Catalan Pics to Track at Berlin

Sparks have shared the title track for their new album ‘The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte’.The Los Angeles duo – comprising brothers Ron and Russell Mael – also announced that the song, which you can listen to below, will come with a video featuring actress Cate Blanchett at 5pm GMT tomorrow (March 3) here.They said via press release: “We met Cate Blanchett in Paris at the César Awards last year, little knowing that a year later, one of the great actors of our time (and a splendid person!) would graciously consent to lending her bootie-shaking skills to the first video from our new album, ‘The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte’. Dreams really do come true.

EXCLUSIVE: The Match Factory has unveiled a slew of deals for German director Christian Petzold’s Berlin Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner Afire.

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

The films of Jennifer Reeder have an unmistakable vibe. Her acclaimed short films, including “All Small Bodies” and “Crystal Lake,” have been shown on The Criterion Channel, and her feature film “Knives and Skin” has been shown at Berlin and Tribeca.  READ MORE: ‘Inside’ Review: Vasilis Katsoupis’ Heist Thriller With Willem Dafoe Is Formulaic Yet Never Dull [Berlin] Reeder’s films, which have been described as the meeting point between David Lynch and John Hughes, share little in terms of plot, but all bear an unmistakable eeriness, an otherworldliness that could only be Reeder.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor To director Mira Fornay, there are no three things more important in life than trees, water and children. And with “She-Hero,” playing as part of the Generation strand at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, the Slovakian filmmaker gathers all three in telling the story of Romy (Rozmarína Willems), a young girl who embarks on a grand forest adventure in search of her lost budgie, Mimi. Fornay, who won the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam Tiger Award in 2013 with her sophomore feature “My Dog Killer,” did not originally set out to make a children’s film, but was fascinated by the natural charisma of Willems. “I already knew Romy and she is immensely photogenic, but I didn’t know if she could act as well. So I tried working with her back when she was six, and she was just amazing. When COVID hit, I realized I had to shoot quickly otherwise she would grow. This is why I wrote a story for her.”

EXCLUSIVE: Following bidding wars in multiple territories, A24 has sold Past Lives, probably the year’s most critically acclaimed new film, to a raft of key territories.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Global indie streamer distributor and producer MUBI has acquired all rights in several key European territories to “Passages,” the erotic drama by Ira Sachs that bowed with a splash at Sundance and just had its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Following the world premiere of “Passages” at Sundance MUBI last month snapped up all rights for the U.S., U.K., Ireland and Latin America to the U.S. indie darling director’s first film shot in France. Now MUBI has acquired additional European territories on “Passages” including for Germany, Austria, Italy, Turkey and Benelux. The Benelux pickup is in partnership with Belgium’s Imagine Film Distribution.

In 1991, “Street Fighter” made history by introducing the world’s first playable female character in a fighting game, Chun Li. An expert martial artist and Interpol officer, Chun Li has a notorious sense of justice, with much of her arc dedicated to a tireless search for revenge for the wrongful killing of her father.

Naman Ramachandran Berlin’s just concluded European Film Market (EFM), which had a physical edition this year after two online editions in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, has reported “record results” according to the organizers. There were 230 stands and 612 companies from 78 countries and more than 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. Some 773 films were shown in 1,533 screenings, including 647 online screenings and 599 market premieres. The total number of buyers also rose to 1,302. 629 film projects were presented on the new Producers & Project Pages. “After the past two irregular years, we’re pleased to return to the physical in full force, and with a vibrant, bustling and strong market. The exhibition areas at Gropius Bau and the Marriott Hotel were sold out, and the exhibitors reported strong sales and good business. The decision to group all the market happenings together with the Berlinale Series Market and the market screenings at Potsdamer Platz, and to provide the industry with an efficient infrastructure, was extremely well-received by our market participants,” said EFM director Dennis Ruh.

Makoto Shinkai’s latest pic Suzume is the first Japanese animated picture to play in competition at Berlin in two decades. However, Shinkai told a press conference in Berlin that a successful festival run has never been high on his list of priorities.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Veteran auteur Mario Martone, whose Naples-set drama “Nostalgia” launched last year from Cannes, has quite a lot in common with Massimo Troisi, Italy’s beloved late comic actor-director who is best known internationally as the star of Oscar-winning film “Il Postino.” Which is why Martone was well-suited to direct the multi-layered doc about Troisi’s legacy “Somebody Down There Likes Me” that is screening in the Berlinale Special sidebar. For starters, they are both Neapolitan, and were born only a few years a part. Troisi – who in “Il Postino” played the simple postman who rides his bicycle on a sandy Italian island to deliver mail to his sole client, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda – died tragically of congenital heart failure at age 41 in June 1994, the day after “Il Postino” finished shooting at Rome’s Cinecittà studios.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

There’s a pretty traditional formula that most music documentaries follow. They’ll often center around a standard birth to mainstream success overview, populated with talking heads and contemporaries to contextualize the music, politics, and social scenes.

Director Vasilis Katsoupis tells the audience exactly what “Inside” is about to do from its very first scene. The disembodied voice of Willem Dafoe narrates a childhood fable fished from the depths of memory.

From “Rosa Luxemburg” in 1986 to 2012’s “Hannah Arendt,” the films of Margarethe Von Trotta, an icon of the New German cinema, have put strong female protagonists center-stage in renditions of German history. For her latest, Von Trotta paints a portrait of German poet Ingeborg Bachmann, author of essays, radio dramas, and opera libretti.

The audiences at Berlin International Film Festival tend to be respectful and engaged.

Young Belarusian Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is impatient for a better life in Europe. Coming from a country under dictatorship and with very strong Russian ties, the political isolation of which has made it suffocating for the younger generations, he is seduced by the idea of a borderless, communal whole where everybody counts for something.

The battle for success on the new drama series scene is the battle for talent, led by screenwriters. Following, portraits of Spanish TV scribes or creators, sometimes writing teams, who’ve made an impact, or look set to do so: 2022 was Araujo’s year. He co-wrote Berlin Competition’s “One Night, One Day” and “Rapa,” Movistar+’s biggest 2022 bow. “Offworld,” a collective series he coordinated, was a Variety’s International TV Show of the Year. An iconoclast – “if I do the same thing, I get bored,” he says –  who tears up the rule book. Best known for acting, winning at Malaga for “The Wild Ones,” but a driving force as co-creator, director and star behind “This Is Not Sweden” a €1.5 million grant recipient and groundbreaking Spain-Scandinavia-Germany co-pro, turning on a couple who think they’ve found a model lifestyle. But “there are no guarantees,” says Clotet.