Vision Distribution Takes World Sales on Berlin Panorama Title ‘Swing Ride’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Anna Marie de la Fuente Kazakh filmmaker Askar Uzabayev’s domestic violence drama “Happiness” snagged the Audience Award in the Berlin Film Festival’s prestigious Panorama sidebar, a good sign of its potential appeal in cinemas and festivals worldwide. Whether it will secure distribution in its native Kazakhstan is another matter, however.Based on actual events, “Happiness” centers on a lovely influencer who promotes a product line called Happiness, which she pitches as a surefire path to happiness, beauty and success.But her home life reflects the opposite where her abusive husband grows ever more violent.

Emiliano Granada World premiering in the Berlinale’s Forum, “Dry Ground Burning” marks the second feature collaboration between directors Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós, after Pimenta DP-ed Queirós’ “Once There Was Brasilia.”So it’s no surprise that by this point the directorial couple have refined a common language that in “Dry Ground Burning” delivers a movie that’s stylistically refrained, while walking a fine line between documentary and a fiction with sci-fi and Western overtones.Produced by Cinco Da Norte and Terratreme with Pimenta once again behind the camera, the duo returns to their portrayal of the inhabitants of Ceilandia, a district on the periphery of Brasilia which has been a recurring subject in both filmmakers work. The film follows sisters Chitarra and Léa, leaders of an all female gang who refines oil drawn from an oil pipeline to sell to motor bikers in the Sol Nascente favela.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief“The Novelist’s Film,” which Wednesday earned Korean director Hong Sang-soo the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin, has scored multiple rights deals. With Seoul-based Finecut handling the rights sales, the film was licensed to Ama Films for Greece and Cyprus, Mimosa Films for Japan, L’Atalante Cinema for Spain, Arizona Films Distribution for France and to The Cinema Guild for the U.S.Finecut also did European Film Market business with “Contorted,” an unorthodox horror about a family tragedy.

Cinema Guild has acquired U.S. rights to The Novelist’s Film, the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner from South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo, which recently made its world premiere at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival. The film is the third Silver Bear winner in as many years from Hong—who won Best Director for The Woman Who Ran in 2020 and Best Screenplay for Introduction in 2021—and will be the 11th of the director’s works released by Cinema Guild in the last seven years.

BERLIN -- The Catalan family drama “Alcarràs” won the Golden Bear award for best movie at the Berlin International Film Festival on Wednesday.Director Carla Simón's film was picked from a field of 18 by a seven-member jury under American filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan.He said the movie was honored “for its extraordinary performances, from the child actors to the actors in their 80s, for the ability to show the tenderness and comedy of family and struggle, and for the betrayal of our connection and dependence on the land around us.”The film depicts a family that spends its summers picking peaches in an orchard in a village in Spain's Catalonia region, but faces new owners who plan to replace the peach trees with solar panels.Meltem Kaptan took the best leading performance honor for the title role in German director Andreas Dresen's “Rabiye Kurnaz vs.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAdriana Chiesa Enterprises has taken world sales on high-profile doc “Caterina Caselli: One Life, 100 Voices,” about the former Italian pop singer, base player and actress who is now president of Andrea Bocelli’s record label, Sugar Music.The veteran Italian sales agent is lauching sales on the doc at the online EFM.Directed by Renato De Maria, who is known for films such as “Love Me” and “The First Line,” which went to Toronto – and more recently Netflix Italy original “The Ruthless” – the doc delves into Caselli’s career which kicked off with the 1966 Sanremo song fest where she performed proto feminist song “Nessuno mi può giudicare,” (which translates as “Nobody Can Judge Me”). It went gold, selling over one million copies.

Here’s another walking-and-talking film from festival favorite Hong Sang-soo, encapsulating a sliver of Korean life with his customary elusive delicacy. Shot largely in creamy black and white, Berlin competition entry The Novelist’s Film centers on the meeting between two artists who, for different reasons, have simply stopped working.

Manori Ravindran International EditorSovereign Distribution has launched a new label to develop action content for film and TV.Action Xtreme will be headed up by writer and director Chee Keong Cheung, with Sovereign founder and CEO Andreas Roald joining the board. The label will join the U.K.

Former Manchester United midfielder Paul Ince believes Jadon Sancho has struggled to adapt to life in the Premier League because it is a step up in quality from the Bundesliga.

Holly Jones By way of improvisation, relying heavily on events to naturally develop, Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki presents a meandering ode to the city of Vienna, its customs, cultures, facades, and the near-sacrilege of enacting a smoking ban in cafes city-wide.In, “A Little Love Package,” two main protagonists become the vehicles through which the minutiae of everyday life in Vienna unfolds. Experimental aural and visual cues present themselves as Angeliki (Angeliki Papoulia) and Carmen (Carmen Chaplin) seek the perfect apartment in a city suspended in time.Produced by Little Magnet Films, out of Austria, and Solnicki’s Argentine production company, Filmy Wiktora, “A Little Love Package” is the fifth cinematic feature for Solnicki, whose entire catalog was recently acquired by MOMA.

The real star of Mutzenbacher, an austere Austrian documentary screening in the Encounters strand at the Berlin Film Festival, is a gaudy but once elegant settee that has seen better days, and likely even service in a 1970s pornographic movie (it is described early on as looking like “a former erotic sofa”). Fittingly, it is literally a casting couch for director Ruth Beckermann, who entertains a parade of men aged between 16 and 99 — her specific criteria — as she holds an open audition for a role in her latest film.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentChiara Bellosi, whose first work, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin’s Generation 14plus section in 2020, is back with “Swing Ride” (“Calcinculo”) about an overweight 15-year-old named Benedetta pining for attention in an Italian province where she falls in love with the skinny non-binary Amanda.A key difference between the two films is that while “Ordinary Justice,” which examined the lives of two families on opposite sides of a murder case, originated from a deeply researched screenplay that Bellosi wrote, “Swing Ride” — premiering in Panorama on Feb. 13 — stems from a prizewinning script proposed to her by Carlo Cresto Dina, her producer, who also discovered Alice Rohrwacher (“Happy as Lazzaro”) and is known for nurturing the cream of Italy’s new cinematic crop.   “It’s a very different process; it was the first time that I had to start from a world that didn’t germinate from me,” said Bellosi about working from the script penned by Maria Teresa Venditti and Luca De Bei that won Italy’s prestigious Solinas prize in 2018.It was like moving into a new house that she had to make her own, she said.“I worked with the writers; I wanted to make a few tweaks and we did that together,” she added, noting that initially “it was a leap into the void.” But directing from their screenplay actually ended up giving her “more freedom” than her previous pic because “the container is already there; but you can go pretty wild with the rest.”This freedom also made it more fun.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentRAI Com is launching sales at the online EFM on Giuseppe Piccioni’s Fascist-era drama ‘L’Ombra del giorno,” starring Italian A-lister Riccardo Scamarcio (“Three Floors”) and Benedetta Porcaroli (“Baby,” “The Catholic School”).Pic, which Scamarcio produced, is a love story with a thriller twist set in 1938, two years before Italy entered World War II. It unfolds entirely in the central Italian town of Ascoli Piceno, a hidden gem with gorgeous medieval monuments, churches and piazzas.The film’s title translates as “The Shadow of the Day,” a reference to the darkness of Fascism.Luciano (Scamarcio), a wounded World War I veteran and a sympathizer of Fascism like most Italians at the time, runs a classy restaurant overlooking the town’s ancient square.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentAdding to its notable lineup in Latin American movies, Paris-based sales agent MPM Premium has taken international sales rights to “Fogaréu,” from writer-director Flávia Neves, part of Brazil’s new wave of female filmmakers, which is one of the most exciting developments the country’s cinema currently has going for it.MPM Premium is introducing the film at this week’s Berlin Festival, where it world premieres in Panorama on Feb. 15.First glimpsed at 2020’s Ventana Sur project market, “Fogaréu” shares a sense of attitude and a feminist agenda and a visual verve with fellow Brazilian Ventana Sur titles “The Pink Cloud,” Iuli Gerbase’s a sci-fi character-driven thriller, and “The Joy of Things,” Thais Fujinaga’s portrait of motherhood, also playing at the same market.

Naman Ramachandran Kino Lorber has acquired U.S. rights to writer-director Ajitpal Singh’s debut feature, “Fire in the Mountains,” which premiered in the World Dramatic Competition of the Sundance Film Festival in 2021.A powerful feminist tale set in a tourist homestay in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, the film centers around a woman (Vinamrata Rai), the sole breadwinner of the household, who scrimps and saves for her son’s medical treatment, while her alcoholic husband believes that an expensive shamanic ritual is the answer to all their woes.The film is produced by Alan McAlex and Ajai Rai of prolific Indian arthouse producers Jar Pictures alongside Mauli Singh and Amit Mehta.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentTel-Aviv-based Cinephil, the sales company behind triple-Oscar nominated “Flee,” has snapped up world rights, excluding U.S., to Italian director Nicolò Bassetti’s transgender-themed doc “Into My Name,” which is executive-produced by Elliot Page.UTA Independent Film Group will be handling North American rights. The buzzy doc, which world-premieres at the Berlin Film Festival in the Panorama Documentary section, stems from Bassetti’s personal experience with the gender transition of his child, Matteo.“Into My Name” provides an intimate look at the universal challenges of gender transition by observing a tight-knit group of trans friends in the central Italian city of Bologna. Cinephil managing director Olivier Tournaud in a statement said that he was “immediately taken” by Bassetti’s “sensitive and relatable exploration of the many facets of gender and even more so the love letter from a father to his son.”“Into My Name is timely and spotlights voices that need to be heard; this is exactly the kind of film Cinephil is proud to represent,” Tournaud noted.Bassetti underlined that for him the doc “is a deeply personal project, both as a parent of a transgender son and as a director who has always explored individual paths that show our shared humanity.” “I trust that together with a strong partner such as Cinephil, we can add to the awareness and understanding of trans issues with international audiences,” the director said.The doc’s characters, Nico, Leo, Andrea and Raff — whose ages span from their mid-20s to mid-30s — come from different parts of Italy, and started their gender transition from a female to a male identity at different times in their lives.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorThe trailer for Gu∂mundur Arnar Gu∂mundsson’s teen drama “Beautiful Beings” has debuted ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. The film, which plays in Panorama, is being sold by Jan Naszewski’s New Europe Film Sales.

Christopher Vourlias Berlin Golden Bear winner Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”) is set to begin production in Romania on his next feature, Variety can reveal.“A Case History” analyzes the relations between individuals and multinational companies in the mad dash of new Romanian capitalism, starting from the real story of preparing and shooting a problematic work safety video. Principal photography is slated to begin in summer or early fall.“The film is composed of two parts which respond to each other, forming a diptych of sorts,” said Jude.

Jose Mourinho has claimed Alexis Sanchez was 'not happy' playing for Manchester United in England.

Comments made by Jose Mourinho about Manchester United flop Alexis Sanchez came back to haunt the coach and his Roma team in Coppa Italia last night.