Buzzy Locarno Title ‘Tommy Guns’ Wins Europa Cinemas Label Prize

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Two Korean and two Indian movies make the cut in the Busan International Film Festival’s New Currents main competition section. Thet are joined by one each from Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Germany. The section has a track record of making significant discoveries among new Asian films and directors.The selected titles are eligible for multiple awards, including the New Currents Award, the FIPRESCI Award, the NETPAC Award, and the KB New Currents Audience Award. The selection comprises: “Ajooma,” directed by Hu Shuming (Singapore-Korea); “Blue Again” from Thailand’s Thapanee Loosuwan; “Hail to Hell,” by Korea’s Lim Oh-jeong; “Memento Mori: Earth,” by Vietnam’s Marcus Vu Manh Cuong; “No End,” directed by Nader Saeivar and flying the flags of Germany, Iran and Turkey; “A Place Called Silence,” by Malaysia’s Sam Quah; “Shivamma,” fromIndia’s Jaishankar Aryar; Japanese director Kubota Nao’s “One Thousand and One Nights”; “A Wild Roomer,” from Korea’s Lee Jeong-hong; and The Winter Within,” directed by Aamir Bashir, and structured as a co-production between India, France and Qatar.

Emily Blunt Heading To Mipcom For ‘The English’ Red Carpet Curtain Raiser

TIFF announced its Short Cuts section today comprised of 39 live-action narrative, documentary, and animated short films from directors repping 18 countries.

Brazilian filmmaker Julia Murat clinched the Golden Leopard prize in the main international competition of the 75th Locarno Film Festival with her latest feature Rule 34.

Real Madrid president Florentino Perez gave a blunt response to some of his club's fans when they asked him to re-sign Cristiano Ronaldo.

EXCLUSIVE: UK-French film company Alief has secured international sales rights to Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina’s second feature Petrol, following its buzzy world premiere in Locarno’s Filmmakers Of The Present competition.

Latest DealsA score or more of new deals announced since Sunday in exclusivity to Variety:*Germany’s Pluto Film has been in negotiations with several theatrical distributors on Locarno Piazza Grande title “Semret,” ahead of its world premiere on Aug. 10.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentTo the exuberant tones of Christophe’s “Aline,” lamenting the loss of his love, two shirtless men rejoice orgiastically as water tumbling down a rock face drenching their bodies. Meanwhile, at a country house, maids and a gardener, dressed in period costume, proudly pour what looks like a mixture of water and milk onto plants.The scenes, it seems, are from a libertine costume drama, being shot in the wooded French countryside. Then suddenly Valentin, the director, disappears.

Holly Jones Paris-based sales company Alief has swooped on international sales rights to horror-political thriller “Matadero” (“Slaughterhouse”), the awaited fiction feature debut of Argentina’s Santiago Fillol, co-scribe on Oliver Laxe’s Cannes winners “Mimosa” and “Fire Will Come.”Co-written by Fillol, “Matadero” world premieres this week in Locarno’s main International Competition.The film takes a stark look at a historic tale through the maniacal lens of U.S. filmmaker Jared (Julio Perillán), as he shoots a big-screen version of a 19th-century text by Argentine writer Estaban Echeverría, exploiting the times and their trappings to create a piece of cinema meant to dig itself into the collective consciousness.

Guy Lodge Film CriticPortugal’s colonial past in Africa continues to haunt some of the country’s most vital and subversive filmmakers. With his remarkable second feature “Tommy Guns,” Angolan-Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes — borrowing, perhaps, a measure of the former’s visceral austerity and the latter’s shape-shifting playfulness, but mostly proving his own sly, supple talent.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentInspired by director Marcel Beltrán’s walking on a dry, polluted lake in his hometown, Moa, in Cuba, “Moa” won the biggest prize on offer at this year’s Open Doors, a Locarno Fest co-production and talent hub dedicated, in an inspired choice, to smaller territories in Latin American and countries in the Caribbean. The focus lasts three-years, over 2022-24.The territories boast world class filmmakers with urgent stories to tell.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based company Indie Sales has sold Angry Annie, French director Blandine Lenoir’s latest feature, to a host of key territories ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on Thursday.

Marta Balaga Tom Hardiman’s feature debut “Medusa Deluxe,” which premiered at Locarno on Saturday, has already seduced multiple international distributors with its mixture of humor, grief and competitive hairdressing.Now Warsaw-based New Europe Film Sales has sealed further deals for the unusual murder mystery in Spain (Elastica Films), Benelux (Filmfreak), Scandinavia and the Baltics (NonStop Entertainment), Variety has learnt in exclusivity.As previously reported, A24 has acquired North American rights to the film, produced by Emu Films with the support of BFI, BBC Films, and Time Based Arts.MUBI holds the rights to U.K./Ireland, France, Latin America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia. “The buyers are excited about ‘Medusa Deluxe’ because it’s a quirky, original piece of cinema which can appeal to younger audiences, especially since A24 and MUBI will lead the way on global marketing,” said New Europe Film Sales CEO, Jan Naszewski.Hardiman, a self-confessed hairdressing aficionado, has joined forces with celebrity hairstylist Eugene Souleiman in order to show a community struggling with tragic loss yet still striving for perfection.“There is this cathartic moment at one point, two people genuinely caring about each other, and you have this hairstyle with a boat on the top.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based sales company Wide has acquired world sales rights to Angola-born Portuguese filmmaker Carlos Conceição’s Angolan War of Independence drama Tommy Guns, which made a well-received debut in Competition at the Locarno Film Festival on Friday.

Marta Balaga Tom Hardiman becomes a director to track with “Medusa Deluxe,” a deliciously dark murder mystery set in the competitive hairdressing competition which is about to bow at Locarno.MUBI holds the rights to U.K./Ireland, France,Latin America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey, India and Southeast Asia. The film was developed and financed by the BFI and BBC Film.“I really care about hairdressing, it’s something I am really passionate about,” admits Hardiman, who “picked up their language” over time.“When they talk about Russian weaves [in the film], that came from a hairdresser in Peckham.

France, Match Me! focuses on emerging producers. Featuring new projects from tracked auteurs – Lithuania’s Ignas Jonynas, India’s Payal Kapadia and Mexico’s Francisco Vargas – and winners at Cannes, San Sebastian and other major meets, many producers look only a title or two from full emergence. If the fulsome slates of some producers are anything to go by – DR’s Leticia Brea, Estonia’s Tallifornia and Kask Films, for instance – production is a going concern in countries outside traditional production centers. (Distribution, whether to platforms or in theaters, may be another matter).

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentThere’s a new giant in town, or at least at Locarno’s Match Me!, one of the festival’s biggest industry initiatives.For years, by a large head, France has had more titles at the Locarno Festival’s two biggest sections, the Piazza Grande showcase and main International Competition than any other country in the world. 2022 is no exception.Unifrance also hosts the Festival’s biggest industry bash, a first Friday night sit-down dinner or party which used to take place at Locarno’s hillside Belvedere Hotel and has now moved to the near Maggiore Lake-side Blu Restaurant.Now, however, Unifrance, Europe’s biggest national film-TV promotion board, has put its weight behind Match Me!, a networking initiative this year bringing together 32 emerging producers from over the world.

German director Kilian Riedhof’s drama You Will Not Have My Hate is inspired by the experiences of French writer Antoine Leiris, whose wife was killed in the Bataclan nightclub during the November 13, 2015 Paris terror attacks, leaving him to raise their young son alone.

Marta Balaga Alliance 4 Development, a co-development initiative for film projects from Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland hosted by Locarno Pro, has revealed 11 titles selected for its 7th edition.The majority of the projects will be directed by women, from Giorgia Wurth’s “Allegra” about a late-life sexual awakening to Malina Mackiewicz’s “Bottom of the Ocean Electric Fish” and Mariko Minoguchi’s upcoming “Element.” The latter will address some environmental fears as a team of scientists tries to ensure that Earth’s water supply won’t suddenly disappear.Minoguchi, who previously co-wrote the script to Tim Fehlbaum’s “The Colony,” is hoping to develop a German science fiction film that “doesn’t shy away from big emotions or images,” she stated, “that makes you think and reflect and, above all, is a moving and impressive cinematic experience.” Big emotions will also fuel Manon Coubia’s “Songs of the Fallen Mountains,” with old lovers reunited on a mythical mountain, and Stéphane Riethauser’s “Orpheus” about a relationship between a young dancer and his choreographer.“‘There is no love; there are only proofs of love.’ These words by Jean Cocteau will guide me to direct my first fiction feature,” he promised, calling it “a film beyond labels, barriers and genres. A film that reminds us that freedom to love is the most precious thing we have.