøvlen Expand Their Unique Collaboration – Contenders International

With Christmas just around the corner, the boss of supermarket chain Aldi has issued shoppers with an urgent warning ahead of the holidays.

The shortlist of 15 films to vie for a Best International Feature Film Oscar nomination is set to be announced Wednesday. In all, films from 92 countries are eligible this year, and as we regularly see, they offer up an embarrassment of riches. For the first time in a while, however, there doesn’t appear to be a hands-down clear frontrunner. 

Deadline reports that the Berlin Film Festival has its titles for its Panorama section this February. And while not the Festival’s main titles in competition, it’s a stellar crop of films annually.

Daniel Craig is opening up about taking a final bow as James Bond with No Time To Die and what led him to suggest that ending for the iconic character.

Actress, screenwriter and director Kristen Stewart has been named president of the International Jury at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival.“We’re excited about Kristen Stewart taking on this distinguished task. She’s one of the most talented and multi-faceted actors of her generation,” festival directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian said in a statement. “From Bella Swan to the Princess of Wales she has given life to everlasting characters.

Kristen Stewart is to head the International Jury of the Berlinale 2023.

EXCLUSIVE: Veteran Saw cast member Shawnee Smith is circling the newest installment in the billion-dollar horror franchise from Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures, which is currently in production in Mexico City, Deadline hears. 

Eami means “forest” in Ayoreo. It also means “‘”world.” When director Paz Encina traveled to the land of the indigenous Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people, she found that they do not make a distinction between these things: The trees, the animals and the plants that have surrounded them for centuries are all they know and now they live in an area – the Chaco plain – that is experiencing the fastest deforestation on the planet.

Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.

Lou Yi-an’s Goddamned Asura begins with chilling smartphone footage of an expressionless young man opening fire on a busy night market. In a surprising move, it immediately rewinds to the events leading up to the shooting, introducing a core group of characters whose lives will be changed by it. Even more unexpected, though, is the film’s third act, which essentially posits a Sliding Doors-style “What if?” hypothesis.

Brazilian drama Mars One follows the Martins family, optimistic dreamers who are quietly leading their lives on the margins of a major Brazilian city following the disappointing election of a far-right extremist president. They are a lower middle-class Black family who feels the strain of its new reality as the political dust settles.

A critical hit at this year’s Berlinale, Michael Koch’s second feature A Piece of Sky is a sober relationship drama with a difference: It takes place in a picturesque Alpine idyll, with its sections interspersed by a folk choir that acts as an unorthodox Greek chorus. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders International award-season event Saturday, Koch explained: “It’s a story about a couple in a remote mountain village who meet and then are put to the test due to a brain cancer that the man has. The film is about how she deals with it, how the couple deal with it, and how strong love can be.”

Maryna Er Gorbach’s drama Klondike revolves around a Ukrainian couple on the cusp of parenthood whose lives are turned upside down by the rise of the Russia-backed separatist movement in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

It’s rare that a sequel competes in the International Oscar category, especially when the first part didn’t get selected. It’s a measure of Erik Matti’s latest film that, though it follows on from 2013’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title On the Job—or rather, starts in the aftermath—this second instalment stands alone. “The big difference between the two,” said Matti, “is that the first one was set in urban Manila, and the second one is set in the countryside of the Philippines, just to show two contrasts that exist within both worlds.”

Crackdowns in China seem to be in the news a lot lately, making Jason Loftus’s film Eternal Spring all the more timely. The protagonist of this hybrid documentary is a brilliant Chinese artist named Daxiong, who was forced into exile because of his affiliation with a movement known as Falun Gong, a controversial New Age self-help group that became increasingly threatening to the authorities as it grew in size. In 1999, president Jiang Zemin finally outlawed the organization, leading to imprisonments and death.

“I always had a very specific sense of urgency with this idea,” said Holy Spider director Ali Abbasi of wanting to make a film noir based on the true story of the “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei, who saw himself as on a mission from God as he killed 16 women between 2000 and 2001.

Written and directed by Saim Sadiq, Joyland has had a tumultuous trajectory this season. It burst out of the gate in Cannes as the first Pakistani film ever in the official selection, winning the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard and taking several awards later down the road.

When director Darin J. Sallam came to make her feature debut with Farah, she always knew what the subject matter would be: as a little girl, Sallam’s mother used to tell her the story of a teenage girl who was locked up in her room during the partition of Palestine in 1948. “She was locked up by her father to protect her life,” Sallam recalls. “She survived [the conflict] and she made it to Syria, where she met a Syrian girl and shared her story with her. This Syrian girl grew up, got married and had a child, and she shared the story with her daughter—and this daughter happened to be me.”

The majority of submissions for this year’s International Feature Oscar category deal with serious issues, from major to minor, and while He Shuming’s feature debut Ajoomma (the title translates as Auntie) isn’t exactly the heaviest of them all, it does make a point of focusing on a character type that is vastly underrepresented in cinema across the globe: the older female.

Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor tells the forgotten story of the 30,000 Norwegian civilian sailors who were conscripted at the beginning of World War II to serve on convoys keeping Allied supply chains open.