Int’l Critics Line: Kosovo’s Oscar Hopeful ‘Hive’

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today unveiled its shortlist of 15 films that will advance to the next stage of voting in the International Feature Film category at the Oscars. Notable among omissions is Julia Ducournau’s Titane, the entry from France which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or — becoming only the second movie directed by a woman to scoop that prize.

The CW has taken in for development Clubhouse (working title) a murder mystery drama from iZombie writer Christina de Leon, Lisa Berger and Sarah Penna’s Frolic Media, and CBS Studios, where Frolic is under a deal.

Alissa Simon Film CriticWith last year’s surprise nominee “The Man Who Sold His Skin” hailing from Tunisia, Oscar handicappers should be sure to give West Asia and North Africa titles close scrutiny this time around. Among the 11 submissions are several titles likely to be highly competitive in the international feature category.

Offering an explanation. Kim Kardashian has been called out for appropriating Black hairstyles over the years. Now, the 41-year-old fashion designer is setting the record straight about the claims. 

EXCLUSIVE: Elisabeth Moss and Lindsey McManus have boarded writer-director Blerta Basholli’s Hive as executive producers. The Love & Squalor Pictures partners will spearhead the awards push for the Kosovan Oscar entry.

2021 Miss Universe kicked off this past December 10th. The 70th edition of the popular show will be hosted in Israel at the Universe Arena, with an audience of about 5,000 people.

The eponymous edifice of Cambodia’s International Feature Oscar entry, White Building, is barely white at all by the time we encounter it. A low-rise apartment block in Phnom Penh — the sort of teeming anthill of humanity familiar to anyone who has spent time in a South East Asian city — it is stained with tropical rain, its cement falling off in chunks, its cat’s cradles of improvised electrical wiring truly shocking, in every sense of the word. Director Kavich Neang grew up here.

Jordan’s Royal Film Commission has withdraw Oscar hopeful Amira from the 2022 Oscar race following a backlash over the film’s subject.

Lina Wertmüller, the Italian filmmaker who made history in 1977 when she became the first woman to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar, has died at the age of 93.

K.J. Yossman Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to score a Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, died on Thursday in Italy.

Flash, flicker, flash, cut to black. We’re watching grainy film of men walking in and out of the stalls in a West German public toilet, casting glances at each other, maybe a fumbling feel; a reverse angle shows us the camera behind the mirror. The men can’t see it, but some of them must surely guess it’s there and defy the odds anyway. Because without defiance, without desire, what are they? Without those things, they know they will only ever be half-alive.

There are moments in Drunken Birds, Serbian Canadian director Ivan Grbovic’s long-awaited second feature, that evoke strong sense memories of Days Of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s definitive film about the beauty and hardship of the rural laboring life. Days Of Heaven was set in 1916; Drunken Birds takes place today on a successful vegetable farm in Québec, where the workers are bussed in seasonally from Mexico.

Liza Foreman Germany’s Red Balloon Film and Palestine’s Fresco Films have boarded director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s second film “Nothing of Nothing Remains.” The film is part of a trilogy building on his first film, “The Stranger” (pictured), which premiered in Venice and represents Palestine at the Oscars in the International Feature Film category.“Nothing of Nothing Remains” has received development and script funding from German regional funder Moin Film Fund in Hamburg.

William Earl Lana Del Rey was presented with the Decade Award during the Dec. 4 Variety Hitmakers brunch held in Los Angeles.

Oscar De La Hoya is setting the record straight about his relationship with Travis Barker.

Few stock scenes in the cinema stir a surge of emotion as reliably as the sight of an underdog winning a race. There is the victor’s ribcage breaking through the ribbon at the finishing line, the runner’s exhausted smile, the arms raised in victory, the quiver rising to a swell of violins and finally, in the viewer, the lump in the throat. That was where Chariots Of Fire struck gold: it actually did eat your heart out.

The Icelandic mountains loom, the mists swirl between the peaks to where horses suddenly skitter in the snow. The only sound is stertorous breathing as the camera, clearly asserting something’s point of view, approaches the herd. Away they run.

Pregnant prisoners are the subject of 107 Mothers, Slovakia’s striking but somewhat sluggish International Feature Oscar entry directed by Peter Kerekes who co-wrote with Ivan Ostrochovský, winning Best Screenplay in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section earlier this year.