SXSW Faces Talent Dropouts in Boycott
Artists protest the festival’s military and defense sponsorship as the war in Gaza continues.
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Posted by TheFilmVerdict | Mar 14, 2024 | FestMarket Clips |
Artists protest the festival’s military and defense sponsorship as the war in Gaza continues.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Mar 13, 2024 | Locations |
The production will have the largest total qualified expenditures in the history of the California Film and Television Tax Credit Program.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Mar 6, 2024 | Spotlight |
Brisk, exciting and genuinely funny, ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ is the highlight of this
long-running franchise, furthering the hero’s journey to enlightenment, working wonders
with its ensemble cast, and embracing the philosophical spirit of kung fu.
A new production agreement between the United States and Italy is in the works that could mean significant advantages to projects of Italian origin.
Read MorePosted by Adham Youssef | Feb 28, 2024 | EFM '24, Festivals |
The Arab Cinema Center turns ten this year, continuing to offer networking opportunities to Arab filmmakers and their counterparts around the globe.
Read MorePosted by Jay Weissberg | Feb 27, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
When her lover of forty years suddenly dies, Angie discovers she has no rights even to her own apartment in Ray Yeung’s Teddy Award-winning ‘All Shall Be Well’, a heartfelt though unexceptional drama revealing Hong Kong’s unjust inheritance laws for same-sex couples.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 26, 2024 | Featured, Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Berlin’s transitional year unfolded uncertainly amid a dire world political situation and an imminent leadership change at the festival.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 25, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
The Berlinale awards celebrated cultural differences, with the Golden Bear going to Mati Diop’s poetic and thoughtful documentary on colonialism ‘Dahomey’, which follows the return of looted cultural artefacts to Benin.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 23, 2024 | EFM '24, FestMarket Clips |
By Liza Foreman This week’s European Film Market in Berlin had buyers buzzing about big projects....
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 23, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
Crypto-currencies and cryogenics become intertwined in Gala Hernandez Lopez’s illusory dual-screen collage which ruminates on humanity’s speculative relationship with the future, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
Read MoreItaly was 2024’s Country in Focus at the Berlinale’s European Film Market.
Read MorePosted by Clarence Tsui | Feb 23, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Featured, Festivals |
Nepal’s first-ever competition title at the Berlinale, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala is a visually breathtaking, emotionally engaging relationship drama about a young Tibetan’s physical and mental journey across the Himalayas in search of her vanished husband.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 23, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
A filmmaker explores her struggles with motherhood and artistic stimulus through a correspondence and a short film about birdwatching in That’s All from Me, a deft epistolary short.
Read MorePosted by Jay Weissberg | Feb 23, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Three generations of Russified women in Ukraine come to grips with their identities and displacement in Svitlana Lishchynska’s rough-edged, absorbing film-as-therapy documentary.
Read MorePosted by Clarence Tsui | Feb 23, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Bowing in the Berlinale’s independently curated Forum programme, Indian filmmaker Siddartha Jatla’s second feature, ‘In the Belly of a Tiger’, combines social critique with magical realism to depict the struggles of India’s rural poor.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 23, 2024 | FestMarket Clips |
BY Liza FOREMAN The year 2018 was a special Cannes for women filmmakers in several ways. Nina...
Read MorePosted by Max Borg | Feb 22, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Gustav Möller returns to the thriller genre with his second feature ‘Sons’, bolstered by terrific performances.
Read MorePosted by Oris Aigbokhaevbolo | Feb 22, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Wang Xiaoshuai, controversially without an official screening permit, returns to Berlin with another superb picture about Chinese politics (and peasantry) featuring outstanding performances and stellar dialogue.
Read MorePosted by Stephen Dalton | Feb 22, 2024 | Berlin 2024, Featured, Festivals, Sundance 2024 |
Featuring wordless performances by a heavily disguised Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ is a boldly surreal Bigfoot comedy with surprising emotional depth.
Read MorePosted by Jay Weissberg | Feb 22, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
A misguided narrative full of ill-thought-out atmospheric twists spoils the cinematic attractions of Tunisian-American Meryem Joobeur’s debut feature about a family torn apart when two sons join Daesh.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 22, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals, Verdict Shorts |
A man has his heart removed in an attempt to lessen his existential anguish in Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s expressive, lingering animation, Tako Tsubo.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 22, 2024 | EFM '24, FestMarket Clips |
BY LIZA FOREMAN This year’s European Film Market has been awash in big titles sold by a slew of...
Read MorePosted by Deborah Young | Feb 22, 2024 | Featured, Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
The gap between African and Chinese culture proves easier to breach than the perspectives that separate a woman and a man in acclaimed director Abderrahmane Sissako’s ‘Black Tea’, a fascinating love story set in China but one that sadly gets lost in the telling.
Read MorePosted by Kevin Jagernauth | Feb 22, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Featured |
Aliyar Rasti’s contemplative fable searches for a better future in the vast Iranian countryside.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 22, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
The outmoded bleach sellers of Tangier offer a window to a simpler time and a resistance against rampant growth in Hicham Gardaf’s tranquil documentary, In Praise of Slowness.
Read MorePosted by Alonso Duralde | Feb 21, 2024 | Festivals |
This lumbering lesbian road-trip “comedy” lurches its way toward nowhere in particular.
Read MorePosted by Clarence Tsui | Feb 21, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature, ‘Cu Li Never Cries’, is an absorbing, beautiful ode about a pensioner’s nostalgia for her past and a young couple’s uncertainty about their future.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 21, 2024 | EFM '24, FestMarket Clips |
The Undersecretary of the Culture Ministry, Lucia Borgonzoni hosted a private meeting Tuesday at...
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 21, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in the strange and meditative experimental documentary, The Moon Also Rises.
Read MorePosted by Adham Youssef | Feb 21, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Nelson Makengo’s beautifully shot and observed documentary ‘Rising Up at Night’ captures the darkness of Kinshasa after severe flooding and electricity cuts, along with the resilience of its people.
Read MorePosted by Stephen Dalton | Feb 21, 2024 | Berlin 2024, Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych’s quietly powerful documentary ‘Intercepted’ combines bleakly beautiful, defiantly hopeful images of her war-ravaged homeland with recordings of phone calls made by invading Russian soldiers.
Read MorePosted by Alonso Duralde | Feb 21, 2024 | Spotlight |
The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation delivers on the visual grandeur and political intrigue, even if the characters tend to be reduced to their plot function.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 21, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
Santiago, Chile is both brought into focus and dreamily abstracted in Towards the Sun, Far from the Centre, a languid city symphony featuring a queer couple looking for a space in which they can express themselves.
Read MorePosted by Deborah Young | Feb 21, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
A joyful feminist fantasy set in Venice in 1800, in which music unchains an orphanage full of talented girl musicians, ‘Gloria!’ will split audiences into two distinct camps.
Read MorePosted by Stephen Dalton | Feb 21, 2024 | Berlin 2024, Berlinale 2024, Featured, Festivals |
Martin Scorsese pays personal homage to visionary film-maker duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in David Hinton’s formally traditional but thorough documentary ‘Made in England’.
Read MorePosted by Stephen Dalton | Feb 20, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Featured, Festivals |
Real historical murder cases inspired ‘The Devil’s Bath’, a relentlessly grim but atmospheric psychological horror thriller from Austrian writer-director duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 20, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
A wonderfully observed sketch of a family lunch in late-1990s China, Remains of the Hot Day not only captures period mood but is compiled from glimpses of myriad miniature dramas.
Read MorePosted by Deborah Young | Feb 20, 2024 | Featured, Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
A depressed Chinese woman tired of her unaffectionate family and middle class life heads towards a breakdown in ‘Some Rain Must Fall,’ the first feature by Qiu Yang, whose minimalist storytelling is full of atmosphere and foreboding.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 20, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Verdict Shorts |
A young girl avoiding her home and a woman returning to hers after a long absence form a brief but profound bond in Selin Oksuzoglu sparkling short, Bye Bye Turtle.
Read MorePosted by Jay Weissberg | Feb 20, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Three people in Beirut representing the past, present and future of Lebanon experience the hopes, disappointments and decimated sense of stability in Myriam El Hajj’s sad yet defiant documentary tracing the country’s ups and downs since 2018.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 20, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’s fanciful exploration of the inner life of one of Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos, Pepe, is an idiosyncratic affair as piercing and beguiling as it is confounding.
Read MorePosted by Clarence Tsui | Feb 19, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Hong Sang-soo’s third collaboration with Isabelle Huppert is the weakest outing for both the director and actor so far.
Read MorePosted by Lucy Virgen | Feb 19, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
Las voces de tres mujeres dan autenticidad a una película a punto de rebasada por propósitos didácticos. Memorias de un cuerpo que arden que se estrena en la sección Panorama en la Berlinale.
Read MorePosted by Lucy Virgen | Feb 19, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Featured |
The voices of three women give authenticity to ‘Memories of a Burning Body’, premiering in the Panorama section at the Berlinale.
Read MoreTFV attended a Berlinale networking event for German talents and asked them about their experiences.
Read MorePosted by Deborah Young | Feb 19, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024 |
In her first solo directing stint ‘Langue étrangère’, Camera d’Or winner Claire Burger cleverly evokes the fears and anxieties of two middle-class 17-year-old European girls about to inherit a world racked with violently diverging political opinions.
Read MorePosted by Adham Youssef | Feb 19, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals |
Shot over 15 years, Birgitte Stærmose’s deeply empathetic documentary, focused on child survivors, is an intimate and diligent depiction of the lingering aftermath of war.
Read MorePosted by Ben Nicholson | Feb 19, 2024 | Berlinale 2024, Festivals, Verdict Shorts |
A young girl draws a circle on the ground and people are drawn to stand within its borders in Joung Yumi’s typically mannered and strangely engrossing monochrome animation.
Read MorePosted by Jay Weissberg | Feb 19, 2024 | Festivals, Berlinale 2024, Featured |
Another stunning documentary from Victor Kossakovsky full of gob-smacking immersive images of the natural world, pitched this time as a call for a harmonious alliance between nature and architecture.
Read MorePosted by TheFilmVerdict | Feb 19, 2024 | EFM '24, FestMarket Clips |
The Italian Ministry of Culture, with Cinecitta’, are hosting a series of events in the Gropius...
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