Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival Wraps 32nd Edition, With Awards Going To ‘Between The Rains,’ ‘The Echo’ And More

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent MK2 Films has boarded Bernhard Wenger’s feature debut, “Peacock,” a tragicomedy headlined by Albrecht Schuch, the German actor who starred in “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “System Crasher.” An up-and-coming Austrian director, Wenger developed the script at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefondation residency and was part of Berlinale Talents in 2020. His shorts, including “Keeping Balance,” “Guy Proposes to His Girlfriend on a Mountain” and “Excuse Me, I’m Looking for the Ping-Pong Room and My Girlfriend,” have played at festivals in Chicago, Palm Springs and Nashville, among others.

Greece’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival returns this evening for its 64th edition with a screening of The Pot-au-Feu (The Taste of Things), the latest film by French-Vietnamese director Trần Anh Hùng. 

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Nurturing young talent and promoting film education is the name of the game at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. The festival will feature a range of events specifically aimed at education promoting both film literacy in schools and vocational training in front of and behind the camera.

Echo & The Bunnymen have announced ‘The Very Best Of’ 2024 UK tour – find all details down below.The Liverpudlian band will perform a setlist taken from the best of their 40-year-long career. It will include songs all the way up to their most recent LP, 2018’s ‘The Stars, The Ocean and The Moon’.They will then embark on a tour throughout the UK, where they’ll stop off at Brighton (3), Cardiff (10), Manchester (16) and more.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Mexico’s official entry to the Best International Feature Oscar race, Lila Aviles’ “Totem,” and Tatiana Huezo’s documentary “The Echo” (“El Eco”) snagged three prizes a piece at the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), which wrapped Sunday, Oct. 29. The awards doled out Saturday capped a busy 21st edition that saw a constellation of luminaries in town, including Jodie Foster, Jessica Chastain, Peter Saarsgard, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Huston, James Ivory, Irène Jacob and producing partners Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Like “Testament” — the 1983 made-for-TV movie that imagined the fallout, both nuclear and psychological, after an atomic bomb is dropped on American soil — “Leave the World Behind” depicts a plausible doomsday scenario from the perspective of a handful of ordinary characters. Not military experts, not scientists, but two families obliged to shelter under the same roof out in the East Hamptons while something scary unfolds a few hours away, off-screen, in New York.

The International Documentary Association announced its shortlists of features and shorts in the running for the 39th IDA Documentary Awards, a list as notable for what was left out as for what films made the cut.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic One fan drove all the way from Louisiana to Little Rock to see the new Austin Butler movie, “The Bikeriders,” hoping the “Elvis” star might show up. Unfortunately, the ongoing actors strike prevented Butler from attending Filmland, a local industry fundraiser that hosted the Arkansas premiere of the film earlier this week — a rowdy portrait of a 1960s motorcycle gang freely inspired by a book of photos New Journalism pioneer Danny Lyon took while embedded with the Outlaws.

EXCLUSIVE: ETM Distribution has set a nationwide theatrical release for Holiday Twist, a new family film starring Kelly Stables (Superstore), Neal McDonough (Yellowstone), Sean Astin (Stranger Things) and more. Marking the debut feature of Stephanie Garvin, who directed from her own script, the film will bow exclusively in 500+ theaters nationwide December 1.

American Fiction” from writer, director and producer Cord Jefferson, and the recent winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award. Based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison,” a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired narratives and themes. After he writes an outlandish book making fun of the offensive tropes, his success propels him into the center of hypocrisy.

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.

The Wrestler, directed by Bangladeshi-Canadian filmmaker Iqbal H. Chowdhury, and September 1923, from Japan’s Tatsuya Mori, picked up the New Currents Awards as Busan International Film Festival wrapped a busy 28th edition on October 13. 

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival has unveiled the program for its 27th edition, which will take place in the Czech city of Jihlava between Oct.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island. There are jokes, of course, and educated guesses, but the best most of us can do is search inside ourselves for the answer.

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

Mumbai Film Festival has announced a packed line-up of 250 films, including the 14 titles selected for its inaugural South Asia Competition, part of an expansion of the festival’s vision to become a hub for works from South Asia and South Asian diaspora talent. 

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.  

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic What would a monk want with a gun? Bringing wisdom and a streak of wry humor to his Bhutan-set sophomore feature, “The Monk and the Gun” director Pawo Choyning Dorji teases any number of possible answers to that question over the course of a droll, shrewdly satirical fable, in which Western values crash against a seemingly intransigent (but potentially more enlightened) South Asian culture. A gifted storyteller who keeps audiences guessing about his characters’ motives until the surprising moment everything comes together, Dorji was born in Bhutan, but attended university in Wisconsin.

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.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam is beginning to fill out its lineup leading up to IDFA’s 36th edition next month. The largest all-documentary festival in the world today announced selections for the Competition for Short Documentary and the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary, along with the films selected for the Best of Fests section and the “Signed” section, a new addition to the IDFA program.