Travel-Banned Iranian Directors Dedicate ‘My Favourite Cake’ Berlin Premiere To Women At Forefront Of Woman Life Freedom Fight

Savina Petkova Women dancing, women singing, women burning their hijab: these acts of defiance shape Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s feature-length debut, “My Stolen Planet.” After premiering in Berlinale’s Panorama section and winning a second place Audience Award, the film now competes for the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki International Doc Fest. Prior to her feature, Sharifi made eight shorts while working as an editor for documentaries, including Firouzeh Khosrovani’s IDFA winning “Radiograph of a Family.” Using the essayistic style of a diary, “My Stolen Planet” presents the joy and vivaciousness in contrast with the regimented oppression in Tehran using both the director’s personal archives and 8mm recordings of strangers’ lives.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Occult drama-thriller “Exhuma,” dominated the South Korea box office in its opening weekend with a scarily good debut approaching $17 million. The film, about two shaman, a feng shui master and a mortician who attempt to undo the mysterious events happening to a U.S.-based Korean family, grabbed $14.5 million between Friday and Sunday, representing a 77% share of the overall box office market. Including the earnings since its Wednesday debut, the film earned $16.8 million in its full opening session, according to data from Kobis, the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council (Kofic).

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Paradises of Diane,” which premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, came out of an exploration of the “dark side of maternity” and the role of the mother in society, director Carmen Jaquier tells Variety. The film, which was directed with Jan Gassmann, starts with Diane abandoning her new-born baby at a maternity clinic in Zurich, and heading to the seedy Spanish seaside resort Benidorm, without telling anyone.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Hong Kong director Ray Yeung ‘s “All Shall Be Well” has sold in several key markets following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Represented in international markets by Films Boutique, “All Shall Be Well” is playing in the Panorama section at the Berlinale and is eligible for the Teddy Award.

EXCLUSIVE: Ahead of its world premiere today at the Berlin Film Festival, Cohen Media Group has secured all North American distribution rights to Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent “Black Tea,” Abderrahmane Sissako‘s lushly lensed romance drama set in China, has been bought by major distributors in key territories ahead of its world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Gaumont, which co-produced the film, has sold it to Caramel (Spain), Academy two (Italy), Pandora Films (Germany, Austria), Cineart (Benelux), Films4you (Portugal), Provzglyad (CIS), Mozinet (Hungary), Another World Entertainment (Norway), Film Bazar (Denmark), MCF Megacom (Former Yugoslavia, Albania), Filmstop (Latvia, Estonia), MB Taip Toliau (Lithuania), Imovision (Brazil), AV Jet (Taiwan), Falcon (Indonesia), Pathé BC (Sub-Saharan Africa, Maghreb) and New Cinema (Israel).

Mahin’s friend Pouran likes talking about her ailments, real and imagined. More than that, she has something on her phone she is keen to show the ladies gathered for one of their regular lunches at Mahin’s place: the film she made of her colonoscopy. “That’s disgusting,” snorts Mahin (Lily Farhadpour). “I told her to marry! You wouldn’t be like this if you had!” Another of their wrinkly gang chips in. “What joy did our dead husbands ever bring us?” They all laugh, companionably.

Russian Pussy Riot Dissident Nadya Tolokonnikova has welcomed a pledge by Alexei Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya to carry on his fight for democracy, following his death in an Arctic penal colony last week.

Korean director Hong Sang-soo is such a Berlinale favorite that his film in competition, featuring Isabelle Huppert as an apparently penniless tourist trying to scrape together a living in Seoul, is his sixth film to be invited to the festival since 2020 — remarkably, that’s not even his entire output over that time. He hits this pace by keeping things simple, shooting each film in just a couple of weeks with very few crew and small casts, most of whom have been his collaborators for years, and covering many of the key technical jobs himself.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “From Hilde, With Love,” which world premiered Saturday in competition at the Berlinale, has debuted its trailer (below). The film, directed by Andreas Dresen, centers on a group of young anti-Nazi activists in Berlin during World War II. (Read Variety‘s review here.) The film, which is being sold by Beta Cinema and is produced by Claudia Steffen and Christoph Friedel for Pandora Film, stars “Babylon Berlin” breakout Liv Lisa Fries and Johannes Hegemann.

Christopher Vourlias Following on the heels of his Oscar-shortlisted “Refugee,” veteran U.S. producer Brandt Andersen (“Everest,” “Lone Survivor”) makes his feature directorial debut with “The Strangers’ Case,” a kaleidoscopic and deeply felt portrait of the refugee crisis that world premieres Feb. 23 as a Berlinale Special Gala.

Christopher Vourlias A cross-country journey in search of a mysterious treasure puts the nature of faith to the test in “The Great Yawn of History,” the feature debut of Iranian director Aliyar Rasti, which premieres Feb. 23 in the competitive Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival. The film tells the story of a man of wavering religious conviction who dreams of a box of gold hidden in a cave.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief France’s Isabelle Huppert, one of the leading actors of her age, has crafted a unique relationship with Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo. Hong’s “A Traveler’s Needs,” which premieres this week in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, is the third time that Huppert has starred in one of his unique pieces of minimalist cinema. She says she hopes the partnership can go much further. Huppert plays a footloose and intense French woman at large in Korea and vaguely making ends meet as an untrained language tutor with eccentric methods.

Christopher Vourlias Greek filmmaker Yorgos Zois, who’s set to bow his sophomore feature, “Arcadia,” in the competitive Encounters strand of the Berlin Film Festival Feb. 18, is developing his first TV series. “Play” follows a lone cinephile who joins a mysterious group of strangers that reenact scenes from movies in real life.

There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.

EXCLUSIVE: Urban Sales has unveiled key deals for Mascha Halberstad’s CGI animation Fox And Hare Save The Forest ahead of its world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s young audience-focused Generation Kplus sidebar this weekend.

Filmmaker Andreas Dresen and actress Liv Lisa Fries took part morning in the press conference for new drama From Hilde, With Love, which debuts this weekend in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

Christopher Vourlias A lonely widower wrestling with the loss of his wife finds himself in the thralls of a mental health crisis, setting the stage for a moving tale of grief and acceptance in Mamadou Dia’s “Demba,” which premieres Feb. 17 in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival. “Demba” follows its titular protagonist, an archivist in a provincial Senegalese town being nudged toward an early retirement after nearly 30 years in the civil service.

Euphoria star Hunter Schafer stole the show at the Berlin Film Festival press conference on Friday for Tilman Singer’s horror movie Cuckoo which is world premiering at the city’s 2,500-capacity Verti Music Hall this evening.

Jessica Kiang How late is too late? It’s a question that besets Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) a 70-year-old retired nurse who sleeps late, whose late husband is late by 30 years, and who is beginning to wonder if her loneliness might become untenable as late-life gets later still. But the question could also be asked of “My Favourite Cake” itself, which after leaning into Farhadpour’s ample charisma and the lovely, whimsical chemistry she strikes up with co-star Esmail Mehrabi, takes a strangely bitter turn in its home stretch, like a spongy confection whose dangerously high sucrose levels you are only just getting used to, when an unwelcome bit of grit chips a tooth.