Palestinian Oscar Entry ‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ Secures U.S. Distribution With Women Make Movies

Pro-Palestine protests at Los Angeles and New York airports disrupted travel today on one of the busiest days of the year, leading to a combined total of more than 50 people arrested between both locations.

Ethan Shanfeld Fifty-six French stars, including Carla Bruni, Charlotte Rampling and Carole Bouquet, signed an open letter defending Gerard Depardieu, the Oscar-nominated actor who has been charged with rape and accused by more than a dozen other women of sexual assault, harassment or groping. The essay, published in the right-wing French newspaper Le Figaro, reads, in part: “We cannot remain silent in the face of the lynching targeting him, the torrent of hate being dumped on his personality” (via AP). “When Gerard Depardieu is targeted this way, it is the art [of cinema] that is being attacked.

The shortlist of 15 films set to vie for a Best International Feature FiOscar nomination has now been revealed, with only a few surprises in the mix. 

American Symphony, the Obamas-executive produced documentary about Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste, scored a remarkable hat trick today as the Oscar shortlists were revealed, but a couple of documentary icons were left on the bench.

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Top prizes were handed out by the CineGouna Platform (CGP) at the El Gouna Film Festival this week to projects in various stages of inception or completion. Winning a $15,000 prize for a project in development, “Theft of Fire” is Palestinian filmmaker Amer Shomali’s hybrid documentary, retelling the true story of an art heist “that never happened” to steal back antiquities pilfered from Palestinian lands by former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan.

Netflix has a new YA hit on its hands with My Life With The Walter Boys.

has already been renewed for a second season. Everybody try to contain yourselves.“I am beyond thrilled that My Life With the Walter Boys has been renewed for a second season,” series creator Melanie Halsall told .

Selome Hailu Netflix has renewed “My Life With the Walter Boys” for a second season. The series is based on a WattPad novel of the same name by Ali Novak, which has since been published as a book. The coming of age story that follows fifteen-year-old Manhattanite Jackie Howard (Nikki Rodriguez) after losing her family in a tragic accident.

J. Kim Murphy Filmmaker Michael Goorjian set out to create a different kind of film about Armenian nationality when developing “Amerikatsi,” the country’s submission in the international feature category for this year’s Academy Awards. Along with directing, Goorjian also stars as Charlie, an American who repatriates to Armenia after World War II — but ends up in a Soviet prison for simply wearing a tie.

There’s a lot to take in and even more to process in American-Armenian director Michael Goorjian’s ambitious period piece: What he’s tilting at here is not beyond the realms of comedy, as Armando Iannucci proved with his 2017 jet-black satire The Death of Stalin. But tone is crucial, and Amerikatsi has a waywardness that too often undermines its intent — there’s a lot that works here and so much that doesn’t. There are moments that are sensitive, thoughtful, and really quite moving — in an elegant, silent-movie way — but the framing is so dark in its humor that many viewers may never make it to them.

Lauren Jauregui and Marianne Williamson are arguing about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yesterday, we got the first poster for the upcoming comedy audaciously titled “The American Society Of Magical Negroes,” and today, the trailer has arrived. A movie that will debut at Sundance of next year, leave it to a Sundance indie to be this bold and outrageous.

Fresh off its fall festival circuit run, including its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, “The Promised Land” will finally arrive in US theaters next February. That’s plenty of time for audiences to catch up with the historical drama before it might vie for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in March.

In a clip from the documentary, Little Richard: I Am Everything, we hear the young entertainer singing an early version of what would become his signature tune, “Tutti Frutti.” But surprise! The original lyrics were different than the ones we know today: “Tutti frutti, good booty/Tutti frutti, good booty!”

Omen is the official submission from Belgium for the International Feature Oscar category and comes from multi-hyphenate interdisciplinary artist Baloji, who makes his feature directing debut. The film had its world premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section this year where it won the New Voice Prize, before going on to play myriad festivals. Utopia is the North American distributor. 

Following her film, Their Algeria, documentarian Lina Soualem returns to her family once again for an in-depth look at its rich history. With Bye Bye Tiberias, Soualem focuses on several generations of women in her family, beginning with her mother, Succession star Hiam Abbass, who, as a young woman, left her home country of Palestine for France, where she still lives today. While Their Algeria followed the story of Soualem’s grandparents who decided to divorce after 62 years, Bye Bye Tiberias looks at what it means to leave your family and culture behind and the generational thread between women.

Deadline’s Contenders Film: International award-season event launches Saturday beginning at 9 a.m. PT, the latest in our series of showcases that this time turns the focus toward global cinema via discussions with the casts and creatives of 12 movies submitted by their countries for the 2024 Academy Awards’ International Feature race.

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor “The Pianist” and “King Kong” star Adrien Brody spoke at the Red Sea Film Festival Friday about a wide variety of creative pursuits, including making music from popcorn in the 1990s. “I liked the sound of the kernels of popcorn hitting the aluminium lid of the pan and so I set my microphone up and recorded it and then I sampled it and put on some reverb,” he told the audience in Saudi Arabia. “It went pok-a-pok-a-pok.” Something of a prodigy, he was cast as a lead in a TV movie “Home at Last” when he was only 15 and later became the youngest actor to win the best male lead Oscar.

Alissa Simon Film Critic After “Their Algeria,” a well-received documentary from 2020 about the parents of her actor father Zinedine Soualem, France-born filmmaker-performer Lina Soualem turns her camera on her maternal relatives in “Bye Bye Tiberias,” in particular her mother, the Palestine-born actress Hiam Abbass. By telling their story, she hopes to reclaim and question the personal, historical and visual legacies she inherited and to answer the question “How does a woman find her place when caught between worlds?” a question that applies equally to her and her mother.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Justine Triet‘s “Anatomy of a Fall” missed out on being chosen as France’s Oscar entry, but the movie has been a critical and commercial hit — including in the U.S., where it’s become the highest-grossing specialized foreign-language release post-pandemic, according to distributor Neon. Released in the States on Oct. 13, “Anatomy of a Fall” has pulled in $3.5 million so far, putting it ahead of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” and on track to match last year’s Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” another Neon movie.