Iranian Debutante Dornaz Hajiha’s ‘Like a Fish on the Moon’ Takes Top Prize at Transilvania Film Festival

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Laurie Anderson will lead a post-screening conversation with legendary singer Joan Baez and director Karen O’Connor after a screening of the new documentary, “Joan Baez I Am a Noise” at the Hamptons International Film Festival on July 22. (Read Variety‘s review of the film here.) The 2023 edition of the documentary showcase festival will conclude with a presentation of the documentary, which was produced by O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle on Saturday, July 22, at 7 p.m. at the Regal UA East Hampton Cinema. Following the film, Baez and O’Connor will join the musician and artist Laurie Anderson for an intimate conversation.

Christian Petzold’s Afire and Celine Song’s Past Lives are among the titles set to screen at this year’s scaled-down Edinburgh International Film Festival (Aug 18-23), which is being mounted as part of Edinburgh’s wider cultural Festival.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Riz Ahmed will be honoured by the Locarno Film Festival where the latest short in which the British actor appears – titled “Dammi” and directed by French auteur Yann Mounir Damage – will world premiere. Ahmed, who earned an Oscar nomination for best actor in 2021 for his performance as a drummer who suddenly goes deaf in Amazon’s “Sound of Metal,” will be feted by the Swiss fest dedicated to indie filmmaking cinema with with its 2021 Excellence Award Davide Campari, which pays tribute to film personalities who have left their personal stamp on contemporary cinema. “Dammi,” which was teased at Cannes, is an experimental work, broadly on the theme of immigration and identity, produced by French fashion brand  AMI, founded by Alexandre Mattiussi, and also starring Isabelle Adjani, Souheila Yacoub, Sandor Funtek and Suzy Bemba. The buzzed-about short will screen at Locarno’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande, on opening night, Aug. 2, during the ceremony at which Amed will receive the award.

The raucous period drama “Firebrand” was the official opening-night film at the 57th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Friday night in the spa resort town outside Prague, but there was a lot more going on in and around the Grand Hall at the Hotel Thermal than just the on-screen battle between Alicia Vikander’s Catherine Parr and Jude Law’s King Henry VIII. It also included the presentation of awards to Vikander and Russell Crowe, the usual complement of opening-night speeches, an extended dance number that appeared to be performed on ice skates (though it wasn’t on ice but on an artificial surface that mimicked ice but could be walked on safely) and, during breaks and after the movie, complete concerts by the British band Morcheeba and by Crowe’s nine-piece band, Indoor Garden Party.

Alicia Vikander got the support of her husband Michael Fassbender while being honored at the 2023 Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

Will Tizard Contributor From indoor ice skating feats to Russell Crowe rocking the crowd, the 57th edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival has launched with all its unconventional charisma intact. Audiences who had to weather a downpour clearly showed no signs of dampened spirits as they cheered the fest’s opening gala dancers on ice skates, then rose to their feet to applaud guests Crowe and Alicia Vikander, both of whom accepted honors for their robust range of film work. Vikander, in accepting the award of fest president Jiri Bartoska, said she was moved to be celebrated in the Czech Republic, where her international career first took off with the 2012 shoot of “A Royal Affair.”

Oh Seok-geun, director of Busan International Film Festival’s industry platform, Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM), has resigned from his post, the latest in a string of resignations to rock the festival. 

This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) will close with the UK premiere of British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali’s well-received Sundance pic Fremont.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Busan International Film Festival has apologized for its mishandling of the resignation of its executive director Huh Moon-young and related sexual harassment allegations. “We sincerely apologize over the sexual harassment case that occurred in the workplace,” BIFF said in a Korean-language statement on Thursday. (A festival spokesperson said that an English-language statement, along with an update, will be issued in the coming days.) Huh has publicly denied the allegations, though he has not replied to email and telephone requests for comment by Variety.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Mother of all Lies, a docu-drama film that probes the secrets of Morocco’s 1981 Bread Riots, was Sunday named the best picture at the Sydney Film Festival. The jury, headed by Anurag Kashyap, called the Asmae El Moudir-directed film “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous.” It presented the A$60,000 ($41,100) cash prize film ahead at the State Theatre ahead of the Australian premiere screening of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” The film, which uses doll-like figurines, recently premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it earned the section’s best director prize. “Juxtaposing evidence from barely existent public materials with private family memory, this film reconstructs the history of the state, the family and the individual, in three distinct levels,” said the jury of Kashyap, actor Mia Wasikowska (Australia), film curator and journalist Dorothee Wenner (Germany), writer and director Larissa Behrendt (Australia) and filmmaker Visakesa Chandrasekaram (Australia – Sri Lanka).

France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival has unveiled the prize winners of its biggest edition to date, running from June 11 to 17.

Christopher Vourlias Romanian filmmaker Cosmin Nicolae’s “Pyrrhic,” a feature debut about an army veteran sent into a downward spiral after returning home from Afghanistan, took home the top prize Friday at the Transilvania Pitch Stop, the co-production forum of the Transilvania Film Festival. The Chainsaw Europe Post-Production Award comes with €25,000 ($27,400) in post-production services for the winning project. Nicolae’s war drama follows a veteran returning to her hometown on the Black Sea coast, where a harrowing discovery jeopardizes the process of coming to terms with her traumas and with a drifting society. The film is produced by Velvet Moraru of Bucharest-based Icon Production.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “Cypher,” a drama about the astronomical rise of rapper Tierra Whack, and “A Strange Path,” which follows a young filmmaker who returns to his country of Brazil during the pandemic to reconnect with his father, won the top prizes for U.S. narrative feature and international narrative feature, respectively, at this year’s Tribeca Festival. “Between the Rains,” a film that captures the Turkana-Ngaremara community as they contend with prolonged drought, took home the award for documentary feature. The festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name in 2021, hosts more than 600 events across New York City and hands out awards in categories including short film, audio storytelling and games. This year’s edition ends on June 18.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival’s Eastern Promises industry platform has unveiled 27 film projects that will be showcased during its Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch and First Cut+ Works in Progress presentations. The most promising projects, selected by international juries, will receive awards with a total value of 115,000 EUR.  The showcasing of projects to industry professionals will take place in Karlovy Vary, during this year’s KVIFF Industry Days on July 3 (Works in Progress and Works in Development – Feature Launch) and July 4 (First Cut+ Works in Progress). For Works in Progress, 11 fiction and documentary feature films in the late stage of production or post-production from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa have been selected.

Naman Ramachandran The world premiere of Scottish writer-director Johnny Barrington‘s debut feature “Silent Roar” will open the 2023 Edinburgh International Film Festival on Aug. 18. Billed as a “teenage tale of surfing, sex and hellfire” set in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the film stars emerging actor Louis McCartney as Dondo, a young surfer struggling to accept his father’s recent disappearance at sea. Caught up in grief, he is brought to his senses by rebellious crush Sas (Ella Lily Hyland), a high achiever who dreams of escaping the island. When an oddly-behaved new minister arrives on the island, Dondo begins to have cosmic visions. The film is produced by Scottish producer Chris Young (“The Inbetweeners Movie”) and was made with the participation of Screen Scotland, BBC Films and BFI. MK2 Films is handling sales.

Gabrielle Union steps out in a studded mini dress from Prada for the premiere of her new movie, The Perfect Find!

This year’s scaled-down, “special one-year iteration” of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) will open on August 18 with the world premiere of Silent Roar, the debut feature from Scottish writer and director Johnny Barrington.

Ewan McGregor and Alicia Vikander will receive the President’s Award at the 57th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, KVIFF organizers announced on Tuesday.Both performers will attend the opening weekend of the festival, which begins on June 30 and runs through July 8 in the spa town west of Prague.Previously, the festival announced that Russell Crowe would receive the Crystal Globe Award and perform with his band on opening night, giving KVIFF an unusual three honorees on its opening weekend (with others to potentially be announced later).McGregor will be in Karlovy Vary for a screening of “You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder,” a drama from director Emma Westenberg in which he plays a former addict who drives his estranged daughter to rehab after she has an overdose. The actor co-stars with his real-life daughter, Clara McGregor, who also served as one of the producers on the film.Vikander will be there with “Firebrand,” a Karim Ainouz film which premiered in Cannes.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and Swedish actor Alicia Vikander will be honored at the 57th Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where they will receive the President’s Award, and present their latest films. The festival will open with “Firebrand,” in which Vikander has the leading role of Katherine Parr. McGregor will present “You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder,” in which he stars alongside his daughter Clara McGregor. McGregor’s role in Danny Boyle’s dark comedy “Shallow Grave” (1994) earned him an Empire Award for best British actor, and their next joint film, “Trainspotting” (1996), was an international sensation. McGregor and Boyle teamed up again for the 1997 romantic comedy “A Life Less Ordinary,” in which McGregor appeared alongside Cameron Diaz.

Naman Ramachandran International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has appointed former BFI London Film Festival director Clare Stewart to the position of managing director, taking over from Marjan van der Haar. Stewart was most recently interim CEO at Sheffield DocFest and commences in the role at IFFR on June 21. IFFR has a dual leadership structure where the managing director and festival director oversee the commercial and creative elements of the organization respectively, working in partnership. Stewart previously consulted with the IFFR board of directors in 2021 in its first phase of re-evaluation prior to her joining DocFest, with a focus on the IFFR program structure and content strategy.