‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ Sound Designer Ben Burtt to Be Honored by Locarno Film Festival

Saint Clare starring Bella Thorne will open this year’s Taormina Film Festival.

Earlier this spring, we talked to Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly about their excellent Apple TV+ sci-fi series “Dark Matter” for our Bingeworthy podcast; it’s a darker, more adult consideration of the multiverse-type stories that have dominated comic book movies of late. “Dark Matter” is anything but a comic book movie and centers on a doppelgänger physicist from another universe who abducts his other self in order to be with the woman he missed his chance to be with.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Baby,” which premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week where it won the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award for joint acting lead Ricardo Teodoro, has closed further sales. Berlin-based sales agency M-Appeal have sold the distribution rights to Ama Films for Greece, Mezipatra z.s for Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Falcon for Indonesia.

Naman Ramachandran The 32nd Raindance Film Festival (June 19-28) has revealed its jury award winners, reflecting a renewed focus on emerging filmmakers. Korean thriller “Sleep,” directed by Jason Yu and starring Lee Sun-kyun and Jung Yu-mi, took home the Discovery Award for best debut feature. The film marks Lee’s final role before his passing.

Ben Croll Roaring towards its 23rd edition, the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) built its reputation as a haven for outré fare, pulling in a reliable (and renewable) youth crowd eager for wild thrills and hard-to-source Asian titles, while becoming a fixture on the horror festival circuit as a lakeside home-away-from-home for a stable of filmmakers who return year and again.

Selome Hailu South by Southwest will not receive sponsorship from the U.S. Army for its 2025 festival, a decision made after multiple pro-Palestinian protests and boycotts earlier this year. “After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model,” reads a statement on the SXSW website.

The Witch is the biggest series of its kind out of Greece and Antenna has conjured a second season of the epic period drama. Season two is teed up as a sequel.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Peruvian director Paolo Tizón‘s documentary “Night Has Come,” which has its world premiere Sunday in the Proxima competition section at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, has debuted its trailer (below). The film centers on a group of young men, many of them teenagers, who sign up for one of the most challenging military training courses in Latin America. The objective is to turn them into fearsome fighters operating in the dangerous VRAEM region, an area plagued by various armed groups, guarding their coca plants and engaged in narcotics trafficking.

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to award-winning Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones sound engineer, editor and voice actor Ben Burtt at its upcoming 77th edition in August.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor The Palm Springs International ShortFest has announced the juried and audience award winners for its 2024 edition, which took place June 18-24. Over $25,000 in cash prizes and five Academy Award-qualifying honors were presented to the winning films, which included Esteban Pedraza’s “Bogotá Story” and Jadwiga Kowalska’s animated film “The Car That Came Back from the Sea.” See a full list of winners below.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor The Mediterrane Film Festival kickstarted its second edition with the international premiere of Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s “The Count of Monte Cristo.” The film, shown at the heart of Malta’s capital of Valletta on Saturday night, was followed by a reception at the historic Mdina Ditch Gardens, in which Malta Film Commissioner Johann Grech highlighted the importance of the festival as an event to “unite the nations of the Mediterranean through film.” The sentiment echoes this year’s festival theme of Unity Through Film, with Grech adding that he hopes the festival will bring nations together to “share stories that celebrate not only our diversity but also our shared outlook.” The film commissioner emphasised the success of the festival’s first edition, claiming the return to the local economy “far exceeded our investment, showing once again what a force for good film is in our country.” Several members of the local film industry were present at the gathering as well as international attendees in this year’s jury president Jon S. Baird (“Tetris,” “Stan and Ollie”) and “Triangle of Sadness” actor Zlatko Burić, who was part of last year’s jury.

What’s going on with Academy Award-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “Star Wars” movie centering on Rey Skywalker (Daisy Ridley)? Rumored to be called, “Star War: A New Jedi Order” and then more recently, “Star Wars: Episode X – A New Beginning” (who knows if any of that’s true), for months, all Daisy Ridley has said is she’s been waiting to read a script from Academy Award-nominated writer Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky Blinders,” and writer of “Eastern Promises,” “Spencer” and more.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Brazilian romantic comedy “Perfect Endings” has sold to distributors in North America and several territories in Europe. Berlin-based sales agency M-Appeal is handling world sales rights.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Flow,” a director-driven animated feature which world premiered at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and just swept three awards at Annecy Film Festival, has been embraced by a raft of major distributors in key territories, including the U.K., Japan, South Korea, Germany, Spain and Italy. The movie is represented internationally by Charades.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Coralie Fargeat’s Demi Moore-starring feminist body horror film “The Substance” has been set as the closing night title for the New Zealand International Film Festival. The picture is one of 16 which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month selected for the NZIFF which is now under the artistic leadership of Paolo Bertolin.

A true crime podcast on the history of the casting couch.All the hits and misses for summer 2024News, interviews and reviewsAnouk Aimée, the French actress known for her elegance and cool sophistication in films including Claude Lelouch's "A Man and a Woman," died on Tuesday. She was 92.The company is expected to make the announcement official on Monday.Brad Pitt’s upcoming feature about Formula 1 racing has gotten a release date from Apple Original Films.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Paolo Cortellesi’s “There’s Still Tomorrow,” a box office smash in its native Italy, was Sunday named winner of the Sydney Film Prize at the end of the Sydney Film Festival (June 5-16) A jury headed by Danis Tanovic called the film about an industrious woman in post WWII Rome “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous.” The prize is one of the richest awarded at any festival and is worth A$60,000 ($39,600). The announcement was made at the city’s State Theatre ahead of the Australian premiere screening of the Demi Moore-starring Cannes hit “The Substance.” The A$20,000 ($13,200) Documentary Australia award went to local filmmaker James Bradley, for “Welcome to Babel,” which charts Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen’s plans to create an epic work.

Rosario Dawson, Hayden Christensen, and Lucasfilm Creative Chief Dave Filoni were on the Happy Sad Confused podcast to discuss the “Star Wars” series “Ahsoka” this week (read our review). And while all eyes are on season two of “Ahsoka,” which Filoni says he’s writing, so it’s presumably on the way at some point, many fans are wondering what’s going on with the feature-length film.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin-based sales agency Films Boutique has closed further deals for Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well,”following the North American deal with Strand Releasing and the first international sales previously announced by Variety.The film has been acquired by Nour Films in France, One From the Heart in Greece, Mezipatra in Czech Republic and Slovakia, HBO Europe in Eastern Europe, Beta Film in Bulgaria and Falcon in Indonesia, in addition to the already announced deals with Vedette in the Benelux, Karma in Spain, Trigon in Switzerland and Lev in Israel.Films Boutique is in negotiations with potential buyers in the U.K., Latin America, Germany and Japan.Additionally, New Voice Film Productions Ltd. secured distribution deals with Golden Scene for Hong Kong and Macau and Flash Forward Entertainment in Taiwan.“All Shall Be Well” is written and directed by Yeung and was produced by Yeung’s frequent collaborator Michael J.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor The Mediterrane Film Festival announced its complete program ahead of its second edition, taking place in Malta’s capital of Valetta from June 22-30. New titles selected include recent Cannes highlights in Coralie Fargeat’s Demi Moore-led body horror “The Substance” and Roberto Minvervini’s “The Damned,” which join previously announced films like Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness” and Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw The TV Glow.” Further program additions include Mahdi Fleifel’s Directors’ Fortnight standout “To a Land Unknown,” which Variety labeled “a confident, angry, fully-realized drama,” and Truong Minh Quy’s Un Certain Regard breakout “Viet and Nam.” An extended version of the Malta-shot “Jurassic World: Dominion” will play as part of the Malta Expanded strand, while on the retrospective end of the program, the festival will honor David Bowie with screenings of Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and Lisa Azuelos’s “My Way,” plus a masterclass on the musician’s enduring legacy helmed by British Film Commissioner Adrian Wootton titled “David Bowie: Celebrating 60 Years of Genius.” Artistic Director Teresa Cavina said she is “very happy” with the selection, calling it “a chorus of strong and harmonious voices that, through extraordinary films, gives shape to a complex and varied universe, a mirror of the reality that surrounds us, often difficult to decipher, sometimes painful, but also full of hope and capacity for renewal.” Cavina also emphasised the strong female presence at this year’s festival, with 16 films — almost half of the festival’s official selection — comprised of works directed by women.