‘Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’ Review: Emily Atef’s Latest is a Sensual Yet Exhausting Misfire [Berlin]

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Kowloon Walled City — one of Hong Kong’s most famous landmarks, or infamous trouble spots, depending on your point of view — fell prey to the developers’ bulldozer 30 years ago. But it remains an icon of the territory’s gritty spirit and is being painstakingly re-created for action thriller feature “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.” The film is a beacon for how Hong Kong cinema is now evolving. Directed by hot-shot Soi Cheang, whose “Mad Fate” recently played in Berlin and is set for imminent local release, “Twilight” boasts leading stars Louis Koo, Sammo Hung and Richie Jen, plus emerging talents Philip Ng, Raymond Lau and Terrance Lau.

EXCLUSIVE: Douglas Smith (Big Little Lies), Mark O’Brien (Arrival), Rebecca Liddiard (Alias Grace) and Vinessa Antoine (Diggstown,) have been cast opposite Amanda Seyfried (The Dropout) in Seven Veils, the new feature from filmmaker Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter).

Sony Pictures Classics has picked up all rights in North America, Latin America and European Europe (excluding Hungary) to the Ilker Çatak drama The Teachers’ Lounge, which won both the Europa Cinemas Label award and the CICAE Arthouse Cinema award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

EXCLUSIVE: Sony Pictures International Productions has optioned remake rights to Latvian Christmas comedy Accidental Santa in eight territories: North America, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico and Brazil.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

the MPSE website.

Naman Ramachandran Berlin’s just concluded European Film Market (EFM), which had a physical edition this year after two online editions in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, has reported “record results” according to the organizers. There were 230 stands and 612 companies from 78 countries and more than 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. Some 773 films were shown in 1,533 screenings, including 647 online screenings and 599 market premieres. The total number of buyers also rose to 1,302. 629 film projects were presented on the new Producers & Project Pages. “After the past two irregular years, we’re pleased to return to the physical in full force, and with a vibrant, bustling and strong market. The exhibition areas at Gropius Bau and the Marriott Hotel were sold out, and the exhibitors reported strong sales and good business. The decision to group all the market happenings together with the Berlinale Series Market and the market screenings at Potsdamer Platz, and to provide the industry with an efficient infrastructure, was extremely well-received by our market participants,” said EFM director Dennis Ruh.

Danish actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas is best known for his work on-screen with filmmakers such as Lars von Trier and Anders Thomas Jensen, but he’s in Berlin this week with Agent, his first project as a writer-director.

Steven Spielberg told a Berlin Film Festival press conference on Tuesday that he has yet to set his next movie in the wake of back-to-back productions West Side Story and The Fabelmans.

Director Vasilis Katsoupis tells the audience exactly what “Inside” is about to do from its very first scene. The disembodied voice of Willem Dafoe narrates a childhood fable fished from the depths of memory.

Millions of women in the Muslim world live under the dominion of men, subject to their rules, confined by their power. The documentary Under the Sky of Damascus, making its world premiere tonight at the Berlin Film Festival, examines the alarming gender politics in one ancient locality — the capital of Syria.

Christopher Vourlias Though the world watched — often in silence — as a decade-long civil war tore Syria apart, exiled filmmakers Talal Derki (“Of Fathers and Sons”) and Heba Khaled say an equally brutal but less visible war is still raging. In “Under the Sky of Damascus,” which premieres Feb. 20 in the Panorama strand of the Berlin Film Festival, the duo shifts the lens to the silenced majority of Syrian women who routinely face sexual harassment, violence and abuse in their patriarchal society. The film follows a tight-knit group of young Syrian women who embark upon on a radical project to produce a play that lays bare the culture of misogyny and sexual abuse that has blighted the lives of females in their country for generations.

To this day, I am traumatized by the notion I could have killed my little brother. Six years younger, we had an age difference primed to maximize annoyance, his constant nagging the spark for my first foray with untethered fury.

Nick Frost, Alicia Silverstone & Kevin Connolly To Star In Dark Comedy ‘Krazy House’Nick Frost, Alicia Silverstone, and Kevin Connolly have signed on to star in the dark comedy Krazy House from writer-directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil. Production on the pic has just been completed in Amsterdam. The cast is rounded out by Gaite Jansen, Walt Klink, Jan Bijvoet, Chris Peters, and Matti Stooker. Maarten Swart will produce the film for Kaap Holland Film, in a co-production with Haars and van der Kuil. Kaap Holland Film’s Jorn Baars and XYZ’s Todd Brown are executive producers. Splendid Films is handling distribution in the Benelux. XYZ has North American sales rights.

Emily Atef’s latest feature is something of a curate’s egg, a well-made foray into high-end romantic lit that’s saddled with some off-putting baggage about the reunification of Germany post-1989. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry is clearly personal to the novel’s writer, Daniela Krien, who was born, mid-’70s into the former GDR, and it does offer a layer of quirky detail, such as an unnerving car crash involving what looks to be Trabant. But for a film that shows a lot of naked flesh and spends a lot of time documenting a young woman’s complicated sexual awakening, the political table-talk can be distracting and even wearying, notably on the occasion when a whole (recently reunited) family bursts into “The Song of The Peat Bog Soldiers.“

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire. While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Emily Atef, the outspoken French-German filmmaker, may have stepped into a minefield with her latest movie, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” which looks to be one of the Berlinale’s most divisive movies in competition. With such a cute title, one might expect a flowery romance drama, but the movie goes far to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality. Based on Danielle Krein’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

EXCLUSIVE: The cast of thriller Rich Flu has been set with Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Star Wars: Ahsoka), Rafe Spall (The Big Short), Lorraine Bracco (The Sopranos), Dixie Egerickx (The Secret Garden), Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner), Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Cesar Domboy (Outlander), Dayana Esebe (LA Star), and Richard Sammel (3 Days To Kill).