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AFI Fest marks the end of the Fall film festival circuit before the industry shifts gears toward Awards season. And while that means there are plenty of titles at the Hollywood-set festival premiered elsewhere earlier in the year, it still offers some premieres of its own.

Oscar winner Steve McQueen says he believes that, while the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Middle East has seen a rise in antisemitism across Europe and the US, he believes it has always been there, but that “people have been deaf to it.”

As we welcome in the New Year, we can reveal our annual (non-exhaustive) list of U.S. and international movies we think could grace the festival circuit in 2024. We’ve stuck to our criteria that the project must already be in production and have not already been announced for a festival. More than 70% of our selections last year went on to debut at a major festival. Those that didn’t were largely delayed by the strike or are still in post-production. If the titles below make the cut, it will be a thrilling year on the festival circuit once again.

“12 Years A Slave” filmmaker Steve McQueen didn’t set out to make back-to-back WWII movies, his upcoming WWII/Amsterdam doc, “Occupied City” which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, and his Apple TV+ WWII drama “Blitz,” but it just ended up happening that way. “You plant seeds, and some come to fruition, and others don’t,” he told Variety earlier this year.

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam is beginning to fill out its lineup leading up to IDFA’s 36th edition next month. The largest all-documentary festival in the world today announced selections for the Competition for Short Documentary and the IDFA Competition for Youth Documentary, along with the films selected for the Best of Fests section and the “Signed” section, a new addition to the IDFA program. 

Director Steve McQueen said his unusual four-hour Holocaust documentary shot in Amsterdam is rooted in his strong sense that “the past is present” in physical manifestations all around us, as well as a reminder to stay vigilant.

“A lot of very impressive people have led this festival and what connects them is a love for movies and culture and what that can achieve,” Kristy Matheson told Deadline of her new job as Director of the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Venice Gap-Financing Market is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year with record-breaking attendance and impressive new figures on the projects that the core component of Venice’s industry side has helped bring to the big screen. All told, over the span of a decade, “We have had 370 films (including immersive) from 70 countries and 80% of them have been completed within six months after the festival,” says Pascal Diot who heads the Venice Production Bridge, as the Lido’s market is known.

Jeymes Samuel’s sophomore feature The Book of Clarence, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Boy and the Heron by Hayao Miyazaki are among the titles that have been announced within the full lineup of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) 67th London Film Festival. Scroll down for the full list.

Naman Ramachandran The 67th BFI London Film Festival has unveiled its full lineup, which includes galas and special presentations of films by contemporary masters. As previously announced, Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” will open the festival and Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya’s “The Kitchen” will close it.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter New York Film Festival will serve as the world premiere of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s genre-defying series “The Curse,” led by Emma Stone; and Garth Davis’s science-fiction drama “Foe,” starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. They will screen as part of Spotlight, which Film at Lincoln Center describes as a selection of “significant and surprising films, one-of-a-kind presentations including adventurous portraits of creative minds, one-night only events with live musical accompaniment, bold short films by acclaimed directors, and probing documentaries.” As previously announced, Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” will hold its North American premiere on Oct.

Garth Davis’s science-fiction sci-fi drama Foe, directed by Garth Davis (Lion) and starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival.

New Regency said today it’s closed a $175 million term loan from global investment firm Carlyle Group, providing new capital for the indie to scale up production. The loan is a refinancing and upsize of an existing Carlyle facility.

Documentary fans might be forgiven for nurturing a dream – that Cannes would follow the recent example of Venice and Berlin and award its top prize to a nonfiction film. Complete the documentary Triple Crown – the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear and the Palme d’or.

Cannes Film Festival features an unusually robust selection of documentaries, two in the Main Competition alone, where nonfiction films almost never appear. And if the ones that have screened in the festival’s first three days have anything in common, it’s scale.

Somewhere in the third hour of Steve McQueen’s documentary “Occupied City,” the camera slowly dollies left over a list of names in glowing green print on a black background, enumerating the thousands of Jews deported from Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. A moment of silence in the audio mix announces this as an important shot, an occasion to consider the enormity of the loss that this four-and-a-half-hour film itemizes with near-comprehensive diligence.

The Cannes Film Festival kicked off this year with opening-night movie Jeanne du Barry, with Deadline’s on the ground to watch all the key films. Here is a compilation of our reviews from the fest, which last year saw Ruben Östland’s Triangle of Sadness win the coveted Palme d’Or on its way to an Oscar Best Picture nomination.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude (the 1971 IRA prison hunger strike in “Hunger,” the complex horrors of slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” the collision of gritty city politics and feminine revolt in “Widows,” the epochal crackdown on West Indian immigrants in London in “Mangrove”) and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

We walk among ghosts in cities, storied urban constructs with layers of misty memories one can sense in their distinct smells, and perceive in their dated cracks and imperfections. There are hundreds of thousands of such ghosts that haunt Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary essay “Occupied City,” a 2023 Cannes premiere that is as much a hypnotizing and cumulatively disquieting cinematic artifact about the Holocaust and World War II-era Amsterdam as it is a stubbornly single-minded historical art installation.The simplest way to describe “Occupied City” would be calling it an extensive guided tour of Amsterdam’s past that uses Bianca Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” as a compass.

In cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Steve McQueen looks stressed out. He’s a few weeks into post-production on “Blitz,” his World War II drama for Apple TV+, while starting promotion on his other, long-gestating wartime project, the documentary “Occupied City.” “It’s definitely pleasurable, but this is work,” declares McQueen with the wariness of a filmmaker who’s just been plucked out of the edit suite. “Hard work is always hard work. You can’t avoid it.” The British director, who was Oscar-nominated for “12 Years a Slave,” didn’t set out to make back-to-back movies about the war, but “you plant seeds, and some come to fruition and others don’t,” he explains. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.”

As we head into the summer blockbuster season, we get inundated with franchises, the latest Marvel and ‘Fast’ movies, tentpoles, and mega films of all sorts. But thankfully, before it really starts in earnest, and we’re on to the third major superhero film of the year, we get some alternative options at the Cannes Film Festival.

Amsterdam today. Pause on a bridge and watch the Amstel River gently flow through picturesque canals. Eighty years ago, the same vista might have revealed a horror – bodies floating by of Jews who had flung themselves into the Amstel rather than face cruel death from the occupying Nazi forces.

Next month will see the Cannes Film Festival return and give us early glimpses of high-profile/awards-caliber films ahead of their official releases, and many will be premiered at the event. With that in mind, there are some interesting tidbits in a recent Screen Daily interview with Thierry Fremaux, the festival’s delegate general.

Good afternoon Insiders, Max Goldbart here penning the weekly mailer a day after Cannes revealed its long-awaited lineup. Read on for all the details and plenty more, and sign up to the International Insider here.

Stars are getting ready to walk the Croisette.

The Cannes Film Festival revealed the lineup for its 76th edition Thursday morning, and the Official Selection featured a record number of films directed by women filmmakers set to play in Competition.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” will screen out-of-competition on May 20, while James Mangold’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the final installment in the franchise begun in 1982 by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, will also screen in an out-of-competition slot.French director and actress Maïwenn will have the opening-night film with “Jeanne du Barry,” which stars Johnny Depp in his first film since his court battle with Amber Heard. And Pedro Almodovar’s short film “Strange Way of Life,” which stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, was also confirmed in advance of Thursday’s announcement.Other films screening out of competition include “The Idol,” directed by Sam Levinson and starring The Weeknd, and “Occupied City,” a film about Amsterdam from British director Steve McQueen.The Un Certain Regard section, which is typically devoted to films from less established directors, includes Australian director Warwick Thornton’s “The New Boy,” starring Cate Blanchett.Additional films are typically added to the Cannes lineup in the weeks leading up to the festival.

Occupied City” about how Amsterdam was occupied by Nazi forces between 1940-1945. That film will be released by A24 and New Regency.

EXCLUSIVE: In a highly competitive situation, Apple has landed Blitz, the sought-after new feature from Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen featuring the stories of Londoners during World War II’s Blitz, which he will write, direct and produce. The film is is set to begin filming later this year. 

World War II has always been a point in history that has fascinated filmmakers. The heroics, hardships, and horrors of war are enormous human struggles that make for riveting drama.

EXCLUSIVE: A24 and New Regency are among partners on Oscar winner Steve McQueen’s intriguing documentary Occupied City.