Ramin Bahrani’s ‘2nd Chance’ About Bulletproof Vest Inventor Heads to Showtime

Succession boss Jesse Armstrong has said that there’s going to be a very definite moment when the story of Logan Roy and his rotten cabal is over and HBO is taking its lead from its creator.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentLoco Films, the Paris-based world sales and production company, has unveiled the trailer for Yulia Trofimova’s feature debut “The Land of Sasha” which is premiering today at the Berlinale, in the Generation 14plus strand.“The Land of Sahsa” tells the story of an indecisive 18-year-old struggling to pursue his desire to become a painter as his mother urges him to choose a safer career path. The sudden appearance of the boy’s estranged father complicates things further. But when Sasha has an unexpected encounter with an unusual girl called Zhenia, he realizes he has no choice but to finally grow up.“The Land of Sasha” was produced by Katerina Mikhaylova and Konstantin Fam for Moscow-based Vega Film.

Marta Balaga Danish helmer Lone Scherfig is already developing the second season of “The Shift”, she revealed on Monday during an online Berlinale Series Market talk “From Film to Series.”Set in a maternity ward and starring Sofie Gråbøl and Pål Sverre Hagen, it’s the first series as a showrunner for Scherfig, who in 2019 opened Berlinale with “The Kindness of Strangers” and won a Silver Bear for “Italian for Beginners.”“It’s a tribute to the people who work in the healthcare system under extreme pressure, to the care and the love they show, even despite tough working conditions,” she said. “The Shift” is produced by Creative Alliance, with Beta Film handling the sales.

EXCLUSIVE: Isaki Lacuesta’s drama One Year, One Night (Un Año, Una Noche), about survivors grappling with trauma following the devastating terrorist attack at Paris’ Bataclan theater on November 13, 2015, world premieres in competition at the Berlin Film Festival today. Check out a clip above as a group of friends discusses messages of support they received in the wake of the tragedy.

Naman Ramachandran Acclaimed Nepalese filmmaker Deepak Rauniyar has cast Indian actor Tannishtha Chatterjee as one of the leads in his upcoming feature “The Sky Is Mine.”Chatterjee’s credits include “Brick Lane” (2007), for which she scored a best actress nomination at the British Independent Film Awards, “Parched” (2015) and “Lion” (2016). She won the Asia Star Award for best Asian filmmaker at Busan for her directorial debut, “Roam Rome Mein” (2019).Rauniyar’s latest work, short film “Four Nights,” is playing at Berlinale Shorts. The filmmaker’s first feature, “Highway,” premiered at the 2012 Berlinale and played Locarno, while his sophomore feature “White Sun” (2016) won awards at the Venice, Palm Springs, Fribourg and Singapore festivals.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s robust 2022 Berlinale representation of a half-dozen titles runs the gamut from the latest works by venerable veterans Paolo Taviani and Dario Argento to pics by fresh new Cinema Italiano voices including Chiara Bellosi, whose first film, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin in 2020.Taviani, who is 91, is returning to Berlin but alone this time — his filmmaker brother, Vittorio, with whom he won a Golden Bear in 2012 for “Caesar Must Die,” passed away in 2018 — in competition with surreal drama “Leonora Addio,” inspired by a short story by Italian playwright and author Luigi Pirandello. Argento, who set his 1977 chiller “Suspiria” in Germany, will be at the Berlinale for the first time as a director with Rome-set suspenser “Dark Glasses,” though he was on the fest’s main jury panel in 2001.

Htun Zaw Win, who uses the professional name Wyne, has been arrested in Myanmar following a year on the run evading charges of encouraging government employees to join protests against local military rule.

Two years ago this month, the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar witnessed a coup d’état, in which the Tatmadaw (the military) seized power from the democratically elected National League for Democracy and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Jessica Kiang Freezing winter in a place designed for frolicsome summer can be a doleful time. A case in point: the empty hotels, shuttered waterparks and endless fog banks of the Italian beach town that gives Ulrich Seidl’s challenging but riveting Berlin competition film its name.

There’s bleak, there’s despairing, and then there is Ulrich Seidl, Austrian chronicler of the marginal, the miserable and plain mad. If there are Nazis still worshipping Hitler in some rural basement, Seidl will dig them out. Closet religious fanatics, marriages mired in cruelty, depraved things respectable people do on holiday that nobody at home will know about: Ulrich Seidl sets them out for all to see. Perhaps the Rimini director/co-writer is not so much bleak as relentlessly clear-eyed.

Dario Argento’s Berlin Film Festival Special Gala entry Dark Glasses plays out almost like a parody of his earlier work. Co-written with Franco Ferrini, it’s a lurid giallo about a killer slaughtering women in contemporary Rome. It lacks the suspense and style of Argento’s work in the 70s and 80s, while repeating various themes. 

Violence and motherhood make for an unusual combination in Ursula Meier’s Berlin Film Festival competition title The Line (La Ligne). Set in remote present-day Switzerland, it stars actor-singer-playwright Stéphanie Blanchoud as Margaret, whose anger towards her mother Christina (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) frequently turns physical. While she’s a grown woman, there’s something primal and childlike about Margaret’s visceral fury that suggests a disorder that’s never named.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAt 81, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento is busier than ever.The director of a string of cult chiller classics starting in the 1970s, including “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” “Suspiria” and “Deep Red,” was at Cannes last July with his acting debut in Gaspar Noe’s “Vortex,” about a pair of old lovers. Argento was also celebrated last year with a new book by Italian critic Steve Della Casa and a retro at New York’s Lincoln Center.

Christopher Vourlias Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, whose latest feature “Rimini” plays in the main competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, is winding down production on his next film, Variety can reveal.“Sparta” is a companion piece to Seidl’s competition entry and revolves around the brother of that film’s protagonist, the washed-up singer Richie Bravo. “[‘Rimini’] actually originated as a much larger story,” the director told Variety.

Christopher Vourlias Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) is set to begin production in Romania on his next feature, Variety can reveal.“A Case History” analyzes the relations between individuals and multinational companies in the mad dash of new Romanian capitalism, starting from the real story of preparing and shooting a problematic work safety video. Principal photography is slated to begin in summer or early fall.“The film is composed of two parts which respond to each other, forming a diptych of sorts,” said Jude.

The Brazilian Filmmakers Collective (BRFC) will launch formally on Feb. 16 at the Berlin Film Festival’s EFM.

Anna Marie de la Fuente Leading Italian sales company The Open Reel has snagged the international sales rights to Pablo Garcia Perez de Lara’s latest doc, “Born to be Born,” ahead of its world premiere at the European Film Market (EFM) in Berlin.Doc revolves around a progressive public school, the Escola Congrés-Indians, in Garcia’s native Barcelona, where preparations for an end-of-year trip of the school’s first graduating class are underway. Children learn at their own pace in the primary school which instills, above all, the values of respect and empathy for other people.“I was struck by the director’s ability to discreetly document the important educational role that the school and its educators play with these young students,” said The Open Reel founder Cosimo Santoro, adding: “They guide them through understanding and dialogue in every phase of their discussions and through any possible conflicts that may arise.” Garcia has trained his camera on children in many of his previous features and shorts.

Coldplay and Selena Gomez have shared a new video for their collaboration ‘Let Somebody Go‘.The black and white clip, which you can view below, was directed by Dave Meyers who did the videos for Coldplay’s previous singles ‘Higher Power‘ and ‘My Universe‘ with BTS.It finds frontman Chris Martin and Gomez in a world not dissimilar to Marvel‘s Doctor Strange or Christopher Nolan’s Inception.The track, which you can stream and download here, is taken from Coldplay’s recent album ‘Music Of The Spheres’, which arrived last October.Coldplay and Gomez previously debuted their collaboration live on The Late Late Show With James Corden as part of a week long residency.Meanwhile, Martin recently confirmed that one of Coldplay’s final three albums will be written as a musical.He told Ellen Degeneres that the band are interested in making a “movie musical”, before joking that it would be called East Side Story.“I think, over time, we’ve learned… we’re so lucky that we get to just follow what feels right,” he continued. “And that’s what we’ve decided to do.