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New features from Tatiana Huezo, Kirsten Tan and Stephan Komandarev are among the 35 projects selected for the 2025Berlinale Co-Production Market.

The 35 projects hail from 27 countries, and will participate in the market to find financing and production partners. The Berlinale has also programmed its Forum Special and Forum Expanded strands.

Scroll down for the full list of titles

Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker Huezo will participate with her new project Galerna, produced by Mexico’s Pimienta Films. Huezo’s first fiction feature Prayers For The Stolenwon a special mention in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2021, and was Mexico’s entry for the international feature Oscar.

The Berlinale’s Co-Production Market has selected 35 feature projects for its 2025 edition, including new works from Tatiana Huezo, Kirsten Tan and Stephan Komandarev.

The 35 projects hail from 27 countries, and will participate in the market to find financing and production partners. The Berlinale has also programmed its Forum Special and Forum Expanded strands.

Scroll down for the full list of titles

Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker Huezo will participate with her new project Galerna, produced by Mexico’s Pimienta Films. Huezo’s first fiction feature Prayers For The Stolenwon a special mention in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2021, and was Mexico’s entry for the international feature Oscar.

Directed by Lawrence Chen, “Starring Jerry as Himself” is a hybrid documentary that mostly shows a fictionalized version of a true-life narrative. It revolves around Jerry S Hsu, a Chinese-American immigrant in his late sixties, living his twilight years in Orlando, Florida. Recently divorced, he lives a bachelor’s life all by himself. Like any parent who immigrated to a Western land, he entered this country to provide better lives for his children. Throughout his life, he had been frugal to a fault. He spent on his bare necessities without indulging in anything. This is a particularly Asian-father trait, whether you’re from Southern nations or the Eastern ones.

After leading his life for his family’s happiness, Jerry is now a retired man. Still, he is open to helping his children with their needs. Even during their family reunion, he is a kind presence in their lives. However, underneath his calm and composed exterior,...

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, Mark Cousins‘ documentary essay about Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and her neurodiversity, including diary passages narrated by Tilda Swinton, won the Grand Prix – Crystal Globe, the top award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) on Saturday. Clive Owen was honored with a Kviff award at the closing ceremony.

A Sudden Glimpse is “exploring the pivotal 1949 experience atop Switzerland’s Grindelwald glacier that reshaped British modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s artistic perspective for decades to come.” The Crystal Globe comes with a $25,000 prize. “I did not expect this in a million years,” Cousins said in accepting the honor. About Barns-Graham, he said: “She didn’t change the world. But she lived completely, fully and utterly. Let’s try to do that.”

The 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival‘s closing ceremony also honored the Norwegian marital drama Loveable, directed by Lilja Ingolfsdottir, with its special jury prize,...

Athens-based sales and production outfit Heretic has sold key territories on the Cannes Film Festival’s Acid sidebar opening film, Greece’s “Kyuka: Before Summer’s End.”

Heretic has sealed distribution deals for France with The Dark, Benelux with Gusto Entertainment and Greece with Cinobo.

Directed by feature debutant Kostis Charamountanis, who previously directed several acclaimed shorts, the film follows a family of three, a single father, Babis, and his twin children on the verge of adulthood, Konstantinos and Elsa, who sail to the island of Poros on the family boat for their holidays. In the midst of swimming, sunbathing and making new friends, Konstantinos and Elsa meet, unbeknownst to them, their birth mother Anna who abandoned them when they were babies. The encounter stirs up long-held feelings of resentment in Babis, resulting in a bittersweet coming-of-age journey.

The film, which had its world premiere last week, opening Cannes Acid (Association...

Athens-based boutique film outfit Heretic has two titles in the Cannes Acid (Association for the International Distribution of Independent Cinemas) sidebar.

Heretic’s own Greek production, co-produced with North Macedonia’s List Production, “Kyuka Before Summer’s End,” by debut director Kostas Charamountanis, is the opening film of the Acid program. The film follows a family of three, a single father, Babis, and his twin children on the verge of adulthood, Konstantinos and Elsa, who sail to the island of Poros on the family boat for their holidays. In the midst of swimming, sunbathing and making new friends, Konstantinos and Elsa meet, unbeknownst to them, their birth mother Anna who abandoned them when they were babies. The encounter stirs up long-held feelings of resentment in Babis, resulting in a bittersweet coming-of-age journey.

“Kyuka Before Summer’s End” is produced by Danae Spathara, Giorgos Karnavas and Konstantinos Kontovrakis of Heretic, Greece...

Variety Awards Circuit section is the home for all awards news and related content throughout the year, featuring the following: the official predictions for the upcoming Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and Tony Awards ceremonies, curated by Variety senior awards editor Clayton Davis. The prediction pages reflect the current standings in the race and do not reflect personal preferences for any individual contender. As other formal (and informal) polls suggest, competitions are fluid and subject to change based on buzz and events. Predictions are updated every Thursday.

Visit the prediction pages for the respective ceremonies via the links below:

Oscars | Emmys | Grammys | Tonys

2024 Oscars Predictions:

Best International Feature Wim Wenders’ ‘Perfect Days’

Weekly Commentary: The United Kingdom is poised to win its first Academy Award with Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” and what a deserved win it will be.

But while I have the floor: it’s time for the...

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has unveiled its slate of public programming for the 2024 spring season, which will include a tribute and retrospective of the work of Marlon Brando, a May the 4th “Star Wars” celebration and a world premiere 4K restoration of “Amadeus,” among others.

The Academy Museum will screen John Waters’ short films “Roman Candles” and “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket” with live commentary by Waters. Exhibitions include a celebration of Oscar-winning music in Indian cinema, a film series focused on queer female lensers in early Hollywood, a retrospective on actor Youn Yuh-Jung, a behind-the-scenes presentation of Dykstraflex, used to film the original “Star Wars” trilogy.

Special guests will include Ed Begley Jr., Cary Elwes, Jane Fonda, Yunte Huang, Nyla Innuksuk, Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Patricia Rozema, Bird Runningwater, Mink Stole, John Waters, Youn Yuh-jung and more.

“This spring, we’re delighted to present an array of one-of-a-kind programming,...

The New Directors/New Films lineup boasts a slew of 2024 festival breakout features.

The annual festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, will take place from April 3 to April 14 at Film at Lincoln Center. Sundance premiere “A Different Man,” Berlinale best first feature winner “Cu Li Never Cries,” and Locarno Film Festival winner “A Good Place” are among this year’s standout titles.

The 53rd annual festival celebrates rising filmmakers who redefine the state of cinema. The 2024 lineup includes 25 features and 10 short films, including one world premiere. “A Different Man,” directed by Aaron Schimberg and co-starring Berlinale best actor winner Sebastian Stan, will open the festival April 3. Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions,” which also premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, will close New Directors/New Films April 14. Both features were directed by New York City-based filmmakers.

“It just feels right for us to bookend...

Heretic has acquired world sales right to Iranian director Aliyar Rasti’s “The Great Yawn of History,” a debut feature that premieres this month in the competitive Encounters strand of the Berlin Film Festival.

The film tells the story of a man who dreams of a box of gold waiting for him at the end of a cave. Curbed by his religious belief that it’s not permissible to go after it himself, he employs the assistance of a non-believer. Together they embark on a long journey across the Iranian landscape in pursuit of a miracle. But their treasure hunt soon turns tempting also for those they meet along the way.

Heretic’s head of sales and acquisitions, Ioanna Stais, praised the first-time director’s film for how it deftly transforms into an intricate game of hide-and-seek between faith and human frailty.

“From road trip to allegory, Aliyar’s poetic...

The Göteborg Film Festival has unveiled the competition titles selected for its 47th edition, which runs from January 26 to February 4. (Scroll down for the full list).

Göteborg is split into four competition strands. The main strand is the Nordic Competition, which features nine films from the Nordic region. The competition’s winner takes home the Dragon Award and a Sek 400,000 cash prize. The rest of the festival comprises the Nordic Documentary Competition, the Ingmar Bergman Competition for first-time filmmakers, and the International Competition.

Among the Nordic highlights is Madame Luna, Swedish filmmaker Daniel Espinosa’s return to Nordic filmmaking following a series of Hollywood titles such as Morbius and Safe House. Inspired by real-life events, the film follows an Eritrean refugee who gets stuck in Libya and becomes a notorious human trafficker known as “Mama Luna” with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. When she is forced to flee to...

The shortlist of 15 films set to vie for a Best International Feature Film Oscar nomination only has a few surprises in the mix.

Firstly, there are a couple of crossovers with films also included on the documentary shortlist: Ukraine’s 20 Days in Mariupol and Tunisia’s Four Daughters. At the same time, Morocco’s The Mother of All Lies, also eligible in documentary, landed a shortlist slot only in International Feature.

For Ukraine, this is the first inclusion on an International Feature shortlist. For a narrative feature, same goes for Armenia with Michael A. Goorjian’s Amerikatsi.

Bhutan, here with The Monk and the Gun, is a comer. After landing the country’s first advancement in 2021 with Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, director Pawo Choyning Dorji is again in the mix.

Related: Oscar Doc Shortlist Scores & Shockers: ‘American Symphony Earns Trifecta, But Two Doc Legends Snubbed

A surprise here is Iceland’s Godland,...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences branches began voting today to determine the shortlists in 10 categories for the upcoming 96th Academy Awards. These categories, along with the number of films to be named, are: documentary feature (15), documentary short subject (15), international feature (15), makeup and hairstyling (10), sound (10), original score (15), original song (15), animated short film (15), live action short film (15), and visual effects (10).

The shortlist voting period runs from Dec. 14-18, with the finalists announced on Dec. 21. Nominations voting will occur from Jan. 11-16, and the official nominees in all categories will be revealed on Jan. 23.

The Academy comprises nearly 10,000 eligible voting members, each belonging to one of 18 branches. Each branch nominates for its respective category. However, four branches (as of now) don’t represent specific awards categories: casting directors, executives, marketing/public relations and the recently created production and technology.

Of note is that each branch member casts a ballot for best picture,...

Deadline on Monday launched the streaming site for its Contenders Film: International, featuring the full panel videos from Saturday’s award-season showcase of 12 movies submitted by their countries to this year’s Oscar International Feature race.

Click here to launch the streaming site.

Actors who took part in the discussions included South Korean entry Concrete Utopia‘s Lee Byung-hun, Renée Soutendijk from Netherlands’ Sweet Dreams, Eli Skorcheva from Bulgaria’s Blaga’s Lessons and Eliane Umuhire from Belgium’s Omen.

They were joined among others by directors including J.A. Bayona from Netflix’s Society of the Snow, Hugh Welchman from Poland’s The Peasants, Noora Niasari from Australia’s Shayda, llker Çatak from Germany’s The Teachers’ Lounge, Concrete Utopia‘s Um Tae-hwa, Ena Sendijarević from Sweet Dreams, Stephan Komandarev from Blaga’s Lessons, Omar Hilal from Egypt’s Voy! Voy! Voy!, Jude Anthany Joseph from India’s 2018 – Everyone Is a Hero,...

Filmmaker Stephan Komandarev, whose credits include two previous Bulgarian Oscar entries including the shortlisted The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner, wrapped a movie trilogy about the social ills of post-communist society with Blaga’s Lessons, about the harrowing journey of a retired teacher through the dangerous world of phone scams.

Taking care of his elderly parents over the past decade inspired Komandarev to take a closer look at the plight of retirees.

“This is the generation of our parents, and they became the biggest victim of the process of transition (from communism to democracy) that is already 30 years; somehow they lost the dignity of their last years,” he said during an interview for the Argo Films movie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International.

He hopes the film and its shocking ending will provoke discussion about “the chronic problem” of how society treats its elderly and help bring in a positive change.

Deadline’s Contenders Film: International award-season event launches Saturday beginning at 9 a.m. Pt, the latest in our series of showcases that this time turns the focus toward global cinema via discussions with the casts and creatives of 12 movies submitted by their countries for the 2024 Academy Awards’ International Feature race.

Click to sign up for and watch today’s livestream.

The 2023 Oscar ceremony was a triumph for international film. Going into the ceremony, Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front was a winner already, having earned a spectacular seven nominations. If that wasn’t enough, it came away with four statuettes: one for International Feature, and three for Cinematography, Music and Production Design. Clearly this can’t happen every year, but, like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite before it, Berger’s World War I epic proved that boundaries are being broken down, and international film, once synonymous with arthouse,...

Shortlist of 15 films to be announced December 21, nominations out on January 23, 2024.

The Academy has announced eligible features in the categories of international feature film, animation, and documentary for the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024.

The shortlist of 15 films will be announced on December 21, and the nominations announcement is January 23, 2024.

International

Eighty-eight countries or regions have submitted films eligible for consideration in the international feature film category. An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (more than 40 minutes long) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track. Namibia is a first-time entrant.

Academy members...

The 54th edition of India’s Goa Film Festival concluded Tuesday evening with a tribute to Michael Douglas, who picked up the fest’s Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Cinema.

Previous winners of the award — which organizers say celebrates individuals whose unparalleled contributions have enriched the cinematic landscape — include Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dilip Kumar, Carlos Saura, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Wong Kar-wai.

“It’s a tremendous honor to receive this award. It’s a career life achievement. When I heard about the award, my family and I were elated,” Douglas said. The veteran Basic Instinct actor was joined by his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and son Dylan Douglas.

Later, during his acceptance speech, Douglas touched on world affairs, highlighting the role he believes cinema can play in bringing people together. Douglas also gave a shoutout to what he described as some of his favorite Indian films, including Rrr,...

The 54th International Film Festival of India (Iffi), Goa, concluded on Tuesday with Hollywood veteran Michael Douglas accepting the Satyajit Ray lifetime achievement award for excellence in cinema.

Previous winners of the award include Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dilip Kumar, Carlos Saura, Krzysztof Zanussi and Wong Kar-wai.

“It’s a tremendous honor to receive this award, a career life achievement. When I heard about the award, my family and I were elated,” said Douglas, who was accompanied by wife Catherine Zeta Jones and their son Dylan Douglas. The two-time Oscar winning actor said that his favorite Indian films are “Rrr,” “Om Shanti Om” and “The Lunchbox.” The award was conferred during the festival’s closing ceremony by Bollywood actor Ayushmann Khurrana and Pramod Sawant, chief minister of Goa.

At the festival’s international competition, the jury, presided over by veteran filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, awarded best film to Abbas Amini’s Rotterdam-winning Iranian film “Endless Borders.

Iffi 2023: Endless Borders Wins Best Film, Panchayat Season 2 Awarded Best Web Series Honor! ( Photo Credit – IMDb )

The 54th edition of the acclaimed International Film Festival of India (Iffi) honored groundbreaking performances from the world of cinema and Ott during the closing ceremony on Tuesday (November 28). Abbas Amini’s Endless Borders bagged the Best Film honor, while Rishabh Shetty, who has swept the majority of awards this year for Kantara, took home the Special Jury Award for his film, which has now become a cultural phenomenon. Panchayat Season 2 was at the forefront of scripting history by winning the first-ever Best Web Series (Ott) Award. Hollywood legend Michael Douglas, meanwhile, received the Satyajit Ray Lifetime Achievement Award.

Endless Borders Wins Best Film

The Persian film Endless Borders, directed by Abbas Amini, took home the award for Best Film at Iffi 2023. The film, follows an exiled Iranian teacher, Ahmad, living in...

“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” from Romania’s Radu Jude, added to its ever larger silverware collection, winning the top Albar Award at Spain’s Gijón Festival.

Gijón’s big win join not only a Special Jury Prize at August’s Locarno Film Festival, where the film was the most talked about – one of Jude’s aims– and lauded of competition titles among reviewers, plus a Chicago Silver Hugo best performance nod (Ilinca Manolache) in October and a Lisbon Fest Jury Prize late last month.

Over 61 editions, and most especially when José Luis Cienfuegos, now Valladolid chief, took over its reins in 1995, the Gijón-Xijón Film Festival (Ficx) has carved out an identity as highlighting edgier international auteurs and indie fare, moving into promoting often more singular movies from a burgeoning new generation of Spanish filmmakers, greeted with enthusiasm by discerning and predominantly YA audiences...

Blaga’s Lessons, Bulgaria’s International Film Oscar submission, has set a release in multiple countries.

The film. written and directed by Stephan Komandarev, will hit theaters in Germany in January through distributor Jip Film. Following an October 20 limited release, Blaga’s Lessons will go wide in Bulgaria on Dec. 15th. Its domestic distributor is A Plus Films.

Additionally, the film is premiering in Spring 2023 in Sweden with distributor November, January 2023 in Taiwan with Swallow Wings, with releases also planned in Spain with Filmin, Greece with Danaos, and Slovakia with Association of Slovak Film Clubs.

Blaga’s Lessons also will be carried by Warner Bros. Discovery’s HBO/Max and Cinemax in the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Albania, Bulgaria and Adriatic countries.

The movie world premiered in July at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival where it won the Grand Prix for Best Film as well as Best Actress...

The submissions for this year’s Oscar for best international feature include some of the best of world cinema. Below is a rundown of the entries for the 96th Academy Awards. The 15-title shortlist is slated to arrive on Dec. 21, prior to the nominations announcement on Jan. 23 and the ceremony itself, which is dated for March 10.

Albania

Alexander

Director: Ardit Sadiku

Logline: A documentary about an engineer who, after being fired by the navy for dissidence, hijacked a warship to get himself an dhis family to freedom.

Prodco: Ardit Sadiku Film

Argentina

The Delinquents

Director: Rodrigo Moreno

Logline: A ticklish, gently surreal saga following two colleagues who collude in robbing the bank where they work.

U.S. distribution: Mubi

Armenia

Amerikatsi

Director: Michael A. Goorjian

Logline: An Armenian-American relocates to Armenia after WWII and ends up in a Soviet prison for the crime of wearing a tie.

U.S.

This may be the comeback of the decade. In her first film role in almost 30 years, Bulgarian actress Eli Skorcheva — who had gone into self-exile from cinema, changing careers and working odd jobs including as a cleaning lady – stars in Blaga’s Lessons, which earned her the Best Actress Award at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival and is Bulgaria’s 2024 International Film Oscar submission.

The movie by Stephan Komandarev also won the Grand Prix Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary and just added the Grand Jury Prize at the Rome Film Festival.

Like Skorcheva’s accidental first foray into movies in the late 1970s with a lead role that made her a star, her successful return was not planned; it came courtesy of her dog. (More on that later.) Her triumph with Blaga’s Lessons also may have been foreshadowed by Baba Vanga, the famous Bulgarian blind mystic credited with predicting...

Oscar voters in the Best International Feature Film category have received their group assignments for this year’s initial round of voting, with 89 films included on the seven lists that the Academy has sent to members.

The lists, which were obtained by TheWrap, include presumed favorites “The Zone of Interest” (United Kingdom), “The Taste of Things” (France), “The Promised Land” (Denmark) and “Perfect Days” (Japan), along with a number of documentaries, among them Estonia’s “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” Brazil’s “Pictures of Ghosts” and Ukraine’s “20 Days in Mariupol.”

The 89 films are four short of the record of 93 qualifying films in the category. The list of group assignments does not make up the Academy’s official list of eligible films; it’s possible that assigned films might still fail to qualify before first-round voting begins on Dec. 18. For the most part, though, films that are included in the group...

Iranian drama film “Empty Nets” was Monday named winner of the Aff Feature Fiction Award at the Adelaide Film Festival. Directed by Behrooz Karamizade, it collected an A$10,000 cash prize.

The festival’s competition section is one of the oldest in Australia and seeks to reward bold filmmaking. This year’s competition mostly comprised films by directors making their feature debuts. They included “Blaga’s Lessons,” from Bulgarian director Stephan Komandarev; “Embryo Larva Butterfly,” by Greek-Cypriot writer-director Kyros Papavassiliou; “On The Go,” from directors Julia de Castro and Maria Gisele Royo; “Sahela,” directed by Australia’s Raghuvir Joshi; and “You’ll Never Find Me,” from Adelaide-based duo Josiah Allen and Indianna Bell.

“’Empty Nets’ is a searing portrait of the bleak socioeconomic reality for young people without family money in contemporary Iran, distinguished by atmospheric visuals, an evocative sense of place, stirring lead performances and a powerful grasp of the sea as...

The jury included ‘The Royal Hotel’ director Kitty Green.

Behrooz Karamizade’s Empty Nets and Ibrahim Nash’at’s documentary Hollywoodgate have scooped the top prizes at Adelaide Film Festival (Aff)

Empty Nets received the Aff Feature Fiction Award, with Iranian-born German filmmaker Karamizade winning a cash prize of $6,300.

The Germany-Iran co-production centres on a young couple fighting for the survival of their relationship in the forbidding world of contemporary Iran. The film previously won the special jury prize at Karlovy Vary and premiered at Filmfest München.

The five-strong jury, which included filmmakers Kitty Green and Goran Stolevski, described the film...

Three festival-goers will choose the winner of the international series competition.

Switzerland’s Geneva International Film Festival (Giff) has unveiled the programme for its 29th edition, with festival hits including Polite Society and The Sweet East, and a new format for its international series competition.

The festival includes 110 works, of which 53 are films, 27 are series, 28 are immersive experiences and two are installations.

Scroll down for the feature and series competition titles

Giff includes four competition sections: international feature, international series, international immersive and the convergent competition – the latter section featuring projects from all three formats.

All 12 titles in the international...

A pair of noteworthy Cannes titles in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu, some Locarno items such as Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World but with a major slew of Venice-preemed films are part of the 21 newly added titles to be considered for a whole bunch of prizes for the upcoming European Film Awards. The European Film Academy have now set their 4600 members with a batch of 40 films competing for various prizes at the ceremony that will be set for December 9th in Berlin. Here are the added films:

Animal – Sofia Exarchou (Greece/Austria/Bulgaria/Romania/Cyprus)

Blaga’s Lessons – Stephan Komandarev (Bulgaria/Germany)

Club Zero – Jessica Hausner (Austria/UK/Germany/France/Denmark/Qatar)

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude (Romania/Luxembourg/France/Croatia)

Excursion – Una Gunjak (Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia...

40 feature films now selected for Academy’s 2023 shortlist.

The European Film Academy has added a further 21 features to its shortlist for the 2023 European Film Awards, including Cannes premieres The Zone of Interest and Club Zero and Venice competition titles The Green Border and Io Capitano.

The shortlist for the European Film Awards now comprises 40 features. The first 19 titles titles in the running for the 2023 European Film Awards were unveiled in August and included Anatomy Of A Fall, How To Have Sex, The Old Oak and Firebrand.

The European Film Academy said that more than 40% of all selected films are directed by women.

Predicting the eventual five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature is made difficult by the three-step process that begins after the October 2, 2023 deadline for countries to submit entries. To be part of the selection process for this category, which was called Best Foreign Language Film before 2020, requires a great deal of dedication. (Scroll down for the most up-to-date 2024 Oscars Best International Feature predictions.)

In the days following the deadline for submissions, the academy determines each film’s eligibility. Then the several hundred academy members who serve on the International Feature screening committee are divided into groups and required to watch all their submissions over a six-week period that ends in early December. Their top 15 vote-getters will make it to the next round. That list of semi-finalists will be revealed on December 21, 2023.

These 15 films will be made available to the entire academy membership who can cast ballots for the final five...

The Oscars Best International Feature Film race landed two major frontrunners on the same day on Thursday, with the United Kingdom submitting Jonathan Glazer’s chilling World War II drama “The Zone of Interest” and France following with Tran Anh Hung’s rapturous “The Taste of Things” in the one-film-per-country competition.

“The Zone of Interest,” set among German families who live on the outskirts of Auschwitz, won the Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and won raves as one of the most original and unnerving films to deal with the Holocaust since “Son of Saul,” which won the Oscar in this category eight years ago. It was considered the obvious choice for the U.K. to submit.

France, on the other hand, had an extremely difficult choice between Palme d’Or winner “Anatomy of a Fall,” starring Sandra Huller as a woman on trial for murdering her husband,...

The South Australian festival iis now an annual event.

Films from Europe, the Middle East and Australia dominate the fiction and documentary competitions at the Adelaide Film Festival (Aff), the first since an injection of government funding enabled the event to step up from being biennial to annual.

The festival will take place in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, from October 18-29.

The opening film will be the Australian premiere of Kitty Green’s Toronto premiere and awards hopeful The Royal Hotel, produced by UK-Australian outfit See-Saw Films. The world premiere of Scott Hicks’ music documentary My Name’s Ben Folds – I Play Piano,...

Stars Acting Up At Busan

Oscar-winning Korean actor Youn Yuh-jung will headline the Actors’ House section of the upcoming Busan International Film Festival, it was announced on Thursday.

Introduced in 2021, Actors’ House is a special series that connects audiences and film enthusiasts with iconic actors from the current generation through its in-depth discussions. “There’s much anticipation to hear her words of wisdom, as she’s known for her insightful observations,” said the festival.

Others this year include: Han Hyo-joo, Song Joong-ki and Korean-American actor and author John Cho. Han is known for performances in 2015’s “The Beauty Inside,” “W” (2016), “Happiness (2021), and last year’s “The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure.” She will be in Busan with Netflix-backed “Believer 2” and recently appeared in the Disney+ original series, “Moving.”

Song, who hosted the 2021 Busan festival’s opening ceremony, was recently seen in “Hopeless,” one of the handful of Korean films in Cannes this year.

Stephan Komandarev’s Blaga’s Lessons (Уроците на Блага), which took the Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe Competition at 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as well as the Best Actress Award for its star Eli Skorcheva, will be Bulgaria’s International Film submission for the 2024 Academy Awards.

The country’s selection committee picked the dark contemporary drama by an unanimous decision Thursday. The choice makes Komandarev the Bulgarian director with the most Foreign Language/International Film Oscar entries, three.

You can watch a trailer below.

He holds the distinction of directing the only Bulgarian submission to make the category’s short list with the crowd pleaser The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner in 2009. His migrant drama The Judgement competed in 2015.

Blaga’s Lessons, a Bulgarian-German co-production, is the third film in Komandarev’s trilogy about his country’s social ills which he embarked on following The Judgement.

It’s a welcome sight for any longtime visitors returning to Sarajevo, the white-jacketed waiters circling the terrace of the majestic, Austro-Hungarian-built Hotel Europe as film and TV industry professionals parse scripts and close deals amid the espresso-fueled chatter. Around them a haze of cigarette smoke hovers like the mist that settles each morning over the green hills that ring this scenic Bosnian city.

Each summer hundreds of industry guests from around the globe descend on the historic, 140-year-old Hotel Europe, which survived two World Wars and the shelling that razed Sarajevo in the 1990s and serves as the de facto hub of industry events during the Sarajevo Film Festival. Twenty years after its launch in a city still emerging from the rubble of a brutal, four-year siege, CineLink Industry Days has grown into the leading film and TV industry event in the Balkan region — a success story as improbable...

”It’s all about enthusiam, stubborness and determination,” he says.

Aged 85, Roger Gibson is preparing for his final edition as artistic director of the Chichester International Film Festival. He has built it into one of the UK’s leading regional film festivals since launching it in 1992.

Over the years guests travelling to the south of England festival have included Alec Guinness, Stephen Poliakoff, Kathleen Turner, Ken Russell, Mike Leigh and Ralph Fiennes. This year’s guest list is equally impressive: the festival has programmed retrospectives of work by Cate Blanchett and Hugh Bonneville, and both actors are set to attend,...

Recipients also include ‘Made In EU’ the new film by Bulgaria’s Stephan Komanderev.

Made In EU, the new film by award-winning Bulgarian filmmaker Stephan Komanderev, has received €220,000 from the Leipzig-based regional German fund Mdm in its latest round of awards.

Produced by Halle-based 42Film, which also produced Karlovy Vary winner Blaga’s Lessons, the film is based on real events that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bulgaria. A seamstress working in a clothing factory in a small town is at the centre of an online drama when she is labelled “patient zero” and accused of infecting her...

The lessons learned in this pitch-black German-Bulgarian co-production are very grim indeed, a social-realist drama that takes an unexpectedly shocking turn at its harrowing climax. The film’s recent win at Karlovy Vary, where it took the Grand Prix in the Crystal Globe Competition, should give it a welcome boost on the arthouse circuit, but the unwary are warned that Stephan Komandarev’s latest feature packs a punch not seen since Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke in their provocative prime.

Blaga (Eli Skorcheva) is a widow, grieving after the recent death of her beloved husband Hristo, a former policeman. After saving up, she plans to buy a plot of land to bury him in, 40 days after his passing, with a custom-made double gravestone for them both. Hristo “believed in Lenin more than Jesus,” but Blaga’s desire to substitute a cross for a red star is expressly forbidden in Bulgarian law.

Russell Crowe is standing on a stage, playing an electric guitar. He’s singing “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash, accompanied by a trumpetist, a drummer, someone at a keyboard, another guitarist, and even four backing singers. He starts rocking out to the instrumental section. The crowd, full of Czech film industry insiders, international critics, and fans, is undoubtedly entertained.

This is not yet another remake of “A Star Is Born,” but simply the kind of event you can expect to witness at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, taking place every summer in the Czech city and welcoming talent from all over the world.

First established in 1946, Kviff went through a transformation in the early 1990s following the fall of communism. Karel Och, working at the festival since 2001 and its artistic director since 2011, thinks this shift explains how spectators themselves have changed.

“They didn’t really react at Q&a’s,...

The 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30 – July 8) came to a close this evening with an awards ceremony that bestowed two key prizes to contemporary Bulgarian drama Blaga’s Lessons (Urotcite Na Blaga) by director Stephan Komandarev.

The third film in the director’s trilogy about his country’s social ills focuses on an old woman duped by a telephone scam.

Also among winners on the night were Vincent Perez’s The Edge of the Blade (Une Affaire D’honneur), which took home the audience award, and filmmaker Babak Jalali, who took home the best director prize for the film Fremont.

There were two prizes on the night for Ernst De Geer’s The Hypnosis (Hypnosen) while the top industry award of 90,000 euros went to Czech film I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, which is currently in post.

As previously revealed, Russell Crowe...

Bulgarian multi-hyphenate Stephan Komandarev completes his trilogy on social problems and moral ills in contemporary Bulgaria with “Blaga’s Lessons,” world premiering in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Crystal Globe competition. Heretic is the sales agent.

After “Directions” (2017), which centers on tough times for some Sofia taxi drivers over a long and eventful night, and “Rounds” (2019), about police officers patrolling the capital, Komandarev and his co-writer Simeon Ventsislavov use an older woman duped by a telephone scam to look at issues afflicting their parents’ generation. Komandarev says: “The Bulgarian pensioners turned out to be the real victims of the so-called ‘transition’ (the time from 1989 to today.) These people, who have worked and created persistently all their lives, have lost basic safety and security, normal food, adequate medical care, heating, etc.”

The protagonist Blaga (Eli Skorcheva) is a retired Bulgarian language and literature teacher. A recent widow, she’s worried about how...