Berlin Film Festival Unveils Sidebar Juries

BERLIN -- Judges at the Berlin Film Festival announced Friday that the satirical movie ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ by Romanian director Radu Jude has been awarded this year’s top prize, saying it has the “rare and essential quality of a lasting art work.”The film about a teacher facing scrutiny over a sex tape “captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time,” the Berlinale jury said as it awarded the film its

The 27th Sarajevo Film Festival will pay tribute to German filmmaker Wim Wenders.

Hours after his Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn won the Golden Bear for best film at the first-ever virtual Berlin International Film Festival, Romanian director Radu Jude took aim at what he called the "bullshit of red carpets" and the false glamour of in-person film festivals.Jude said he was "quite happy" not to have had to attend a fancy awards gala in Berlin on Friday to receive his Golden Bear.

Refresh for latest…: The Berlin Film Festival is unveiling its Competition winners this afternoon following five days of virtual screenings. Given the ongoing pandemic, this year was a hybrid event that included the European Film Market and the competition films being made available only to industry delegates and the international jury from March 1-5.

La Mif (The Fam), a coming-of-age drama from Swiss director Fred Bailif, has won the top prize for best film in the Generation 14Plus sidebar of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival. Bailif'sfictional look inside a residential care facility housing teenage girls "pulls you in, never lets you go, and hits straight to the heart," according to the Generation jury.

Alissa Simon Film CriticFor the first time ever, two Hungarian films are competing for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear: “Forest – I See You Everywhere,” a standalone sequel to the 2003 Berlinale hit “Forest,” from veteran auteur Bence Fliegauf, and “Natural Light” from feature debutant Dénes Nagy.

Toward the end of Tina, the revealing documentary tribute by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin for HBO, Tina Turner is seen in an extended concert clip performing the Beatles' "Help" as a decelerated ballad — intimate, melancholy and full of feeling.

Opening with a very real-looking hardcore sex tape, and climaxing with a deranged orgy featuring super-sized dildos, Romanian writer-director Radu Jude's latest taboo-busting polemical comedy is refreshingly untroubled by tasteful restraint. Shot during COVID lockdown last summer, with cast and crew all wearing anti-viral masks, the snappily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is a scattershot attack on sexual hysteria and political hypocrisy in an era of online slut-shaming.

EXCLUSIVE: New York-based distributor FilmRise has struck a deal with sales firm WaZabi Films for U.S. rights to TIFF 2020 and Berlin 2021 drama Beans.

Most cop movies — and most movies in general — spend the first reel setting up a story that usually kicks off after an “inciting incident,” to quote various screenwriting manuals, which takes place within the first ten or 15 minutes. For the rest of the film, we then watch how that incident unravels and affects the lives of all those involved.

Hungary’s most recent contribution to the implacable flow of war films pouring out of Eastern Europe is a far cry from the Russian tank operas and spectacular disaster films like Battle of Leningrad. Denes Nagy’s sensitive first featureNatural Light (Termeszetes feny), bowing in Berlin competition, is the opposite of these: a slow starter high on atmosphere but low on action, whose horrific main event takes place discreetly off-screen.

Spain brings an extraordinary gamut of movie titles to Berlin. Some highlights:“All the Moons,” (Igor Legarreta)A France-Spain co-production, “All the Moons” tracks two vampires in the northern Spain during the last Carlist war.

The underseen but arresting 2016 documentary feature Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait of a flinty Vermont loner and his volatile relationship to the land that has consumed him for more than three decades. Its director, Tony Stone, now blurs the line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking to depict another solitary man inseparable from his natural environment in Ted K, a piercing psychological probe into the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

Three bright, talented young people in their 20s struggle to find their place in a rotten society, scarred by Germany’s defeat in World War I and menaced by the rising tide of Nazism, in Fabian — Going to the Dogs (Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde.) This second screen adaptation of Erich Kastner’s now classic 1931 novel (the first was directed by Wolf Gremm in 1980) marks a stylistically daring attempt to capture the zeitgeist by director Dominik Graf, who returns to Berlin competition where

You have to wonder about the shelf life of all the compact film productions being stitched together around COVID pandemic restraints, particularly those in which the visual field is limited to computer desktops.

Jamie Lang A year after featuring as the European Film Market’s focus country, Chile returns with a delegate of more than 20 producers who will participate in a virtual stand, backed by ProChile and the Ministry of Culture.Bastard.

Our Top 10 list of the best Lesbian Movies 2021 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen 2021. For 25 years, the biggest Dutch LGBTQ+ film festival is inviting the LGBTQ+ community to see the best, the most popular, and the newest LGBTQ+ movies.

Berlin this year, at least the first leg of the film festival in March, will be online only, with everyone — critics, reporters and the international film industry — watching the lineup of the 2021 Berlinale from home on their laptops. Everyone, that is, except for this year's competition jury.

Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and Cécile de France, “Peaceful,” directed by Cannes best actress winner Emmanuelle Bercot, will head Studiocanal’s 2021 Berlin slate.“Peaceful” is produced by Les Films du Kiosque, whose credits include “La Belle Epoque” and Bercot’s own “Standing Tall.”Introduced to buyers from Feb.

Maybe it’s because the film is actually titled “Natural Light,” but it’s hard to watch the new trailer for the upcoming WWII drama and not be cognizant of the lighting. And it’s that lighting that adds to the overall dread and somberness that is prevalent in the upcoming film.