Cannes’ Marché du Film Confirms Pre-Cannes Screenings

The Marché du Film has set its dates for the “Pre-Cannes Screenings” virtual film market, which will now take place May 25-28.The smaller, virtual film market is designed to bridge the gap between the Berlin Film Market and Cannes, though the Marché du Film will still host a more traditional — and hopefully in-person — film market to coincide with the delayed Cannes Film Festival between July 6-15.The “intermediate event” in May will be a four-day online version of the Marché du Film.

Also Read: Spike Lee Returns as Cannes Jury PresidentOfficial dates still need to be confirmed, but the pre-screenings will begin no earlier than May 24.

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.

Not long into I'm Your Man, Dan Stevens' character, a genial android named Tom, arranges a perfectly contrived combination of romantic clichés for his would-be partner, Alma. The rose petals are "artfully" strewn, the candles flicker, and flutes of bubbly are ready for sipping beside the bubble-filled tub.

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.

There’s a brief shot early on in Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s wondrous romance and Berlinale competition entry What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?) that might seem to illustrate something quite mundane. The male protagonist’s soccer practice session has ended.

There's sardonic self-deprecation in the part Daniel Brühl has chosen for himself in his first feature as director, that of a European movie star sweating over an audition for a Hollywood superhero film that stands to push his fame — and his bank account — to the next level. But celebrity entitlement is only one part of the package.

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.

Adding another strong voice to the chorus of anti-capital-punishment films coming out of Iran is Ballad of a White Cow (Ghasideyeh gave sefid), a drama almost entirely centered on the wife of a condemned man who is wrongfully executed for murder in the opening scene.

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won wide acclaim and festival prizes with his 2015 breakthrough feature, the bittersweet ensemble drama Happy Hour. But the nuanced, novelistic eye behind that delicately observed five-hour epic seemed to desert Hamaguchi on his 2018 anti-romance Asako I & II, which premiered to lukewarm reviews in Cannes.

In Dasha Nekrasova’s feature directorial debut, The Scary of Sixty-First, New York City is a desolate place. The sky is a muddy beige with no indication of sun.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Since Kirsty Bell founded Goldfinch Entertainment in 2016, the company has funded over 200 film and TV projects over the past five years, including the acclaimed “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Amazon’s “Le Mans: Racing Is Everything” and “Killers Anonymous” with Gary Oldman and Jessica Alba. She has also launched an online art gallery as well as a physical one in her hometown of Newcastle, England.It was during the first week of the pandemic lockdown that Bell

Anna Marie de la Fuente By forging key partnerships with filmmakers, financiers and distributors through the years, The Exchange, founded by veteran sales executive and CEO Brian O’Shea, has grown to become a leading worldwide sales and finance company.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefTriumph and pain were bedfellows last year for the Korean film industry. But Berlin’s European Film Market and the imminent Hong Kong FilMart see Korean companies putting on a brave face.Korean cinemas were in defensive mode early on in the coronavirus pandemic, as a population familiar with epidemics chose to stay away from crowded places.

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.

ever do nothing nice and easy,” she said in a sultry snarl. “We always do it nice and rough.”“Tina,” the documentary about Turner that premiered at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, has moments where it tries to be nice and easy, sliding over difficult portions in Turner’s life in an attempt to find a celebratory tone.