EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off its world premiere in the Berlin International Film Festival’s competition program, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, Maria Speth’s feature documentary Mr Bachmann And His Class has sold into multiple territories.
05.03.2021 - 21:41 / hollywoodreporter.com
The coronavirus pandemic has obviously changed how movies are being made, with the extra costs involved in testing and implementing strict hygienic regimes, and the constant threat hanging over every shoot that a local outbreak or lockdown could shut things down.
But what impact has the once-in-a-lifetime, global experience of the Corona crisis had on what stories filmmakers want to tell? The Sundance and Berlin film festivals provided a glimpse at the first crop of films either shot or edited —
.EXCLUSIVE: Fresh off its world premiere in the Berlin International Film Festival’s competition program, where it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize, Maria Speth’s feature documentary Mr Bachmann And His Class has sold into multiple territories.
Leo Barraclough International Features EditorARRI Media has closed a deal with Crescendo House – a new boutique distribution company – for North American rights on Marxist vampire comedy “Bloodsuckers,” following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.The film, which screened as part of the Berlinale’s Encounters section, was written and directed by Julian Radlmaier.Radlmaier’s script was praised by the jury as being “extravagant, bizarre, and hilarious” when he was presented with the
Filmed in glossy black and white, and adopting a non-judgmental vérité approach, director Carlos Alfonso Corral’s debut is a humanizing look at a small section of the homeless population in El Paso, Texas. “Dirty Feathers,” is a short, but thematically rich, film about those on the margins of society.
It’s 1943. A particularly cruel winter has swept through the occupied Soviet Union.
One year in the life of a teenager can feel like an eternity. The intensity of the fleeting romances, the wild swings between happiness and despair, the thrilling yet uneasy anticipation of a future that seems simultaneously imminent and distant — it’s a wonder that we come out of adolescence intact.
This year, more than most, Berlin's European Film Market was an opportunity to gauge the health of the global indie industry. Judging from the business done over the past week — the 2021 EFM wraps Friday — the general assessment would be: The patient is stable and the prognosis is promising.
The first thing to understand about the social dynamics in Mexico around police is that they differ greatly from how the public in the United States relates to law enforcement officers. Stateside, both the uncritical reverence some feel toward them—namely the Blue Lives Matter crowd—and the terror they incite among BIPOC communities emanate from their violent efficaciousness and status as inflexible figures reveling in a lack of accountability.
As industry guests enjoy the Berlinale from home this year, eagle-eyed viewers will take pleasure in spotting a familiar location in the latest film from South Korean auteur and festival-regular Hong Sang-soo. If we can’t stroll around Potsdamer Platz this year, at least the characters in “Introduction“ can share a moment there.
The latest from T.J.Martin and Daniel Lindsay, directors of “Undefeated” and “LA 92,” “TINA” looks like another documentary that came off of a factory line, complete with the usual panning shots of contact sheets, dramatic zooms into rolling tapes, cross-cutting between audio interviews and their published print versions, melodramatic score cues doing their best to emulate Philip Glass.
There is an unavoidable distance in life between ourselves and those who came before. Parents, grandparents; no matter how open and honest they are with their children or younger relatives, there is a sense that their pasts remain partial enigmas.
For the students at a remote boarding school for Kurdish boys, survival is a matter of course, particularly during the frigid depths of winter. The meals are meager, the heating doesn’t work, and even the principal’s car won’t start.
It’s always interesting to see what an actor will deliver as they make the step towards directing, and for “Next Door” director and star Daniel Brühl has not shied away from a premise that closely parallels, yet distorts, his own life. It’s a film that explores a space of conversation highlighted to great effect in Bong Joon-ho’s recent towering success, “Parasite,” toying with societal dichotomies and opening up discussions around wealth, class, gentrification, and spatial divides.
South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo has been a particular favorite at the Berlin Film Festival for quite some time — he won the Best Director prize there last year for The Woman Who Ran — and he’s back again this year with another competition entry, Introduction.
Exactly one year ago, Chinese film buyers were almost entirely absent from Berlin's European Film Market as broad swaths of the world's second-biggest economy remained in a state of total shutdown. Business in the U.S.
Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired North American rights to WWII drama Into the Darkness, from veteran Danish filmmaker Anders Refn and depicting the disintegration of a family unit amid Denmark's slow side into fascism under the shadow of the Third Reich.
Pierre Morel’s upcoming action thrillerThe Blacksmith, which recently lost its star Nick Jonas due to a scheduling conflict, has a deal in place for the important China market. Beijing-based distributor Infotainment China Media picked up rights to the film ahead of Berlin's European Film Market and plans to stick with the project despite the casting change-up.
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.