City Aleppo Showbiz Latest News and Updates

The Strangers’ Case from American filmmaker Brandt Andersen and starring French actor Omar Sy will make its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. 

EXCLUSIVE: Last month, when Brandt Andersen’s debut feature film The Strangers’ Case won the Amnesty International Film Award at Berlinale, it marked the recognition of a long and impassioned journey for the writer, director and long-time producer as he sought to marry film with his extensive activism background. 

EXCLUSIVE: Beloved French actor Omar Sy stars in the debut feature from longtime producer Brandt Andersen in The Strangers’ Case, a searing and international ensemble that is world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. Watch an exclusive clip above.

Christopher Vourlias Following on the heels of his Oscar-shortlisted “Refugee,” veteran U.S. producer Brandt Andersen (“Everest,” “Lone Survivor”) makes his feature directorial debut with “The Strangers’ Case,” a kaleidoscopic and deeply felt portrait of the refugee crisis that world premieres Feb. 23 as a Berlinale Special Gala.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Chime,” a mid-length movie by leading Japanese director Kurosawa Kiyoshi, is among three late additions to the Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale Special section. The two others are “August My Heaven,” another mid-length picture form Japan, directed by Kudo Riho, and “The Strangers’ Case,” a full-length feature directed by Brandt Andersen which will play as a Berlinale Special Gala presentation. In “Chime” Tashiro, a student at a culinary school, hears voices in his head.

“Imagine yourself operating on a patient when you are being attacked by barrel bombs and missiles. Your hands are shaking, the hospital is shaking, soil could go in the patient’s wounds while you are operating and then you have to wait a while until the strike stops and carry on.”

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Discovery-owned Eurosport has acquired streaming rights in 54 countries to Olympic refugee documentary “We Dare to Dream” by Waad Al-Kateab, the Oscar-nominated Syrian director of “For Sama.” “We Dare to Dream” is the story of the refugee Olympic team that competed at the 2020 games in Tokyo, which featured stateless athletes from Iran, Syria, South Sudan and Cameroon who swim, run and fight their way to safety in host nations across the world. It’s told through the personal prism of Al-Kateab while she is coming to terms with the reality that she can never return to Aleppo, where she shot “For Sama.” The doc premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and had an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run at New York City’s IFC Center in October.

Addie Morfoot Contributor John Legend is lending his voice to “We Dare to Dream,” a documentary about the refugee Olympic team at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Legend will write, compose and record “Don’t Need to Sleep,” an original song for the docu, which will open theatrically Oct. 20 at New York’s IFC Center.

Netherlands photographer and director Anton Corbijn has been named as president of the main feature film jury for the upcoming Zurich Film Festival.

Ben Croll Winner of the audience award and prize for best creation at this year’s Monte-Carlo Television Festival, six-part drama “The Seed” mixes Scandi-noir, ecological concerns and corridors-of-power intrigue into a tense geopolitical thriller that turns around the most elemental of concerns. “Beneath all the thriller convention we explore this question of who feeds the world,” says show creator Christian Jeltsch. “Because whoever feeds the world has a hold on political power, and today only three companies supply us all.” The seeds (ahem) of the idea were planted years ago, when Jeltsch read about mercenaries destroying a seed vault in Aleppo and connected the idea to the very real Svalbard Global Seed Vault just off the North Pole. The wheels began turning, the seeds took to sprouting, and soon the show-writer had a narrative full of international intrigue that begins when a young German activist goes missing on the Norwegian northern archipelago.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia is the latest high-net-worth individual to get involved in the documentary business. As a producer on Waad Al-Kateab’s “We Dare to Dream,” about the refugee Olympic team at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Gebbia not only helped fund the project, he also played an active role in the film’s pre-production, production, and edit. “We Dare to Dream” is Al-Kateab’s second feature docu. In her first film, “For Sama,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, the Syrian director used her camera to capture her daily life during the siege of Aleppo.Gebbia produced “We Dare to Dream” alongside Violet Films’ Joanna Natasegara (“Virunga”) and Abigail Anketell-Jones (“The Edge of Democracy”) and XTR’s Bryn Mooser and Kathryn Everett. Angelina Jolie recently signed on as an executive producer on the project. Gebbia joins fellow philanthropists Laurene Powell Jobs (Concordia Studio), Jeff Skoll (Participant Media) and Jim Swartz (Impact Partners) in the docu investment business.

If you like the MEN's Friday Pub Quiz, you'll like this week's Lazy Sunday Quiz half as much.

Gwyneth Paltrow on a ski slope recalled hearing a “blood-curdling scream” moments before the 2016 incident. Terry Sanderson, who is suing the Hollywood star, took the stand on Monday 27 January, adding he thought somebody “was seriously out of control” on the slopes of the Deer Valley resort in Utah.

Turkey and Syria have been hit by two more huge earthquakes just two weeks after the border between the countries suffered its last devastating tremor.

Venezuela, without a single break, earning an entry in the Guinness World Records.Throughout his career, Fakhri preserved and popularized traditional forms of Arab singing and music, including Quddud Halabiya, native to his hometown Aleppo.Fakhri’s voice was so powerful and distinct, he once told his interviewers that his family recognized it when he was a baby.“I started singing when I was born,” he once told an interviewer for Egyptian TV CBC.

In the new Tom Clancy adaptation, “Without Remorse,” Michael B. Jordan is a Navy SEAL about to trade military life for private security when his pregnant wife (Lauren London) is executed in their Washington D.C.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” is a lively formulaic action-hero origin story, dunked in combat grunge, that demonstrates how a resourceful lead actor can bend and heighten the meaning of a commercial thriller. In the opening sequence, which looks like an outtake from “Zero Dark Thirty” shot in the rubble of “Full Metal Jacket,” John Kelly (Michael B.

Andreas Wiseman International EditorOlivia Munn (X-Men Apocalypse) is attached to play the lead in feature drama Aleppo, the story of a Syrian refugee and a UN journalist (Munn), brought together by tragedy and their escape from Syria.Currently in pre-production, the film from LA-based producer MiLu Entertainment will be directed by Brazilian filmmaker David Schurmann from an original script by Beto Dantas.Attached crew include Oscar-wining art director/set decorator Brigitte Broch (Moulin

After working to help casualties in the besieged city of Aleppo, Dr Ahmad Alomar has learnt how to cope well in a crisis.

Feras Fayyad would have been forgiven for not wanting to return to Syria.After winning a Sundance grand jury prize and an Oscar nomination for his 2017 feature doc, Last Men in Aleppo, which follows the work of Syria's White Helmets volunteer force, the filmmaker was warned in no uncertain terms that his success would make him a more visible target for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his murderous regime.Having already been arrested and tortured twice by Syrian troops in 2011, Fayyad had

By Matthew Carey

Feras Fayyad, the two-time Academy Award nominee behind Last Men in Aleppo and The Cave, has yet to be able to secure an extended U.S. visa —despite his recent Oscar nomination for best documentary and multiple other awards.The Cave, distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films in the U.S., has earned the Syrian filmmaker universal acclaim, so has visa struggles have not gone unnoticed.

By Peter White, Diane Gordon