A bittersweet season. Princess Kate paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth II with a special holiday message, revealing what the late monarch loved the most about Christmas.
04.12.2022 - 02:07 / deadline.com
Pierfrancesco Favino is best known internationally for strong male character roles such as mobster Tommaso Buscetta in The Traitor, disgraced politician Bettino Craxi in Hammamet and terrorist-targeted vice-police chief Alfonso Noce in Padrenostro, for which he won Venice’s Volpi Cup for Best Actor.
In Mario Martone’s drama Nostalgia, he plays the gentler, less defined figure of Felice, a man in his 50s who returns from 40 years in the Middle East to his mysterious, layered home neighborhood in Naples to reconnect with his elderly mother and confront a past wrong.
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“What was interesting to me was this relationship with his mother and the tenderness of this man and how gentle he is. It’s quite rare to see a man’s masculinity portrayed in that way,” Favino told a Contenders International panel Saturday.
“I have to say he resembles me much more than The Traitor,” he added. “With The Traitor, I had to do a step towards something that’s really far from me. In this occasion, I could think he’s something that belongs to me quite quickly.”
A key challenge in the role for Rome-born and -based Favino was learning Neapolitan, which typically is spoken in parts of the city.
“In Italy, there’s huge respect for the Neapolitan language,” he said. “All of our playwrights come from Naples. And there’s such an incredible history of Neapolitan actors that I’ve always admired. And I was surrounded by Neapolitans, so not only did I have to learn it, but I also feared their judgment.”
Favino also studied Arabic in preparation for the role as his character has been living in the Middle East and adopted some of its customs.
“I had studied a little bit of Arabic before as I’ve always been fond of the
A bittersweet season. Princess Kate paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth II with a special holiday message, revealing what the late monarch loved the most about Christmas.
EXCLUSIVE: In October, Breaking Glass Pictures acquired Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, Italy’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar for North America, and today we have a first look at the official trailer (check it out above).
Eami means “forest” in Ayoreo. It also means “‘”world.” When director Paz Encina traveled to the land of the indigenous Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people, she found that they do not make a distinction between these things: The trees, the animals and the plants that have surrounded them for centuries are all they know and now they live in an area – the Chaco plain – that is experiencing the fastest deforestation on the planet.
Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.
Lou Yi-an’s Goddamned Asura begins with chilling smartphone footage of an expressionless young man opening fire on a busy night market. In a surprising move, it immediately rewinds to the events leading up to the shooting, introducing a core group of characters whose lives will be changed by it. Even more unexpected, though, is the film’s third act, which essentially posits a Sliding Doors-style “What if?” hypothesis.
Brazilian drama Mars One follows the Martins family, optimistic dreamers who are quietly leading their lives on the margins of a major Brazilian city following the disappointing election of a far-right extremist president. They are a lower middle-class Black family who feels the strain of its new reality as the political dust settles.
A critical hit at this year’s Berlinale, Michael Koch’s second feature A Piece of Sky is a sober relationship drama with a difference: It takes place in a picturesque Alpine idyll, with its sections interspersed by a folk choir that acts as an unorthodox Greek chorus. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders International award-season event Saturday, Koch explained: “It’s a story about a couple in a remote mountain village who meet and then are put to the test due to a brain cancer that the man has. The film is about how she deals with it, how the couple deal with it, and how strong love can be.”
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s coming-of-age drama Beautiful Beings debuted in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Europa Cinemas Label award. The film has also been selected as Iceland’s entry for the 2023 Oscars.
Maryna Er Gorbach’s drama Klondike revolves around a Ukrainian couple on the cusp of parenthood whose lives are turned upside down by the rise of the Russia-backed separatist movement in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
It’s rare that a sequel competes in the International Oscar category, especially when the first part didn’t get selected. It’s a measure of Erik Matti’s latest film that, though it follows on from 2013’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title On the Job—or rather, starts in the aftermath—this second instalment stands alone. “The big difference between the two,” said Matti, “is that the first one was set in urban Manila, and the second one is set in the countryside of the Philippines, just to show two contrasts that exist within both worlds.”
Crackdowns in China seem to be in the news a lot lately, making Jason Loftus’s film Eternal Spring all the more timely. The protagonist of this hybrid documentary is a brilliant Chinese artist named Daxiong, who was forced into exile because of his affiliation with a movement known as Falun Gong, a controversial New Age self-help group that became increasingly threatening to the authorities as it grew in size. In 1999, president Jiang Zemin finally outlawed the organization, leading to imprisonments and death.
“I always had a very specific sense of urgency with this idea,” said Holy Spider director Ali Abbasi of wanting to make a film noir based on the true story of the “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei, who saw himself as on a mission from God as he killed 16 women between 2000 and 2001.
Written and directed by Saim Sadiq, Joyland has had a tumultuous trajectory this season. It burst out of the gate in Cannes as the first Pakistani film ever in the official selection, winning the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard and taking several awards later down the road.
When director Darin J. Sallam came to make her feature debut with Farah, she always knew what the subject matter would be: as a little girl, Sallam’s mother used to tell her the story of a teenage girl who was locked up in her room during the partition of Palestine in 1948. “She was locked up by her father to protect her life,” Sallam recalls. “She survived [the conflict] and she made it to Syria, where she met a Syrian girl and shared her story with her. This Syrian girl grew up, got married and had a child, and she shared the story with her daughter—and this daughter happened to be me.”
The majority of submissions for this year’s International Feature Oscar category deal with serious issues, from major to minor, and while He Shuming’s feature debut Ajoomma (the title translates as Auntie) isn’t exactly the heaviest of them all, it does make a point of focusing on a character type that is vastly underrepresented in cinema across the globe: the older female.
Co-written and directed by filmmaker Santiago Mitre, the Amazon Studios pic Argentina, 1985 is the tale of Argentinian lawyers Julio Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo, who bravely prosecuted members of the country’s former bloody military dictatorship. Under the regime, from 1976 to 1983, an estimated 30,000 people disappeared.
Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor tells the forgotten story of the 30,000 Norwegian civilian sailors who were conscripted at the beginning of World War II to serve on convoys keeping Allied supply chains open.
Narcosis, The Netherlands’ entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, mixes a cocktail of themes perhaps for the first time ever: clairvoyance, deep sea diving and grief.
Writer-director Tarik Saleh’s latest film Cairo Conspiracy follows Adam, the son of a fisherman, who is offered the ultimate privilege to study at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicenter of power in Sunni Islam. Shortly after his arrival, the university’s highest religious leader, the Grand Imam, suddenly dies and Adam soon becomes a pawn in a ruthless power struggle between Egypt’s religious and political elite.
After its well received premiere at Tribeca Festival in June last year, Pan Nalin’s love letter to cinema Last Film Show went on to capture the hearts of festivalgoers all over the world. Starring newcomer Bhavin Rabari, it tells the story of Samay, a country boy whose life is changed forever during a trip to see a Bollywood movie with his family. Soon after, Samay befriends the projectionist at the cinema and begins to play truant, causing a rift with his overbearing but well-meaning father.