‘Spencer’ Director Pablo Larraín Endorses Chilean Oscar Entry ‘White on White’ (EXCLUSIVE)

K.J. Yossman Belgium’s Oscar entry “Playground” has an official trailer.The film, which documents the brutal reality of playground bullying, opened at Cannes Un Certain Regard before going on to screen at the San Sebastian and the BFI film festivals.

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in Spencer (Photo: Pablo Larraín)

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.

The eponymous edifice of Cambodia’s International Feature Oscar entry, White Building, is barely white at all by the time we encounter it. A low-rise apartment block in Phnom Penh — the sort of teeming anthill of humanity familiar to anyone who has spent time in a South East Asian city — it is stained with tropical rain, its cement falling off in chunks, its cat’s cradles of improvised electrical wiring truly shocking, in every sense of the word. Director Kavich Neang grew up here.

Flash, flicker, flash, cut to black. We’re watching grainy film of men walking in and out of the stalls in a West German public toilet, casting glances at each other, maybe a fumbling feel; a reverse angle shows us the camera behind the mirror. The men can’t see it, but some of them must surely guess it’s there and defy the odds anyway. Because without defiance, without desire, what are they? Without those things, they know they will only ever be half-alive.

After a charged premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Pablo Larraín’s Spencer has become one of this season’s hottest contenders. A haunting study of one particular Christmas at Sandringham for Diana, Princess of Wales, as her marriage falters and the Royal fairytale turns grim, Spencer features a landmark performance by Kristen Stewart that has catapulted her to the top of the Best Actress race. Joe Utichi meets Larraín and Stewart to dig deep into the production.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentKino Lorber has acquired U.S. and Canadian  distribution rights to Aly Muritiba’s “Private Desert” (“Deserto Particular”) Brazil’s International Feature Oscar submission and a love story hailed for its large sensibility as well as political point.The deal was negotiated with the film’s world sale agent, Rome-based Intramovies.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentCAA has signed Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, the up-and-coming director of “The Gravedigger’s Wife,” Somalia’s first ever official submission for the Oscars international feature film race.“The Gravedigger’s Wife,” Ahmed’s feature debut,” world premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week and went on to win the Amplify Voices Award at Toronto.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorCrooked Media hired Crystal Ponzio-Busto, an eight-year veteran of Netflix, to lead marketing for the podcasting and media company.As Crooked’s SVP of marketing, Ponzio-Busto will oversee marketing and communications strategy for the brand, working to broaden its reach in podcasting, digital content and ecommerce and helping to launch Crooked’s upcoming TV and film projects.Most recently, Ponzio-Busto was director of films marketing at Netflix, where she developed

Spencer director Pablo Larraín said Saturday that while he and screenwriter Steven Knight took different immersive paths when developing the film’s screenplay, the result was unlike any other he’d worked on: the finished script matched the final edit scene for scene.

Jonny Greenwood’s latest release, ‘New Currency’ – a song from the new Spencer soundtrack. You can watch it below.The film, starring Kristen Stewart, was released last month and features a full score from Greenwood.

deep breath) Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, and Lakeith Stanfield. Now, thanks to this exclusive video, you can hear from many of the actors (including Majors, Elba, and King), along with director Samuel, about how “The Harder They Fall” fell together.In the roundtable, James admits to have been noodling around with the idea for the past 15 years, and discussing it openly with star Idris Elba.

Clayton Davis Focus Features’ “Belfast” will receive the Vanguard Award at the Palm Springs International Film Awards.

EXCLUSIVE: Colman Domingo is executive producing Scott Aharoni and Dennis Latos’ short Leylak.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentStarring Pablo Larraín regular Alfredo Castro, Chilean-Spanish writer-director Theo Court’s “White on White” (“Blanco en Blanco”) has been acquired for distribution in North America by Outsider Pictures.The deal follows on the film’s world premiere this September at the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons sidebar, where Court won a Silver Lion for the section’s best director and a film writers’ Fipresci Prize.

Escape From Mogadishu, Korea’s submission to this year’s International Feature Oscar race, tells the harrowing true story of North and South Koreans caught in the middle of a brutal civil war in Somalia in 1991, and how the divided nation worked together to survive the crisis in a foreign land.

The sobering story of Pebbles, about domestic violence in India, is inspired by an incident in filmmaker P.S. Vinothraj’s real-life past, in which his sister was “chased away by her husband” and forced to walk 14 miles whilst cradling her baby in scorching terrain.

Filmed with an international cast speaking French, English and Spanish, and co-written with cinematographer Sara Mishara, Ivan Grbovic’s Drunken Birds begins in urban, crime-infested Mexico and swiftly transports us to the rural farmlands of Quebec, where former drug runner Willy has come in search of a former lover is in hiding from her mobster partner.