Iranian director Jafar Panahi remains behind bars in Tehran but his cinema continues to travel.
20.09.2022 - 16:03 / variety.com
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20. Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.
In the Retrospective section, IDFA presents all seven films directed by Poitras from 2003 to today. Alongside her best-known titles, the program includes lesser-screened films such as “Risk,” the portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and her first feature, “Flag Wars,” a cinéma vérité film on the gentrification of a working-class African American neighborhood. The festival will also hold a public master talk with Poitras and IDFA’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia in Amsterdam’s historic Pathé Tuschinski cinema. IDFA also plans two Focus programs, which look at particular themes. The program titled Around Masculinity “interrogates the problematic social construct that is masculinity from a variety of perspectives.” The section includes Les Blank’s “Burden of Dreams,” the Maysles Brothers’ “Meet Marlon Brando,”
Iranian director Jafar Panahi remains behind bars in Tehran but his cinema continues to travel.
Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Music Box Films has acquired U.S. rights to “Full Time,” Eric Gravel’s visceral social thriller which is one of the five finalists for France’s official submission to the 95th Academy Awards. Represented in international markets by Be For Films, “Full Time” world premiered at last year’s Venice festival in the Horizons sections and won a pair of awards for Laure Calamy (“Call My Agent!”) and Gravel. The critically acclaimed film went on to made its U.S. debut at New Directors/New Films. Music Box Films will release “Full Time” in cinemas and on home entertainment platforms in 2023.
Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras will be guest of honor at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 9 to 20.
The People’s Choice Award from the just wrapped 2022 Toronto International Film Festival has gone to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. First Runner Up is Canada’s own Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. And Second Runner Up was Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The Documentary Award went to Black Ice, and the Midnight Madness winner was Weird: The Al Yankovich Story .
Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Super, the boutique distribution label from Neon, has acquired U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” after it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize in Venice along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. “Saint Omer” was recently shortlisted for France’s submission to the Academy Awards and will premiere at the New York Film Festival and play the BFI London Festival. Neon plans a theatrical release. “Saint Omer” is Diop’s debut fiction feature, which she co-wrote with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, and it stars Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville and Aurélia Petit. Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral of Srab Films produced alongside Arte France Cinéma and Pictanovo Hauts-de-France.
Neon’s boutique label Super has secured U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s acclaimed drama Saint Omer, following its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals today for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history.
Adam Benzine Guest Contributor Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras slammed the heads of the Venice and Toronto film festivals for “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by programming glossy documentaries from the Clinton family. Her comments come as TIFF this week hosted the Canadian premiere of Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a documentary about the artist and activist Nan Goldin, and just days after the film won Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. It is the rare doc to land slots at the superfecta of Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, and Poitras said she thought “long and hard” about whether or not to voice criticism at the same venues feting her latest work. Nevertheless, she said, “journalists need to ask hard questions.”
K.J. Yossman After triumphing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the U.K. and Irish rights to Eric Gravel’s race-against-time social drama “Full Time” (À plein temps) have been snapped up by Parkland Entertainment. It is set to be released in the U.K. and Ireland in early 2023. The film, which stars “Call My Agent’s” Laure Calamy, had its world premiere at last year’s festival in the Orizzonti section before going on to win prizes for both Calamy, for best actress, and Gravel, for best director. In “Full Time,” Calamy stars as Julie, a maid in a luxury Parisian hotel while simultaneously carting for her two children in the French countryside. One day, she finally gets a break when she is offered an interview for a long-hoped for job. But, as luck would have it, the interview is on the same day as a national strike, which shuts down the city’s transport.
For critics and audiences alike, the Venice Film Festival is an important first look at the films that will shape the award season and year-end conversations. That puts added emphasis on the Venice Film Festival awards – including the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize – as the first step towards canon-building for the rest of the year.
Ben Croll Venice’s red carpet became a stage for quiet protest on Friday, as festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore, among many more, held a somber walk-out to stand in solidarity with imprisoned filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Traffic on the red carpet flowed normally as attendees made their way into Venice’s Palazzo del Cinema for the world premiere of Panahi’s latest film, “No Bears.” And then, at 4:30 pm sharp, the doors to the theater swung open and a sea of people filed out. Moore stood with a delegation that also included fellow juror Audrey Diwan, Horizons jury president Isabel Coixet, and filmmakers Laura Bispuri and Sally Potter.
Brad Pitt is ready to make his way home.
Neon snapped up theatrical rights on Aug. 18 prior to the documentary’s world premiere at Venice Film Festival.
HBO Documentary Films has acquired U.S. television and streaming rights to Oscar winner Laura Poitras’s film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and sneak preview at Telluride.
Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern hit the red carpet together for the premiere of their new movie, The Son, during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Wednesday (September 7) in Venice, Italy.
Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern devastated the Venice Film Festival with the world premiere of Florian Zeller’s “The Son,” which earned a 10-minute standing ovation. Jackman appeared visibly moved during the film’s reception, as did the audience. Jackman hugged his young co-star Zen McGrath amid the ovation. The film, which centers on a gut-wrenching family tragedy, led to audible gasps from viewers during one dramatic scene. Based on this rapturous reception, Zeller might be back for more Oscar glory with “The Son.”“The Son” centers on “a family as it falls apart and tries to come back together again,” according to Sony Pictures Classics’ official synopsis. Jackman stars as a father whose 17-year-old son comes to live with him after deciding he can no longer stay with his mother (Dern) years after his parents’ divorce. Jackson’s character, Peter, has a new partner, Kirby’s Beth. As Peter overextends himself to give his son a better life.
On an abnormally hot summer day in Oslo, a strange electric field surrounds the city as a collective migraine spreads across town. TVs, lightbulbs, and electronics go haywire, the chaos reaching a debilitating crescendo when suddenly, it’s over.
Neon has acquired North American and UK rights to the horror-drama Handling the Undead, marking the narrative feature debut of Thea Hvistendahl, who previously directed the documentary Adjø Montebello and several short films, including the SXSW Grand Jury Award-nominated Virgins4lyfe. The project reteams the distributor with Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, who starred in its Oscar-nominated romantic drama The Worst Person in the World, directed by Joachim Trier.
Writer/director Florian Zeller cannot manage to reproduce the magic of “The Father” with his latest film, “The Son.” This latest screen adaptation of Zeller’s trilogy of stage plays about families falling apart, co-written with Englishman Christopher Hampton, expands its setting outside the limited confines of a single apartment – yet somehow manages to feel less cinematic. Without a clever conceit to elevate the material, this domestic drama is a mostly middling piece of maudlin manipulation.