European Film Funder Eurimages to Boost Diversity, Root Out Bias

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorAs the European Film Market prepares to launch on Monday in a digital format, its new director Dennis Ruh talks to Variety about the rationale behind the structure that he has chosen, and the challenges he’s faced in staging this edition of the event.We took into consideration that the film industry follows a certain rhythm each year.

European Film Market, incorporating industry and press screenings of Berlin Film Festival’s program.

Also Read: 'Nomadland': How Frances McDormand Got Amazon to Agree to Shooting in a Real WarehouseThe drama from Searchlight is the biggest awards push of this truncated fall festival season: It premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival simultaneously, along with a Los Angeles drive-in screening in collaboration with the canceled Telluride Film Festival.

Disney+ has green lit its first slate of European originals, including projects for its international brand Star, which launches in Europe later this month.

Machine Gun Kelly is set to appear alongside his daughter in a new film called One Way.The ‘Tickets To My Downfall’ rapper (real name Colson Baker) will be joined by his daughter Casie Baker in the upcoming thriller, Deadline reports.Joining them onscreen will be the likes of Storm Reid (Euphoria), Kevin Bacon and Travis Fimmel.

Swedish sports drama Tigers, the story of teenage soccer star Martin Bengtsson, was named the Dragon Award winner for Best Nordic Film at the 2021 Göteborg Film Festival, Scandinavia’s top film event. The festival was held virtually this year because of the pandemic.

Leo Barraclough Senior International CorrespondentMatthijs Wouter Knol took over as director of the European Film Academy at the start of the year, having served as director of the European Film Market since 2014.

travel style of the moment. As the world starts to open up again after closing to slow the spread of the coronavirus, travel is looking like a viable option for your spring vacations — including a much-needed spring break, whether you're in college or not.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired North American rights to Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s Gaza Mon Amour, Palestine’s official submission for Best International Feature at the 93rd Academy Awards. The film will be released later this year.

When the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, the city’s largest film festival, gets underway February 17, it will look a little different from previous seasons. It’s a virtual event, save for some drive-in screenings, but the LGBTQ content is still abundant.

The Miami Film Festival is set to go ahead with a hybrid 2021 edition in March with physical theater and online screenings amid the pandemic. The Festival's March 5-14 run this year will open with an in-theater world premiere of Edson Jean’s Ludi — about a hardworking and exhausted nurse chasing the American Dream in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood — and close with the debut of Jayme Gershen’s Birthright.

The UK’s film and high-end TV industries understandably recorded a downturn in 2020, with the pandemic initially causing a complete shutdown before gradual recovery saw the year’s fourth quarter post impressive numbers.

Taking the reins at the Berlinale’s European Film Market after the departure of the long-serving Matthijs Wouter Knol, who left last year to run the European Film Academy, was never going to be easy. Throw an ongoing pandemic into the mix, which has upended traditional industry interactions and shut down international travel, and the role overseeing one of the world’s most important film events looked even more challenging.

Leo Barraclough Senior International CorrespondentThe European Film Market, which is being staged as a virtual event from March 1-5, is to arrange screenings of films selected as part of the Berlin Film Festival lineup in movie theaters in four cities around the world.The initiative, running under the banner “EFM Goes Global,” will see physical screenings for distributors in Tokyo for the Asian market, Melbourne for Oceania, São Paulo for South America, and Mexico City for Central America.

You don't find subjects much more disarming than Rita Moreno, whose seven-decade career on stage and screen is described in Mariem Pérez Riera's celebratory documentary as both the essence of the American Dream and the tenacious attainment of it despite dispiriting obstacles. "You must never really believe anything about your fame and all that kind of bullshit," says Moreno with characteristic unfiltered charm.

Exquisite performances from Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga provide the pulsing, emotionally heightened center to Passing, Rebecca Hall's assured move behind the camera, adapted with great sensitivity from the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen. "We're all of us passing for something or other, aren't we?" muses Thompson's melancholy character Irene Redfield.