Life After Peak TV, Cosy Crime & Searching For Silver Linings: Television Industry Takes Stock As Berlinale Series Market Sessions Kick Off

Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who last week picked up the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, has said he has received death threats and had to cancel his flight home after German officials and Israeli media described his acceptance speech as “anti-Semitic”.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Playmaker has closed a raft of pre-sales deals on “Ploey 2 – The Legend of the Winds,” which was presented to international buyers for the first time at the European Film Market this month. The Playmaker screened an exclusive first-look teaser at its booth in Berlin as well as a promo for attending buyers.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Berlin Film Festival said Monday that it has filed criminal charges following the hacking of its Panorama section’s Instagram social media site, which was used to post anti-Semitic messages. After a politically charged edition, festival organizers also attempted to distance the Berlinale management from the stances taken by some of the awards winners at Saturday’s closing ceremony. The organizers said that on Sunday, the day after the festival concluded, “The Instagram channel of the Berlinale Panorama section was briefly hacked and anti-Semitic image-text posts about the Middle East war with the Berlinale logo were posted on the channel.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Occult drama-thriller “Exhuma,” dominated the South Korea box office in its opening weekend with a scarily good debut approaching $17 million. The film, about two shaman, a feng shui master and a mortician who attempt to undo the mysterious events happening to a U.S.-based Korean family, grabbed $14.5 million between Friday and Sunday, representing a 77% share of the overall box office market. Including the earnings since its Wednesday debut, the film earned $16.8 million in its full opening session, according to data from Kobis, the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council (Kofic).

Guy Lodge Film Critic The Berlin Film Festival drew to a close with tonight’s awards ceremony, with French-Senegalese director Mati Diop taking the Golden Bear for her documentary “Dahomey.” Full report to come; full list of winners below.

Berlin’s European Film Market (EFM) has posted a record of number of visitors for its 2024 edition, with more than 12,000 professionals from 143 countries attending this year.

Martin Scorsese was presented with the Berlin Film Festival’s Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement on Tuesday evening, with old friend German director Wim Wenders paying a warm personal tribute to the director.

Martin Scorsese revealed he is still mulling how to tackle the life of Jesus on the big screen, at a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival where he will receive its honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday evening.

Stockport is being recognised for its nightlife after receiving a prestigious award.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Playtime has had a busy EFM, where it’s locked a raft of major deals on “The Devil’s Bath,” a period psychological thriller in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. “The Devil’s Bath” is directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the Austrian filmmaking duo behind “Goodnight Mommy.” Set in rural Austria in 1750, “The Devil’s Bath” stars Anja Plaschg, the up-and-coming singer and composer known as Soap & Skin. Plaschg plays Agnes, a young married woman who feels oppressed in her husband’s world, which is devoid of emotions and limited to chores and expectations.

Alex Ritman It’s been five years since “Chernobyl,” HBO’s phenomenally successful miniseries about the catastrophic 1986 disaster and a show that garnered both widespread acclaim and a whole host of Emmys, Golden Globes and BAFTA TV awards. Its creator Craig Mazin has since brought us zombies galore in the video game adaptation “The Last of Us,” but now “Chernobyl’s” BAFTA and Emmy-winning director Johan Renck is about to unleash his next project.

Christopher Vourlias Africa’s growing screen industries are making their mark on the global stage, with three titles in the main competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, but how to unlock the continent’s still-untapped potential was a question on the minds of many at a conference hosted on Saturday by the European Film Market. A partnership between EFM and Prudence Kolong’s Stockholm-based consulting firm Yanibes, AfroBerlin was launched to give a platform to filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora and “to find a place where they can share stories and experiences and be heard,” said Kolong, who also organizes the Cannes Film Festival’s AfroCannes industry showcase.

There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.

EXCLUSIVE: Urban Sales has unveiled key deals for Mascha Halberstad’s CGI animation Fox And Hare Save The Forest ahead of its world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s young audience-focused Generation Kplus sidebar this weekend.

Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry joined filmmaker Julia von Heinz for a press conference for new tragic comedy Treasure, which debuts this weekend in the Special Gala section at the Berlin Film Festival.

Jessica Kiang It’s ironic that memory is the central theme of Piero Messina‘s Berlin Competition title “Another End,” when so many of its twists and turns are so directly lifted from other films that it feels like you’ve seen them before; even watching it for the first time feels like rewatching. But if that makes this elegiac literalization of the timeless theme of “what is grief but love persevering?” a rather edgeless experience it’s not a wholly unpleasant one.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Gael García Bernal and Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) star as lovers caught in an unusual bind in Italian director Piero Messina’s unconventional sci-fi film “Another End,” which is competing in Berlin. Set in a near-future when a new technology exists that can put the consciousness of a dead person back into a living body in an attempt to ease the grief of separation, the English-language film sees Bernal play Sal, a man who loses his wife. Reinsve plays Zoe, the woman who rents her body for the implantation of Bernal’s wife’s consciousness.

Christopher Vourlias The Russian invasion of Ukraine will mark its second somber anniversary next week, though in recent months the conflict has been pushed from the headlines in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. But with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy arriving in the German capital on Friday in an effort to shore up flagging European support for his country’s defense, Ukrainian film professionals at the Berlin Film Festival are determined not to quietly disappear from the global stage.

Ellise Shafer Sebastian Stan corrected a journalist at the Berlin Film Festival press conference for his new film, the psychological thriller “A Different Man,” when they used insensitive language to describe a character with facial disfigurement. The film follows Edward (Stan), who, after undergoing facial surgery, becomes fixated on another man playing him in a stage production based on his former life.

Iranian filmmakers Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam’s new feature My Favourite Cake world premieres at the Berlinale on Friday but the directors are not at the festival having been slapped with a travel ban by Iran’s authoritarian Islamic Republic regime.