Secret Lena Dunham Feature ‘Sharp Stick’ Wraps Production, Launches Sales at Virtual Berlin (EXCLUSIVE)

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorSnap wants to get Snapchat’s young-skewing user base to buy more stuff through the social app. As part of that strategy, Snap has acquired Fit Analytics, a German apparel size-recommendation engine that helps online shoppers virtually find the right clothing size.Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.Founded in 2010, Berlin-based Fit Analytics provides a product called Fit Finder to over 18,000 retailers and brands.

Jessica Kiang The public, the private and the deeply personal run on parallel tracks in French director Alice Diop’s documentary “We,” a series of vignettes of life along the RER B, a railway line running through the suburbs and exurbs of Paris out to the surrounding countryside.

Christopher Vourlias Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which won the Golden Bear for best film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has sold to major territories for Heretic Outreach, Variety has learned exclusively.The Romanian writer-director’s latest feature is an irreverent satire about a schoolteacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), who finds her reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is uploaded on the internet.

Berlin’s Netflix Film MarketFor the last two years, a Netflix panel was the hottest ticket at the Berlinale Series Market Conference. But the U.S.

EXCLUSIVE: Indie stalwart Cassian Elwes is making a move into management via his Elevated banner, kicking off with signing Best Sellers director Lina Roessler, whose debut feature starring Michael Caine and Aubrey Plaza screened in the Berlin Film Festival’s Special Gala section this week. It’s the first time the film producer and former co-head of William Morris Independent has moved into the management space.

This year, more than most, Berlin's European Film Market was an opportunity to gauge the health of the global indie industry. Judging from the business done over the past week — the 2021 EFM wraps Friday — the general assessment would be: The patient is stable and the prognosis is promising.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorSales agent M-Appeal has closed further territory deals for Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” which just won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.Benelux rights have gone to September Film, and StraDa Films has picked the film up in Greece. September Film plans to release the title theatrically post pandemic.

EXCLUSIVE: Julie Taymor is attached to direct Gun Love, an adaptation of the Jennifer Clement novel. Babylon Berlin‘s Liv Lisa Fries is attached to play the role of Margot in the ensemble cast. Marissa Kate Goodhill (Come Away) wrote the script.

Girls creator secretly made the film, Sharp Stick, in compliance with coronavirus protocols in Los Angeles over the past months.Variety reports that the independent film, financed by FilmNation, screened footage for potential buyers yesterday (March 2) at the European Film Market.

Carole Horst “Best Sellers,” a Berlinale Special Gala screener and debut feature from Lina Roessler, has scored deals from major territories, which were announced by film’s sales outfit Foresight Unlimited at the European Film Market.Universal Pictures Content Group has acquired major markets including the U.K., Germany, France and Latin America, among others.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent“Natural Light,” a portrait of the attrition and atrocity of war set at a benighted village in occupied Western Soviet Union in 1943, has clinched its first sales as Paris-based Luxbox rolls out the Berlin Competition player at the European Film Market.Nour Films, whose past pickups include Berlin Golden Bear winner “Touch Me Not,” has closed rights to France.Nour will open “Natural Light” “with great conviction and pleasure” on at least 60 prints

Spain brings an extraordinary gamut of movie titles to Berlin. Some highlights:“All the Moons,” (Igor Legarreta)A France-Spain co-production, “All the Moons” tracks two vampires in the northern Spain during the last Carlist war.

The Pygmalion myth gets a gender flip in I’m Your Man, the Berlin Film Festival competition entry from Germany’s Maria Schrader. Maren Eggert stars as Alma, a single anthropologist who agrees to live with a humanoid robot for three weeks as part of a trial testing period. Thomas (Dan Stevens) has been designed as Alma’s ideal partner, using algorithms based on her brain scans, her responses and research involving 17 million people.

Lena Dunham listed her amazing Los Angeles, Spaulding Square neighborhood bungalow for sale this past week.

Self-taught Vietnamese filmmakerLê Bảo's directorial debut Taste takes place in the Ho Chi Minh City slums where he grew up, but the film centers on a displaced Nigerian man who is a world away from home.

Whether by accident or design, the ultra-low-budget Language Lessons feels like a definitive film for the Covid-19 era, as the two main actors never appear in the same shot together until the very end. Seemingly created on two computers, this exceedingly modest tale of a Spanish-language instructor and pupil who meet online becomes more genially engaging as it goes along, although it never aims very high other than as a technical experiment that more or less succeeds.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItalian twins Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo, who made a splash in Berlin last year with “Bad Tales,” are back on set with dark thriller “America Latina” toplining Elio Germano, who was at Berlin 2020 with two pics: “Bad Tales” and “Hidden Away,” for which he scored a Silver Bear.Shooting started March 1 on “America Latina.” Its story details of which are being kept under wraps other than it’s “a love story and like all love stories it’s obviously a

Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and Cécile de France, “Peaceful,” directed by Cannes best actress winner Emmanuelle Bercot, will head Studiocanal’s 2021 Berlin slate.“Peaceful” is produced by Les Films du Kiosque, whose credits include “La Belle Epoque” and Bercot’s own “Standing Tall.”Introduced to buyers from Feb.