‘Jack’s Drive’ Director Susana Nobre talks about Berlinale Forum title ‘Cidade Rabat’

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Asian premiere of Soi Cheang’s “Mad Fate” is just one of three locally-produced movies that have been set as the opening and closing titles of the upcoming Hong Kong International Film Festival. “Mad Fate” is joined in the festival opening slot on March 30 by “Elegies,” Ann Hui’s documentary portrayal of the topography of contemporary local poetry, which will have its world premiere. The closing film, another world premiere, is “Vital Sign,” an affecting drama directed by Cheuk Wan-chi and starring Louis Koo, Yau Hawk-sau, and Angela Yuen, which will wrap up proceedings on 10 April. In total, the festival has programmed some 200 films from 64 countries and territories. These include nine world premieres, six international premieres, and 67 Asian premieres.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based Alpha Violet has posted fresh sales on Mexican director Lila Avilés’s family drama Tótem, which world premiered in competition at the Berlinale to acclaim in February.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sculptor turned director Wu Lang made a splash at the Berlin Film Festival with his debut feature “Absence” playing in the festival’s showcase Encounters section. With a high-profile cast headed by Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud”) and Li Meng (“The Bad Kids,” “The Guillotines”) “Absence” is an art-house romance that uses skyscapes and urban landscapes as metaphors for inner feelings. The seduction starts with a man’s return to Hainan Island after ten years in jail and ends with a flock of sheep in an abandoned construction site. Wu: Shooting the first short film for me had two purposes. First, making a film is not easy in terms of financing and finding coproducers. So, first I wanted to make a short in order to get myself started.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor To director Mira Fornay, there are no three things more important in life than trees, water and children. And with “She-Hero,” playing as part of the Generation strand at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, the Slovakian filmmaker gathers all three in telling the story of Romy (Rozmarína Willems), a young girl who embarks on a grand forest adventure in search of her lost budgie, Mimi. Fornay, who won the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam Tiger Award in 2013 with her sophomore feature “My Dog Killer,” did not originally set out to make a children’s film, but was fascinated by the natural charisma of Willems. “I already knew Romy and she is immensely photogenic, but I didn’t know if she could act as well. So I tried working with her back when she was six, and she was just amazing. When COVID hit, I realized I had to shoot quickly otherwise she would grow. This is why I wrote a story for her.”

Jake Paul is set to feature on the Piers Morgan show on Thursday ahead of his grudge match with rival Tommy Fury this weekend. The two have been in talks to fight for over 18 months, and after two arranged bouts fell through, they finally look set to meet with both men now in Saudi Arabia. Fury first pulled out of a 2021 bout after reportedly struggling with cracked ribs and a chest infection, before not being able to make the second fight the following year after not being able to secure an ESTA to travel to the United States.

Like many of his other films, João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants began with an image from his subconscious. He imagined a tiny house attached to a cliff, and the ensuing animation and story excited his producer Bruno Caetano. The short follows a father and son living in a house attached to the side of a mountain. The pair freezes ice at their home and parachutes down to the valley below to sell their wares. While animated digitally, the artistic style emulates a hand-drawn pencil on paper look with bold shadows and a limited color palette that contrasts the warm colors of humanity with the cold, harsh colors of the outside world.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

Liza Foreman ZDF Studios has signed a deal to distribute the second season of the remake of the iconic Spanish horror series “Stories to Stay Awake” (“Historias Para No Dormir”). The series is a reboot of the classic series created by Spain’s Chicho Ibáñez Serrador in the 1960s which proved a milestone in Spanish horror, introducing Spain to classic tales from Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe,   The deal sees ZDF Studios taking distribution rights to “Stories” in all territories outside Spain, Portugal, Italy and Latin America, which will be handled by Paramount Global Content Distribution. ZDF operated in the same capacity for the first season.

Israeli director Guy Nattiv has defended his casting of non-Jewish actress Helen Mirren as iconic Israeli Prime minister Golda Meir in his biopic Golda, which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday.

Mark Schilling Japan Correspondent One of Japan’s most commercially successful and highly acclaimed animators, Shinkai Makoto has been called a successor to anime titan Miyazaki Hayao. Known for his mix of photo-realistic visuals and gorgeously realized fantasies, Shinkai surpassed the master when his 2016 smash “Your Name” became the highest-earning Japanese film of all time worldwide, beating Miyazaki’s 2001 “Spirited Away.” (That record was later broken by the 2020 anime sensation “Demon Slayer.”) His latest film, “Suzume,” about a teen girl’s quest to halt an apocalypse triggered by the opening of magical doors all over Japan, is also the first Japanese animated feature to screen in the Berlin competition since “Spirited Away” in 2002. Variety sat down with Shinkai to hear his views on his own work and the state of the anime industry.

As the 73rd Berlin Film Festival rolls into its first weekend, one of the buzziest titles on the ground is the taut political thriller Reality, starring Euphoria and White Lotus breakout Sydney Sweeney.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski (“Passages,” ”Undine”), is “certainly a dream come true.” But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.  A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.  

Shayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade. Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books. The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau.

Colm Bairéad’s appearance at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees event marks a year since his film The Quiet Girl first debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. A dual release in the UK and Ireland followed in May, and a slow international rollout has kept the director busy ever since. Indeed, as the film’s Oscar campaign enters the final stretch, The Quiet Girl is only now going wide across America: not bad going for a film with no stars that’s shot almost entirely in Irish, a language spoken by fewer than 2 million people worldwide.

Naman Ramachandran “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney communicated with the real-life Reality Winner to portray her in Tina Satter’s “Reality,” which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival. The film, which contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of an FBI audio recording, follows a tense 90 minutes in the life of whistleblower Winner as the FBI interrogate at her home in 2017. Winner, a former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, was sentenced to five years in prison after she leaked an intelligence report to the media. “I had the honor and privilege to be able actually communicate with Reality. I was able to Zoom with her — Tina connected us — and I would text her throughout the process,” Sweeney told a press conference at Berlin on Saturday.

Callum McLennan Making its world premiere in the Generation Kplus program at the Berlin Film Festival on Feb. 19, “L’Amour du monde” (“Longing for the World”) is the feature debut from filmmaker Jenna Hasse.  Latido Films manage international sales and will be looking to add to their haul from the previous two years at Berlinale, having won with Fred Baillif’s “The Fam,” in 2021 and with Clare Weiskopf & and Nicolas van Hamelryck’s “Alis,”  in 2022.  Produced by Langfilm (“The Mountain,” “Alpine Fire,” a classic Swiss production house, the film has secured distribution with Mindjazz Pictures in Germany giving it momentum coming into its festival bow.

Jessica Kiang It is not unprecedented to have a Sundance-premiering film play in the Berlinale competition. Yet director Celine Song’s journey with “Past Lives,” which received raves in Park City and makes its international bow in Berlin, feels like a fresh phenomenon. She’s a first-time filmmaker. Her movie has no big names. And it is unapologetically personal. Breakthrough status suits Song, who told Variety, “Everything I do, I have to believe it is the first time I’m doing that kind of thing.” Her recent resumé bears that out: Since her Off Broadway play “Endlings” closed early due to the pandemic, she has written for Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time” and mounted a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” entirely within the Sims 4 universe on Twitch. 

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Filmax has boarded “The Sleeping Woman,” the new film from Spain’s Laura Alvea, who helmed episodes of Netflix hit series “The Snow Girl,” which has run up over 100 million global views in three weeks. Filmax will present first images of the film, along with a promo, at Berlin’s European Film Market. A horror thriller with supernatural elements, “The Sleeping Woman” turns on Ana (Almudena Amor), a nursing assistant who starts to feel an attraction towards Agustin (Javier Rey), the husband of the woman in a coma whom she’s caring for.  It won’t be long before Ana begins to get harassed by strange, paranormal phenomena that seem to be trying to kick her out of the house and separate her from Agustin.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Lars Kraume, who explores Germany’s 19th-century, bloody colonization of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) in his latest work, “Measures of Men,” has lined up his next project, a feature film inspired by a California prison program that brings together young inmates with aging prisoners suffering from dementia. Developed at the California Men’s Colony State Prison in San Luis Obispo, the Gold Coat program selects inmates, known as Gold Coats, to assist severely cognitively impaired inmates. Kraume’s story is set in a Berlin prison with a multi-ethnic population, where a young man signs up for the program in an effort to get early parole only to realize that he has first the first time in his life started to love and care for someone.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky and the production team behind his Oscar-shortlisted feature “Gunda” will follow up with the second instalment in his “Empathy Trilogy.” AC Independent will handle the North America sale and Cinephil will be selling international rights. They will be kicking off sales this week at the European Film Market in Berlin. The new film focuses on the health of the oceans and the effects of industrial fisheries. The “Empathy Trilogy,” of which “Gunda” formed the first part, looks at the sentience of non-human animals.