How An Anonymous Collective Of Filmmakers Are Risking Their Lives To Expose Atrocities In Myanmar – Berlin

German-Turkish film director, screenwriter, and producer Fatih Akin has signed a first-look deal with WarnerMedia, the first such agreement the filmmaker has made in his career.

EXCLUSIVE: IFC Films has set a July 8 stateside release date for Claire Denis’ Berlin Film Festival winner Fire, starring Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon.

As the people of Ukraine wake up to the reality of war, many of the country’s top filmmakers and industry professionals have issued statements pleading for international intervention.

Naman Ramachandran The Berlin Film Festival has called for peace over the situation in Ukraine, which is currently in a state of military conflict after Russian forces struck on Thursday morning.“We — festival workers, artists, filmmakers — think fondly of our friends in Ukraine and we are by their side in a call for peace,” the festival said in a statement issued on Thursday. “One week ago, the Berlin International Film Festival was celebrating a complicated yet successful edition.

Resembling more of a personal tribute than exhaustive biography, Pietro Marcello‘s Lucio Dalla documentary, “For Lucio,” takes its title as an invitation. A rambling eulogy that is just as often confusing as it is profound, Marcello’s wisp of a film (running less than 80 minutes) may be missing key context for those not already versed in the life and music of the politically-oriented Italian singer-songwriter.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Kazakh filmmaker Askar Uzabayev’s domestic violence drama “Happiness” snagged the Audience Award in the Berlin Film Festival’s prestigious Panorama sidebar, a good sign of its potential appeal in cinemas and festivals worldwide. Whether it will secure distribution in its native Kazakhstan is another matter, however.Based on actual events, “Happiness” centers on a lovely influencer who promotes a product line called Happiness, which she pitches as a surefire path to happiness, beauty and success.But her home life reflects the opposite where her abusive husband grows ever more violent.

Many of Hong Sang-soo’s films are structured around a woman’s solitary wanderings. The single ladies played by Kim Min-Hee in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “The Woman Who Ran,” or Lee Hye-Young in “In Front of Your Face,” are free radicals, moving from encounter to encounter and disrupting the equilibrium of the people they meet, as meandering conversations reveal a friend’s dissatisfaction or a couple’s disagreement.

Gail Halvorsen was a United States Air Force pilot known as the “Candy Bomber” for dropping candy over Berlin from his airplane during the Berlin airlift in 1948.  Gail Halvorsen joined the Air Force as a pilot during World War II, serving as a transport pilot in the South Atlantic. After World War II, Berlin was divided into four sections occupied by the United States, France, England, and Russia.

Leaves rustle in the wind, sand swiftly lifted from the ground as it resumes its nomadic journey, taking from one place to give to another. Around it, all seems to be consumed by stillness, but, in the safety of this deceiving quietness, life bursts through settled roots to create anew.

Premiering in the Special Gala section of this year’s Berlinale, the latest film from Italian director Dario Argento is surprising in more ways than one. Rather than copy the style of the giallo films from the 1970s and 1980s that made him famous (“The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,” “Deep Red,” and “Suspiria,” to cite just a few), his “Dark Glasses” finds ingenious ways to retain the core of the giallo while adapting to our current times.

It sounds like the set-up to a French New Wave film: a French au pair falls in love with an Irish pickpocket leading to a whirlwind romance that changes both their lives. It might be twee, but Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert) lived it, and on a long, rainy, nighttime drive reflects on the intense, yet fleeting relationship of her youth.

Sat in front of a computer, musician Nick Cave reads a few questions aloud. These are deeply existential musings sent in by people he has never met.

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.

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.

Of all the unsolved mysteries in Claire Denis‘ new Berlin Competition film, the biggest may just be its U.S. retitling to a generic and not particularly representative “Fire.” The film’s English title in the rest of the world, “Both Sides of the Blade” — a line from the terrific Tindersticks track that ends the film —is not just cooler and more compelling.

Htun Zaw Win, who uses the professional name Wyne, has been arrested in Myanmar following a year on the run evading charges of encouraging government employees to join protests against local military rule.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorAhead of Sunday’s world premiere of documentary “1341 Frames of Love and War,” which plays in Berlinale Special, Variety spoke to Israeli writer/director Ran Tal about the film and its subject, Israeli war photographer Micha Bar-Am.In some ways “Frames” continues Tal’s interest in Israeli history evident in his previous work, “What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace,” which centered on the former prime minister of Israel. Bar-Am was born in Berlin in 1930, but grew up in what became Israel, and across a five decade-long career as a photographer he documented many of the major episodes – in particular the wars – in the life of the young country, founded in 1948.

Naman Ramachandran Acclaimed Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain, known for her powerful women-centric films, has a new project participating in the Berlinale Co-Production Market and is launching a female filmmaker grant.Her Berlinale co-production market project, “The Difficult Bride,” follows Novera, a bride-to-be in present-day Dhaka who is in love with the groom and the idea of a fairytale wedding, but secretly struggles with her body, which does not seem to comply with the wedding rituals. She makes continuous trips to the beauty salon and uses home remedies to “cure” her body.

Demystifying and questioning the very notion of authenticity, Jason Kohn’s informative and oddly riveting, diamond-documentary “Nothing Lasts Forever” is ostensibly about the oft-antagonistic relationship between natural and synthetic diamonds. Yet, diamonds are an in-road as Kohn explores the commodification of such abstractions as love and desire, questioning how exactly a shiny rock — one that isn’t even that rare — became a physical manifestation of commitment.

Manori Ravindran International EditorChrissy Metz, the Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated star of “This Is Us,” stars alongside “It” actor Wyatt Oleff and Fin Argus in Jamie Sisley’s drama “Stay Awake,” which premieres at the Berlin Film Festival this week.The feature — which is based on Sisley’s 2015 short film of the same name — centers on brothers Ethan (Oleff) and Derek (Argus), who are trying their best to navigate the pressures of teenage life while tending to their mother’s (Metz) debilitating prescription drug addiction.Based on Sisley’s experience growing up in small-town America, “Stay Awake” is billed as “a personal exploration of the roller coaster ride that families go on while trying to help their loved ones battle a disease that affects millions every day.” In an exclusive clip shared with Variety, the two brothers are shown arguing about the money needed to pay for their mother’s rehabilitation treatment. The subject matter is especially resonant given the recent representation of America’s drug crisis on screen in shows such as Hulu’s “Dopesick.”“The themes and characters in ‘Stay Awake’ mean the world to me since they’re based on my childhood.