Creator, Director of ‘Vanda’ Talk About Their Heist Drama for Legendary Televisions – Berlin

Manori Ravindran International EditorWarnerMedia has struck a first-look deal with German-Turkish director Fatih Akin.The tie-up marks the first exclusive deal of its kind for Akin in his 27-year career. The helmer is best known for such films as “In The Fade” (2017), “Head-On” (2004) and “Soul Kitchen” (2009).

The Sole family grows peaches. Round white peaches ripen first; then the flat white peaches that supermarkets like; then yellow cling peaches. Their farmhouse is surrounded by the plantation they have tended for three generations, promised to them in perpetuity by the current owner’s great-grandparents during the Civil War. Memories are long in their corner of Catalonia. Nobody remembers a time before peaches. Harvesting determines the rhythm of their rumbustious family life. When the fruit ripens, it’s all hands on deck.

BERLIN -- The Catalan family drama “Alcarràs” won the Golden Bear award for best movie at the Berlin International Film Festival on Wednesday.Director Carla Simón's film was picked from a field of 18 by a seven-member jury under American filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.He said the movie was honored “for its extraordinary performances, from the child actors to the actors in their 80s, for the ability to show the tenderness and comedy of family and struggle, and for the betrayal of our connection and dependence on the land around us.”The film depicts a family that spends its summers picking peaches in an orchard in a village in Spain's Catalonia region, but faces new owners who plan to replace the peach trees with solar panels.Meltem Kaptan took the best leading performance honor for the title role in German director Andreas Dresen's “Rabiye Kurnaz vs.

Emiliano Granada Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodríguez’s third feature, “My Two Voices”,  a 68 min documentary that through its short runtime  artfully orchestrates a polyphony of emotions, colors, textures and voices in its portrayal of three immigrant women.Produced by Canada’s Rayon Verde, the same production company behind her previous film “This Time Tomorrow,” Rodríguez’s meticulous approach interweaves the voices of Claudia Montoya, Marinela Piedrahita and Ana Garay Kostic as they share their experiences of immigrating to Canada. Energized by a rich soundscape, the film achieves a deep intimacy, while refusing to draw borders, between spaces, between voices, between there and here, who I was and who I am, between I and Us.

Holly Jones Karlsson: It’s also the expectations they put on themselves. Harry’s constantly torn between what he feels is good music and what is just making money, a concern he shares with his father.

Succession boss Jesse Armstrong has said that there’s going to be a very definite moment when the story of Logan Roy and his rotten cabal is over and HBO is taking its lead from its creator.

Ben Croll To follow-up his 2016 debut “Marija,” Swiss filmmaker Michael Koch set his sight skyward, fixing his vision on a remote Alpine farming community both untouched and victim to time. The filmmaker immersed himself in that world, working with village locals, collecting stories and living off the land, and would then channel those experiences into his sophomore feature.Now premiering in competition in Berlin, “A Piece of Sky” follows a taciturn farmhand, Marco (Simon Wisler), and a single mother, Anna (Michèle Brand), who find strength in each other as they build a life in the punishing Alpine range.

Jamie Lang AMC Networks’ genre-focused streaming platform Shudder has acquired the rights to horror maestro Gustavo Hernández’s “Virus: 32” in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K.The deal was closed between Shudder and Pip Ngo from XYZ, CAA Media Finance and Juan Torres from Latido Films. Spanish sales powerhouse Latido is selling the film and has been showing it to buyers at this year’s European Film Market.A high-profile title to track since it was first unveiled at the virtual Cannes Market in 2020, “Virus: 32” stars Paula Silva (“In the Quarry”) and former Berlin Silver Bear winner Daniel Hendler (“Lost Embrace”) in a story about a rapidly spreading virus which transforms people into intelligent, ultra-violent, extra-fast zombie hunters.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentLoco Films, the Paris-based world sales and production company, has unveiled the trailer for Yulia Trofimova’s feature debut “The Land of Sasha” which is premiering today at the Berlinale, in the Generation 14plus strand.“The Land of Sahsa” tells the story of an indecisive 18-year-old struggling to pursue his desire to become a painter as his mother urges him to choose a safer career path. The sudden appearance of the boy’s estranged father complicates things further. But when Sasha has an unexpected encounter with an unusual girl called Zhenia, he realizes he has no choice but to finally grow up.“The Land of Sasha” was produced by Katerina Mikhaylova and Konstantin Fam for Moscow-based Vega Film.

Marta Balaga Danish helmer Lone Scherfig is already developing the second season of “The Shift”, she revealed on Monday during an online Berlinale Series Market talk “From Film to Series.”Set in a maternity ward and starring Sofie Gråbøl and Pål Sverre Hagen, it’s the first series as a showrunner for Scherfig, who in 2019 opened Berlinale with “The Kindness of Strangers” and won a Silver Bear for “Italian for Beginners.”“It’s a tribute to the people who work in the healthcare system under extreme pressure, to the care and the love they show, even despite tough working conditions,” she said. “The Shift” is produced by Creative Alliance, with Beta Film handling the sales.

Emilio Mayorga Carla Simón’s first feature “Summer 1993” was a knockout; a Generation Kplus and Best First Feature award winner at the 2017 Berlinale and Spain’s 2018 Oscars submission, winning three Spanish Academy Goya Awards. The director has since become a reference within a new wave of Catalan women filmmakers that have broken out to considerable box office and festival success.Now, Simón competes in Berlin’s main competition with her sophomore effort “Alcarràs,” exploring her own roots through her adoptive mother’s family.Set in the so-called Catalan Far West, in a small village near Lleida, the film is shot entirely using non-professional actors.

Holly Jones By way of improvisation, relying heavily on events to naturally develop, Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki presents a meandering ode to the city of Vienna, its customs, cultures, facades, and the near-sacrilege of enacting a smoking ban in cafes city-wide.In, “A Little Love Package,” two main protagonists become the vehicles through which the minutiae of everyday life in Vienna unfolds. Experimental aural and visual cues present themselves as Angeliki (Angeliki Papoulia) and Carmen (Carmen Chaplin) seek the perfect apartment in a city suspended in time.Produced by Little Magnet Films, out of Austria, and Solnicki’s Argentine production company, Filmy Wiktora, “A Little Love Package” is the fifth cinematic feature for Solnicki, whose entire catalog was recently acquired by MOMA.

The streets outside her window are dripping with hope, and yet Élisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is lost. It is Paris, 1981, a new president has been elected, and Élisabeth’s husband has left, claiming the thrillingness of motion by moving in with a new girlfriend while his ex is left with the stagnance of remaining, the apartment where they’ve raised their children, Judith (Megan Northam) and Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), at once comfortingly familiar and dreadfully new.

EXCLUSIVE: Shooting upcoming Netflix pic Against The Ice was no straightforward task, as its stars and director reveal to Deadline in a first interview as a trio.

EXCLUSIVE: Isaki Lacuesta’s drama One Year, One Night (Un Año, Una Noche), about survivors grappling with trauma following the devastating terrorist attack at Paris’ Bataclan theater on November 13, 2015, world premieres in competition at the Berlin Film Festival today. Check out a clip above as a group of friends discusses messages of support they received in the wake of the tragedy.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentAudrey Diwan, the BAFTA-nominated filmmaker of the Venice Golden Lion-winning “Happening,” is set to make her television debut with Haut et Court TV in France, Variety has learned.Haut et Court TV is one of France’s leading production companies with credits ranging from the supernatural drama series “The Returned,” to “Panthers” with Tahar Rahim and more recently “Possession.”Diwan is currently writing the series, which will be an original story about a mother and daughter running a plastic surgery clinic. The plot is under wraps but the series will be similar to “Happening” in that it will deal with women’s relationships to their bodies.

Ben Croll When developing films like 2008’s “Home” and 2012’s “Sister,” French-Swiss director Ursula Meier began by focusing on geography, imaging what stories may spring from a forgotten stretch of highway or how a remote mountaintop might shape the lives of those living upon it. But when she began work on “The Line,” which premiered on Friday at the Berlin Film Festival, the filmmaker had a different terrain in mind.“The setting for this film would be the character’s body,” Meier tells Variety.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentChiara Bellosi, whose first work, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin’s Generation 14plus section in 2020, is back with “Swing Ride” (“Calcinculo”) about an overweight 15-year-old named Benedetta pining for attention in an Italian province where she falls in love with the skinny non-binary Amanda.A key difference between the two films is that while “Ordinary Justice,” which examined the lives of two families on opposite sides of a murder case, originated from a deeply researched screenplay that Bellosi wrote, “Swing Ride” — premiering in Panorama on Feb. 13 — stems from a prizewinning script proposed to her by Carlo Cresto Dina, her producer, who also discovered Alice Rohrwacher (“Happy as Lazzaro”) and is known for nurturing the cream of Italy’s new cinematic crop.   “It’s a very different process; it was the first time that I had to start from a world that didn’t germinate from me,” said Bellosi about working from the script penned by Maria Teresa Venditti and Luca De Bei that won Italy’s prestigious Solinas prize in 2018.It was like moving into a new house that she had to make her own, she said.“I worked with the writers; I wanted to make a few tweaks and we did that together,” she added, noting that initially “it was a leap into the void.” But directing from their screenplay actually ended up giving her “more freedom” than her previous pic because “the container is already there; but you can go pretty wild with the rest.”This freedom also made it more fun.

Manori Ravindran International EditorMia Wasikowska will take on the lead role in “Little Joe” director Jessica Hausner’s cult thriller “Club Zero,” Variety can reveal.The Australian actor will portray an unusual schoolteacher in Hausner’s second English-language film, which begins shooting in the U.K. and Austria in July.Wasikowska was most recently seen in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Cannes-premiering film “Bergman Island.”In “Club Zero,” Wasikowska’s teacher takes a job at an elite school and forms a strong bond with five students — a relationship that eventually takes a dangerous turn.Discussing the film at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event last year, Hausner described the film as “a lot about eating,” relating to eating disorders and “eating behaviors.” This will be Hausner’s sixth feature.

Naman Ramachandran British auteur Peter Strickland is back with his fifth feature, “Flux Gourmet,” and it is as striking and uncompromising as his previous body of work, which includes “In Fabric” (2018), “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014), “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) and “Katalin Varga” (2009). “Flux Gourmet” world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival’s Encounters strand on Feb. 11.The film follows a sonic collective trio with rocky interpersonal dynamics, who take up residency at an institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance and have to answer to the institute’s head, who has her own opinions about their work.