Berlin Market Pushes for Sustainability, Both Environmental and Psychological

Burhan Qurbani's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modern-day adaptation of the 1930s-set literary classic, is the front runner for this year's German Film Awards, the Lolas, having picked up 11 nominations, including for best film. Berlin Alexanderplatz premiered at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

Plans to tear down part of the hated ‘Berlin Wall’ in Piccadilly Garden have been approved by the city council’s executive.

The new measure comes into force today

The German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), one of Germany’s most prestigious film schools, has sacked its British director, Ben Gibson, following an incident during the Berlin Film Festival in which he exposed his backside to a female student during a heated argument.

By Tom Grater

A Jewish prisoner pretends to be Iranian to escape being shot and is then forced to teach Farsi, a language he doesn’t speak, to a Nazi superior inPersian Lessons, the new film from Ukrainian-born, Canada-based director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog).

An impoverished laborer returns home one day to find that social services have taken his children, after the family’s increasingly dire circumstances push his wife to commit a desperate act. With a corrupt local administrator blocking the way to a fair hearing to get them back, the man decides to cross the country on foot in order to plead his case to the government in Belgrade.

Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian director whose latest film, There Is No Evil, won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday, has been summoned to serve a one-year prison sentence in Tehran, according to reports. Nasser Zarafshan, a lawyer for Rasoulof, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the Iranian authorities have ordered the director to turn himself in.

By Tom Grater

A small but splendid Indian tale inspired by poems written by Lalleshwari, a 14th century woman mystic from Kashmir, as well as a Rajasthan folk story, Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs(Laila aur satt geet) takes the viewer deep into the heart of northwest India, where a young nomadic bride plays with her desires and toys with the lust of a young ranger.

Overshadowed by a grisly, racially motivated shooting in western Germany and the growing pains of new festival leadership, this year’s Berlinale served to illuminate the market dynamics and global issues set to impact the international film and television industry in the run-up to Cannes — provided coronavirus stays away from the Croisette.

Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, whose sixth feature “There is no Evil” won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear on Saturday, is one of his country’s most prominent directors even though none of his films have screened in Iran where they are banned. In 2011, the year he won two prizes at Cannes with his censorship-themed “Goodbye,” Rasoulof was sentenced with fellow director Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for alleged anti-regime propaganda.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama “There Is No Evil” took home the top Golden Bear prize at the 2020  Berlin Film Festival.

It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.

Rodolphe Buet may be one of the few EFM attendees who would miss snowy Berlin in February. The newly appointed head of distribution at Newen, controlled by French media giant TF1 Group, is heading into his 15th Berlin market.

Berlin’s European Film Market has gotten off to a slow start — but there are signs of life. Leonine, the new German studio formed last year by KKR’s acquisition and merger of German indies Tele Munchen Group and Universum, picked up German-speaking rights for the Gerard Butler action thriller Remote Control from STXinternational in a mid-seven-figure deal, the largest reported pact of the EFM so far.

Since winning Berlin’s European Shooting Star Award for the low-budget British crime drama Ill Manors in 2012, Riz Ahmed has burst onto the film and TV scene in somewhat spectacular fashion.

It was just four years ago that Berlin hosted the world premiere of Barakah Meets Barakah, the debut feature from Saudi director Mahmoud Sabbagh.

For 25 years, from 1992’s “La Frontera” through 2017’s ”A Fantastic Woman,” a subsequent Oscar winner, the Berlinale has prized a rich trove of Chilean movies.