Göteborg Film Festival To Produce & Debut AI-Altered Version Of Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’

Ellise Shafer Daniel Kaluuya world premiered his feature directorial debut, “The Kitchen,” at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday night, calling it “one of the best days of my life.” Kaluuya was on hand alongside his co-director Kibwe Tavares, producer Daniel Emmerson and several of the film’s actors, including “Top Boy” star Kane Robinson and newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman. Set in a dystopian London where all social housing has been banned, the film follows the residents of a community called the Kitchen who must fight to save their home. Speaking before the premiere, Kaluuya and Tavares explained that it’s taken nearly a decade to bring the Netflix film to the screen.

EXCLUSIVE: Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Let’s Get Lost has received a 4k restoration, which will debut at this year’s Lumiere Film Festival. 

Monsoon Wedding and A Suitable Boy filmmaker Mira Nair has been announced as the Head of Jury for the South Asia Competition at this year’s Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 27-November 5). 

Cailee Spaeny dazzles while promoting her new film Priscilla at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival on Monday (October 9).

Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.  

The first week of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London Film Festival wrapped this evening with a rapturous onstage Q&A session with writer-director Greta Gerwig.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival is back after a one-year hiatus with a rich mix of Arabic and international titles launching into the Middle East and plenty of promising projects from Arab countries set to be unveiled to prospective partners at its CineGouna industry side. The event launched in 2017 by Egyptian telecom billionaire Naguib Sawiris – whose brother Samih built the El Gouna resort in a swathe of desert near the tourist town of Hurghada 250 miles south of Cairo – was put on pause in 2022 ostensibly due to the country’s economic crisis following five editions during which fest co-founder Amr Mansi and chief Intishal Al Timimi had managed to rapidly put El Gouna on the international festival map while also making it a favourite with the local crowd.

Marta Balaga Warsaw Film Festival sets out to spotlight a slew of new local releases, from “Anxiety” by Sławomir Fabicki – Oscar-nominated for his short “A Man Thing” – to this year’s opener “Song of Goats” by Andrzej Jakimowski. The latter, featuring “EO” star Mateusz Kościukiewicz and set in Greece, will show characters living close to an active volcano, exploring the question of how “each of us is responsible for maintaining our fragile heritage,” says the director.

Sharareh Drury Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival GEMS has announced the full lineup for its 2023 festival, which will run from Nov. 2-5. The 10th edition of the fest will feature 26 films from 14 countries, all taking place at MDC’s Koubek Center and Silverspot Cinema.

EXCLUSIVE: The DTLA Film Festival has set the full feature lineup for its 15th edition, taking place at Regal L.A. Live from November 1-5, announcing the Jack Huston starrer Hail Mary as its opening night film.

International execs from Unifrance, MK2 and TrustNordisk kicked off the annual Zurich Summit on Saturday to discuss the importance of film festivals when promoting a title and if fests are drifting away from what works in cinemas. 

The 2024 Göteborg Film Festival will show an AI-altered version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with a new actor edited in. Another Persona will co-star 42-year-old Finnish actress Alma Pöysti as Elisabet Vogler, a role played in the 1966 arthouse classic by Liv Ullmann (now 84), as Deadline reports.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival’s Cinemed industry section has teamed up with Beirut-based cultural nonprofit Aflamuna on a new initiative, under which 10 film and doc projects from a wide range of Arab countries will soon be unveiled to prospective partners. The new program, called Cinemed and Aflamuna Professional Encounters, features 10 Arab works in development that reflect a slew of themes relevant to the region, including political turbulence, societal changes, female empowerment and climate change concerns.

Baz Luhrmann has been named president of the Features Competition jury at the upcoming Red Sea International Film Festival. This third edition of the event runs from November 30-December 9 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Neo Sora’s concert documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus,” a standout at the Venice Film Festival, has sold for theatrical distribution in North America to Janus Films ahead of its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The theatrical release will be followed by a Blu-ray Disc release on the “Janus Contemporaries” label. This is the latest deal inked by London and Paris-based production, finance and sales outfit Film Constellation, following a slew of sales to Spain (Filmin), Portugal (Midas Filmes), Germany and Austria (Rapid Eye), Scandinavia (NjutaFilms), Baltics (Kino Pavasaris), South Korea (Media Castle), China (JL Vision Films), Hong Kong and Macau (Edko Films), Taiwan (Cai Chang) and Singapore (Anticipate Pictures).

Jaden Thompson The Newport Beach Film Festival, which will run from Oct. 12-19 this year, has announced their opening and closing night films. Marco Perego’s “The Absence of Eden,” which stars Zoë Saldana, will open the festival on Oct.

Maja Hoffmann has been officially confirmed as President of the Locarno Film Festival following a vote at an Extraordinary General Assembly on Wednesday.

A first-time filmmaker has claimed the top prize at the 19th Annual Camden Film Festival in Maine, one of the country’s foremost all-documentary festivals.

Watching Mountains, which just made its international debut as part of the Toronto Film Festival’s Centerpiece program, I could not help but think of two other landmark films it seems to recall in its own way. One was 2019’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco, a remarkable story of gentrification and its effect on those being edged out of their home that starred Jimmie Falls and launched the career of Jonathan Majors. The other was the 1960 film version of Lorraine Hansberry’s oft-performed A Raisin In The Sun in which Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger played a struggling husband, son, and father with a dream for a new house and a better life for his family.

Organizers of the Camden International Film Festival in coastal Maine are moving ahead with regular programming today, as Hurricane Lee – downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone – aims further north towards Nova Scotia.