Director Mira Fornay Talks Berlinale Title ‘She-Hero,’ Supporting Charities Through Filmmaking (EXCLUSIVE)

EXCLUSIVE: MakerVille, the recently launched entertainment subsidiary of Hong Kong media group PCCW, is set to make a splash at Filmart, unveiling an ambitious slate of movies and premium series, following its debut feature Mad Fate, which had its world premiere at Berlin film festival. 

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Mk2 films has enlisted leading distributors around the world for “Reality,” Tina Satter’s feature debut starring Sydney Sweeney, on the heels of its buzzy world premiere at the Berlinale. The movie, which bowed in the Panorama section, stars Sweeney (“White Lotus,” “Euphoria”) as Reality Winner, a 25 year-old whistleblower who spent five years in prison during the Trump administration. A former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, Winner was convicted for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film is based on Satter’s 2019 stage play “Is This a Room” and contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording. “Reality” captures the tense and surreal 90 minutes of FBI’s interrogation with Winner at her home in 2017.

K.J. Yossman Mercury Studios, the production company behind recent Abbey Road Studios doc “If These Walls Could Sing,” have unveiled their new feature, about composer Felix Mendelssohn’s genius sister Fanny. Although Felix, who is best known for writing “The Wedding March,” is still world-renowned 175 years after his death, his sister Fanny was also a prolific musician, composing 450 works – including her own wedding music – before she died in her early 40s. “Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn” tells her story. Sheila Hayman (“Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me”) directs the doc, which also stars classical artist Isata Kanneh-Mason bringing Mendelssohn’s works to life. Filming has taken place in Berlin, New York, London, Oxford and Buckingham Palace, where Kanneh-Mason played Queen Victoria’s piano.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sculptor turned director Wu Lang made a splash at the Berlin Film Festival with his debut feature “Absence” playing in the festival’s showcase Encounters section. With a high-profile cast headed by Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud”) and Li Meng (“The Bad Kids,” “The Guillotines”) “Absence” is an art-house romance that uses skyscapes and urban landscapes as metaphors for inner feelings. The seduction starts with a man’s return to Hainan Island after ten years in jail and ends with a flock of sheep in an abandoned construction site. Wu: Shooting the first short film for me had two purposes. First, making a film is not easy in terms of financing and finding coproducers. So, first I wanted to make a short in order to get myself started.

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.

EXCLUSIVE: HBO Films has closed a deal for U.S. rights to the Berlin Film Festival buzz competition title Reality. Directed by Tina Satter, the docudrama is a breakout turn for Sydney Sweeney as convicted classified document leaker Reality Winner. Sweeney stars in the hit HBO series Euphoria.

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.

Berlinale Series and one of Disney+’s early big plays in Southern Europe, U.K.-Italian mafia series “The Good Mothers” walked off on Wednesday night with the Berlin Festival’s inaugural Berlinale Series Award.  A large virtue of the series is to come in at the mafia from a novel angle: a real story of women who dare to defy the Italian mob.  The title forms part of the first European slate by new Disney+ international streaming service Star. It tells how bosses at the the Calabrian mob were targeted by a female prosecutor – thanks to the collaboration of three women inside the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime clan. 

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.

Israeli director Guy Nattiv has defended his casting of non-Jewish actress Helen Mirren as iconic Israeli Prime minister Golda Meir in his biopic Golda, which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday.

Berlin Film Festival. At least not according to the co-chiefs of Turkey’s Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival. “The festival’s opening ceremony started with Ukraine, ended with Ukraine and touched on Iran. But I don’t think they ever mentioned Turkey,” said Ahmet Boyacıoğlu, president of the fest that has historically always been the country’s prime local cinema catalyst.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent One of Japan’s most commercially successful and highly acclaimed animators, Shinkai Makoto has been called a successor to anime titan Miyazaki Hayao. Known for his mix of photo-realistic visuals and gorgeously realized fantasies, Shinkai surpassed the master when his 2016 smash “Your Name” became the highest-earning Japanese film of all time worldwide, beating Miyazaki’s 2001 “Spirited Away.” (That record was later broken by the 2020 anime sensation “Demon Slayer.”) His latest film, “Suzume,” about a teen girl’s quest to halt an apocalypse triggered by the opening of magical doors all over Japan, is also the first Japanese animated feature to screen in the Berlin competition since “Spirited Away” in 2002. Variety sat down with Shinkai to hear his views on his own work and the state of the anime industry.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Luc Besson’s ”Dogman,” starring Caleb Landry Jones, wowed buyers at the Berlin’s European Film Market, where it was screened for select buyers. “We hosted only one private screening of the completed film and buyers were stunned, they all came out saying that it was Luc Besson’s best film to date, his most mature movie and some even called it a masterpiece,” said Gregoire Melin, founder of Kinology, which is handling sales on the film. On the heels of the screening, Kinology closed deals with some of the biggest distributors in key international territories, including Italy (Lucky Red), Germany and Austria (Capelight Pictures), Spain and Latin America (Sun Distribution Group), Scandinavia (Svensk Filmindustri), Benelux (Belga Films), Switzerland (Elite Film), Middle East (Front Row), Poland (Monolith), Portugal (Nos Lusomundo Audiovisuais), Czech Republic and Slovakia (AQS) and former Yugoslavia (Blitz).

As the 73rd Berlin Film Festival rolls into its first weekend, one of the buzziest titles on the ground is the taut political thriller Reality, starring Euphoria and White Lotus breakout Sydney Sweeney.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski (“Passages,” ”Undine”), is “certainly a dream come true.” But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.  A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.  

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The life of Turkey’s most famous photographer, Ara Guler, known globally for his portraits of scores of 20th century icons ranging from Pablo Picasso to Winston Churchill, is set to become a biopic directed by writer-director duo Aren Perdeci and Ela Almayanac (“Lost Birds”). Guler worked for many years for the photo agency Magnum, after its co-founder, celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, personally signed him up. Besides documenting top 20th century personalities, Guler, who died in 2018, gained fame for his images of a bygone Istanbul, which earned him the moniker “Istanbul’s Eye.” He established a long collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Guler’s photographs were included in the 2003 Pamuk book “Istanbul: Memories and the City.” He also directed the 1975 doc “End of the Hero,” about a World War I battle cruiser.

Shayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade. Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books. The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau.