News

Argentina’s National Academy has selected Kill The Jockey (El Jockey) as the country’s submission in the best international feature film Oscar category.

‘Kill The Jockey’: Venice Review

Luis Ortega’s comedy plays in San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos section dedicated to Latin American productions after premiering in Venice and received its North American premiere in Toronto.

Nahuel Perez Biscayart from Robin Campillo’s 120 Bpm stars in the tale of identity and reinvention as a gifted jockey who falls foul of a mobster.

The cast includes Ursula Corbero from Money Heist, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girólamo, and Daniel Fanego,...

Indie distributor Film Movement has snapped up North American rights to Swiss director Ramon Zürcher’s “The Sparrow in the Chimney” following its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.

Described by Variety’s Guy Lodge as a “darkly engrossing psychodrama of pent-up domestic tensions,” the film explores the tumultuous relationship between two sisters, Karen and Jule, whose reunion at a family gathering reignites old conflicts and deep-seated emotional turmoil.

Zürcher, thrilled by its pending North American release, explained: “This film is an exploration of the invisible forces that shape us, particularly within the family structure.”

Sold worldwide by Cercamon, the family drama “should be an arthouse breakthrough” per Variety‘s review.

“This film offers a beautifully crafted, intimate story that will resonate with audiences who appreciate cinema that is both emotionally authentic and visually captivating,” said Sebastien Chesneau of Cercamon, who negotiated the deal with Film Movement.

“What drew...

Film Movement has acquired North American rights from Charades to Hiroshi Okuyama’s upcoming TIFF Centrepiece selection My Sunshine.

‘My Sunshine’: Cannes Review

The film premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard and receives its North American premiere on Tuesday (September 10), with a press and industry scheduled for Monday.

It follows two promising young ice skaters who form a bond while training as a pair for an upcoming competition. Keitatsu Koshiyama, Kiara Nakanishi, and Sōsuke Ikematsu star.

Film Movement will distribute My Sunshine theatrically in 2025 followed by a roll-out on digital platforms and the home entertainment market.

The drama from...

Film Movement has acquired North American rights from Charades to Hiroshi Okuyama’s upcoming TIFF Centrepiece selection My Sunshine.

‘My Sunshine’: Cannes Review

The film premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard and receives its North American premiere on Tuesday (September 10), with a press and industry scheduled for Monday.

It follows two promising young ice skaters who form a bond while training as a pair for an upcoming competition. Keitatsu Koshiyama, Kiara Nakanishi, and Sōsuke Ikematsu star.

Film Movement will distribute My Sunshine theatrically in 2025 followed by a roll-out on digital platforms and the home entertainment market.

The drama from...

A film about fantasies slipping away, Robin Campillo’s semi-autobiographical Red Island begins with a daydream, of a world of miniature buildings and puppet-faced men facing off against a masked girl. The girl is quickly revealed to be a visualization of Fantômette, the heroine of the popular Georges Chaulet book series that bears her name, and a particular obsession of Campillo’s 10-year-old stand-in, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle).

The film unfolds largely around a military base in Madagascar, from 1970 to 1972. It’s a decade after the island country’s independence from France, but various ties to the former colonial power remain in place, with French soldiers staying on their bases and working with the local troops. Perhaps inevitably, the oddly paradoxical Red Island is at once lackadaisical and urgent, relaxed but with a clear eye for how swiftly everything will end for the characters at its center.

Not that Thomas, peering...

As the summer movie season comes to a close, August brings a shockingly stacked slate of offerings, topped by a film that is sure to age like a fine classic in years to come. Elsewhere we have accomplished debuts, action spectacles, and a thriller from the man who has recently returned to perfecting the formula.

15. Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz; Aug. 23)

While its new title doesn’t quite have the hook of its original, Pussy Island, we’re curious what’s in store for the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz. Featuring some cast––including Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Haley Joel Osment, Kyle MacLachlan, Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, and Geena Davis––the story follows a cocktail waitress who becomes infatuated with a tech mogul and travels with him to his private island, where things begin going wrong. Featuring cinematography by Adam Newport-Berra (The Last Black Man in San...

When you have a film as gorgeously composed and framed as one by Robin Campillo (120 Bpm), and set in one of the most beautiful places on earth (Madagascar), one of the best practices is to simply use a frame as the key art. That is the case in this poster for Red Island, a semi-autobiographical account of Campillo’s childhood on a French military base in the 1970, where innocence is lost, and infidelity, colonialism, and coming-of-age are ground in the crucible of the tropical sun. A kind of Euro-Spielbergian tableaux, as the entire case is framed between the palms and the water, from behind, as the look up. The foliage offers a great spot to nestle the typography of a pull quote, and festival...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Following up his Cannes Film Festival sensation in 2017, Bpm (Beats per Minute), Robin Campillo recently returned with his new feature, Red Island. A semi-autobiographical film inspired by the director’s childhood in Madagascar, following a festival tour it’ll now arrive in the U.S. next month. Ahead of its August 16 opening at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Living on one of the last remaining military bases amidst a hedonistic group of French armed forces in 1970s Madagascar, ten-year-old Thomas begins to find cracks in the surface of his family’s blissful existence on the idyllic island. Taking inspiration from his comic book hero Fantomette, Thomas spies on those around him, discovering the hidden and tangled political and sexual lives of the colonizers and the colonized. As relocation looms, Thomas questions whether the memories he has...

Following up Wendell & Wild, animation wizard Henry Selick is planning to return to the world of Neil Gaiman with an adaptation of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. “Instead of a child going to this other world with a monstrous mother, it’s a monstrous mother who comes into our world to wreak havoc on a kid’s life,” Selick told Variety, contrasting the film with his previous Gaiman adaptation Coraline. Gaiman’s 2013 novel follows “an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and remembers events that began forty years earlier.” Selick is currently shopping the project around, so hopefully we’ll have distribution news soon.

While Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem was recently adapted by Alexander Woo, David Benioff, and D.B. Weiss for the Netflix series, a feature adaptation is now in the works from Zhang Yimou. As reported at the Shanghai International Film Festival,...

The passing of the torch was confirmed around Cannes, and rather than what might have been an August shoot, Les Films de Pierre producer Marie-Ange Luciani and filmmaker Robin Campillo are moving full steam ahead on Enzo – the project that Laurent Cantet has been prepping before his passing. Cineuropa confirms that the film will move into production this month with youngsters Eloy Pohu and Maksym Slivinskyi heading the drama along with supporting players Pierfrancesco Favino and Elodie Bouchez. The project was co-written by long-time friends Campillo and Cantet will be filming in La Ciotat (southern tip port city of France) and Toulon with cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie on board.…...

“Red Island,” the latest film by “120 Bpm” director Robin Campillo, has been acquired by New York-based company Film Movement for North American distribution following its run in the festival circuit.

“Red Island,” which is produced by Marie-Ange Luciani, the Oscar-nominated producer of “Anatomy of a Fall,” world premiered at San Sebastian Film Festival. Film Movement will open the film theatrically on Aug. 16 at Film at Lincoln Center, followed by a wider release and a rollout on digital and home entertainment platforms.

Set at the beginning of the ’70s in Madagascar, “Red Island” follows the lives of a few armed forces and their families living in one of the last French military bases abroad, a relic of the fading French colonial empire. Influenced by his reading of the comic book heroine Fantômette, Thomas, a 10-year-old boy, explores his surroundings and gradually opens another reality.

“Red Island” marks Campillo’s follow up to “120 Bpm,...

In Human Resources, Time Out and The Class, the Palme d’Or-winning film-maker – who has died aged 63 – addressed French and European society at all levels

Laurent Cantet was a classic product of the French cinema industry: a deeply intelligent, high-minded progressive film-maker of the same generation as Robin Campillo and Dominik Moll whose supremely literate, emotionally committed, stylish and well-acted movies aspired to address French and European society at all levels.

Cantet made films that you could imagine being discussed around a gregarious dinner table of fashionable Parisians, with glasses being avidly drained and refilled all round – in fact, you could imagine Cantet himself talking about his work at just this kind of gathering.

French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose 2008 film The Class won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2008, died on April 25 at the age of 63.

The acclaimed filmmaker was planning to shoot his next film Enzo, co-written by Robin Campillo and produced by Anatomy Of A Fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani, later this year.

Cantet’s agent Isabelle de la Patellière confirmed to French media the filmmaker “died this morning in Paris from an illness.”

The Class is a Paris documentary-drama based on a semi-autobiographical book by François Bégaudeau set in a French classroom about a teacher in a tough Parisian neighbourhood that starred a mostly unprofessional cast.

French director Laurent Cantet, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2008 for The Class, has died at the age of 63.

Based on the semi-autobiographical book by writer François Bégaudeau about his experiences working as a literature teacher in an inner city school in Paris, The Class featured a mainly unprofessional cast including the author.

Cantet had been due to shoot his next film Enzo, with Elodie Bouchez and Pierfrancesco Favino in the cast, this August

His second collaboration with Anatomy of a Fall producer Marie-Angle Luciani, after 2021 film Arthur Rambo, it revolved around a teenager who embarks on a mason apprenticeship in the South of France to escape a controlling father.

Cantet studied film at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (Idhec) in Paris in the mid-1980s, where his contemporaries were Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand and Robin Campillo.

They would continue to collaborate on one another’s projects throughout their careers,...

Following the bracing sexual and political candor of “Bpm,” writer-director Robin Campillo’s much-laureled film about HIV/AIDS activism in 1990s Paris, “Red Island” initially appears to be a retreat into cozier nostalgia — a child’s-eye view of life on a French military base in 1970s Madagascar, flooded with sunlight, awash with the thrill of youthful exploration. That might seem an obtuse way to portray a time and place rife with fractious post-colonial tensions, only a couple of years before the African territory freed itself from the French Community to become a fully-fledged republic. But “Red Island” is a cannier work than that, slowly deromanticizing its purposely naive view of European family life, before sharply jackknifing into a different perspective, even a different film, altogether.

That switch is both arresting and jarring — a structural pivot that makes for a film easier to admire than it is to embrace. Yet its autobiographical elements are keenly felt,...

Patriarchal and paternalistic structures at both a family and country level are put in the spotlight by Robin Campillo in a story loosely inspired by his own childhood. It’s the early 1970s and though the island of Madagascar became independent a decade before, the French remain a dominant presence. The action unfolds at an air base where youngster Thomas Lopez (Charlie Vauselle) lives with his mum Colette (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), dad Robert (Quim Gutierrez) and his brothers.

We first encounter Thomas as he peeps out from the crate where he is reading his favourite books about masked crime fighting youngster Fantômette - she, in fact, gets her own fantasy sequences in the film, although it is the adults whose features are, tellingly, more fully masked.

“You’re always spying,” his mum tells him later, and it is through Thomas’ eyes that we voyeuristically soak up the details of life on the base,...

Sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two opens in 721 venues this weekend, carrying the hopes of many UK-Ireland cinemas after a slow start to 2024.

Denis Villeneuve’s sequel is Warner Bros’ fourth-widest opening of all time in the territory, after last year’s Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom (749) and Barbie (724), and 2022’s Elvis (746).

It is opening on 62 sites more than Dune, which started in 659 venues in October 2021. That film began with a £4.8m weekend at a £7,210 average, dethroning James Bond title No Time To Die. It went on to a £22.1m total – a decent result in a market still feeling the effects of the pandemic.

Red Island is a brilliant new feature from French auteur Robin Campillo, and one of his most personal films to date. To mark the release of the movie in the UK, we had the pleasure of travelling to Paris to speak to the talented filmmaker, as he talks about bringing so much of himself into his stories, and what he believes enriches the material when we see it through the eyes of a child.

Watch the full interview with Robin Campillo here:

Synopsis

Thomas lives in a military base on colony of Madagascar. His parents and their circle, gradually becomes aware of politics both territorial and sexual while finding an outlet for his imagination in the exploits of crimebuster Fantômette.

Red Island is released on March 1st 

The post Robin Campillo on Red Island, and on bringing so much of himself into his stories appeared first on HeyUGuys.

The cult director grew up on the luscious island of Madagascar just as it was casting off French rule. It was a deliriously happy time for him – but now he realises what was really going on

Robin Campillo’s new movie, Red Island, is an amazing, moving evocation of his own childhood in Madagascar as what the Anglo-Saxons call an “army brat”. His soldier dad was posted there with the family in the early days of the island’s independence from French imperial control – and the 10-year-old roamed free in this lush and gorgeous place, but all the time aware of sexual licence among the grownups, their wan melancholy at their imminent expulsion from this paradise and the increasingly pointed anti-colonial rumblings among the Indigenous people. The boy is almost like young Jim in Jg Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (played by Christian Bale in Spielberg’s film version...

Charlie Vauselle as Thomas … Campillo’s screen surrogate. Campillo: 'I wanted to be a film-maker from the age of six. I was obsessed and I really thought it would be easy for me' Photo: Gilles Marchand/Courtesy UniFrance After his triumphant success with 120 Bpm (Beats Per Minute) at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, when the film about Aids activism in France in the 1990s won the Grand Prix, you might expect Robin Campillo to be nursing a grudge against the festival selectors for shunning his latest foray Red Island last year.

Robin Campillo: 'I felt I owed something to the people of Madagascar who are still waiting for France to recognise this part of their story' Photo: UniFrance Campillo during our encounter as part of the UniFrance Rendez-vous with French Cinema in January, seemed philosophical about his fate. “Apparently the Cannes selectors liked the film. I wrote a note to the...

Anatomy of a Fall French producer Marie-Ange Luciani put in a flying appearance at the Berlinale this week with Claire Burger’s coming-of-age drama Langue Étrangère which received a warm reception in competition.

With the Berlin premiere taking place the day after the Baftas in London (where Anatomy of a Fall won Best Screenplay) and eight days before the January 27 voting deadline for this year’s Academy Awards, Luciani was also in the thick of the awards campaign.

She co-produced the Oscar hopeful with David Thion at Les Films Pelléas under the banner of her Paris-based banner Les Films de Pierre, the company created by Yves Saint Laurent’s long-time business and life partner Pierre Bergé which she acquired on his death in 2018.

New production Langue Étrangère is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale starring Lilith Grasmug as French teenager Fanny who travels to Germany on language exchange trip. Her German counterpart...

There are so many questions surrounding the search for identity and one's own place under the sun that I can relate to in Nele Wohlatz' dreamy drama “Sleep With Your Open Eyes” that I don't even know where to start. As an immigrant who changed houses so many times that every move involved more costs, logistic planning and emotional investment than it was healthy, I felt an instant connection with the film's protagonists who dream big, while struggling to make ends meet pressured by the big question of where they really belong to. I also understood that Wohlatz, who herself has lived for 12 years far away from her native Germany, to study and work in Argentina, knew how to tell the story of a double-sided cultural alienation and solidarity among those ‘lost in translation', right from the film's opening scene which didn't even reveal much about what was going to happen.

Marie-Ange Luciani, who produced Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated film “Anatomy of a Fall,” won the Toscan du Plantier Award at a Paris ceremony hosted by the Cesar Academie on Monday.

Celebrating the year’s best producer, the Toscan du Plantier prize is voted on by 1,717 members, including artists and crew members who were previously nominated at the Cesar Awards, along with the governing body members of the Cesar Academie.

Luciani most recently produced “Anatomy of a Fall” with David Thion. Some of her best known credits include Robin Campillo’s Cannes prizewinning “Bpm (Beats Per Minute).” Through her banner Les Films de Pierre, she has also been producing movies directed by Laurent Cantet, Claire Burger and Ursula Meier. Her pipeline includes the next movies by Campillo and Mona Chokri. She’ll be attending the Berlin Film Festival with the world premiere of Burger’s next film, “Langue etrangere,” playing in competition.

Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center have unveiled the lineup for the 29th Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a festival celebrating contemporary French film running from Feb. 29-March 10.

Thomas Cailley’s “The Animal Kingdom” will screen as the 2024 Opening Night Selection in its New York premiere. The film, which was nominated for 12 Cesar Awards, tells the story of an infection that mutates humans into animal hybrids.

“It is a great honor to open this year’s edition with the French critical and box-office hit ‘The Animal Kingdom’ with director Thomas Cailley in attendance,” said Daniela Elstner, executive director of Unifrance.

Elstner continued, “This remarkable film along with this year’s selection is a great example of the vitality and diversity of French cinema today. A mix of new and established filmmakers together with the stellar presence of actress Marion Cotillard indeed make for a rich 29th edition of this year’s Rendez-Vous With French Cinema.

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...

Exclusive: Duván Duque, the Colombian writer-director behind 2024 Oscar-qualifying short All-Inclusive, has signed with UTA and Silent R Management.

World premiering at TIFF last year before going on to play over 70 festivals around the world, where it picked up 20+ awards, Duque’s latest watches as a young boy’s fragile family is shaken when his desperate father faces the possibility of money laundering as a way out of their financial struggles, putting the kid’s precious bond with his stepmother at risk. By shifting the focus from a spectacular tales of drug lords to the emotional journey of a boy with little control over his fate, the drama offers a fresh angle on Colombian society, transcending the typical tropes through which it’s represented.

All-Inclusive was produced by Oscar-nominated French producers Christophe Barral and Toufik Ayadi of Srab Films, as well as Colombian producer Franco Lolli...

Mysius is a Cannes regular whose credits include ‘Ava’ and ‘The Five Devils’.

French writer-director Lea Mysius is set to write and direct her third feature, an adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s best-selling French thriller The Birthday Party (Histoires De La Nuit).

It is being produced by Marie-Ange Luciani’s Les Films de Pierre, whose credits include the Palme d’Or winning Anatomy Of A Fall, alongside Jean-Louis Livi’s F Comme Film, which produced Florian Zeller’sThe Father.

Set in a hamlet in rural France, the story follows a man and his wife, their daughter and an artist neighbour.

Robin Campillo’s strengths as both a writer and a director revolve around his ability to personalize the most sprawling of ensemble pieces, never allowing viewers to get lost despite the dozens of characters his stories introduce. Following his prior film Bpm, among the finest of the past decade, he has returned with another work that, while rooted in autobiography, has no interest in merely bringing his own formative memories to the screen. But while his previous feature put each of the characters in a wider shared journey within the Act Up movement, Red Island isn’t able to tie its vast ensemble quite as neatly; many central figures remain underdeveloped throughout, and a sudden shift in focus in the closing chapter only highlights how lacking for insight the movie is when it comes to exploring the post-colonial political backdrop of its Southern African setting.

Red Island is set in Madagascar in the early 1970s,...

Exclusive: Carmen Jaquier and Mohamed Kordofani, a pair of fast-rising international filmmakers whose respective films Thunder and Goodbye Julia have both recently been submitted for International Feature Oscar consideration, have signed with Jewerl Ross at Silent R Management.

Representing Switzerland is Jaquier, whose first solo feature world premiered at TIFF last year. Pic is set in 1900 and stars Lilith Grasmug as Elisabeth, a 17-year-old girl on the cusp of taking vows to become a nun, whose life is set on another course following the sudden death of her older sister. She returns to her family after five years in the convent to help on their farm in a mountain village. The mysteries surrounding her sister’s death prompt her to fight for her right to self-determination and to rebel against the strict expectations of the village community.

Thunder scored a sustained standing ovation at its European premiere in San Sebastian...

This visually exquisite, tender film about a boy growing up in a military air base on an former colony is a wonderful watch

Film-maker Robin Campillo has surrendered to the flow of memory and given us this wonderful, personal movie, created with tenderness, unsentimental artistry and visual flair, inspired by his own childhood growing up on a French army base in recently independent Madagascar in the early 1970s. It is the story of an imaginative little kid spying and eavesdropping on the private lives of grownups, which are a mystery to him and a mystery to the grownups, too. Red Island elides his own poignant growing pains with Madagascar’s emergence from the infantilised colonial state. It feels like a classic depiction of childhood on film.

Twelve years after its establishment as an independent republic in 1960, Madagascar still permits the presence of the French army to assist the national authorities.

Some 18 producers from 17 countries will attend workshops throughout 2023 and 2024.

Eve Gabereau of the UK’s Modern Films and Denmark’s Monica Hellstrom are among 18 independent producers selected for Ace 33, the latest intake for the Ace Producers Network.

The 18 producers from 17 different countries will attend three workshops throughout 2023 and 2024 with independent feature projects. The workshops will take place in Norway in October, on content development; in Warsaw, Poland in November, on financing strategies; and finally in France, looking at business strategies.

Scroll down for the Ace 33 selection

The producers will then join the Ace Network following the 2024 Ace meeting in Bordeaux,...

18 producers from 17 countries will attend workshops throughout 2023 and 2024.

Eve Gabereau of UK company Modern Films and Danish producer Monica Hellstrom are among 18 independent producers selected for Ace 33, the latest intake for the Ace Producers Network.

The 18 producers from 17 different countries will attend three workshops throughout 2023 and 2024 with independent feature projects. The workshops will take place in Norway in October, on content development; in Warsaw, Poland in November, on financing strategies; and finally in France, looking at business strategies.

Scroll down for the Ace 33 selection

The producers will then join the Ace Network following the 2024 Ace meeting in Bordeaux, France.

London-based...

French director Campillo’s first film since 2017’s 120 Bpm.

Curzon has acquired UK-Ireland distribution rights to Red Island, the new film from 120 Bpm (Beats Per Minute) director Robin Campillo.

Morocco-born French director Campillo’s new film will have its world premiere in the official selection at San Sebastian Film Festival later this month. Curzon is working on release plans for the title.

Set on one of the last French army air bases on Madagascar in the 1970s, Red Island follows a 10-year-old boy whose world opens up to a different reality when he is inspired by an intrepid comic book heroine.

Javier Bardem, winner of a San Sebastian 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement, is putting back his on-stage acceptance of the distinction until the 2024 San Sebastian Film Festival.

The postponement is due to the “limits imposed under the strike called by the U.S. Actors Union (SAG-AFTRA),” the San Sebastian Festival announced Friday.

It deprives this year’s Festival of its biggest on-stage major star moment this year.

The fest will, however, enjoy its customary bullish presence of world-class auteurs, led this year by Claire Denis, main competition jury chair, and Victor Erice, will accept his Donostia Award on Sept. 29. San Sebastian announced Friday that Hayao Miyazaki will also accept a Donostia Award online.

Gabriel Byrne, François Cluzet, Emmanuelle Devos, Griffin Dunne, Aidan Gillen, Mads Mikkelsen, James Norton and Dominic West have confirmed their attendance, Byrne and Gillen for one of the festival’s biggest tickets, James Marsh’s official selection closing film “Dance First.

Hayao Miyazaki will receive a Donostia Award Photo: Courtesy of San Sebastian Film Festival French filmmaker Claire Denis will chair San Sebastian Film Festival's official during this year.

The 35 Shots Of Rum director will be joined by Chinese actress Fan Bingbing (The Lady In The Portrait), Colombian filmmaker and producer Cristina Gallego (Birds Of Passage), French photographer Brigitte Lacombe, Hungarian producer Robert Lantos (Eastern Promises), Spanish star Vicky Luengo (Cork) and German director Christian Petzold, whose Afire is screening in the festival's Pearls section.

The festival has also announced that Hayao Miyazaki, whose The Boy And The Heron is this year's opening film, will receive a Donostia Award for lifetie achievement in a virtual ceremony.

Among the other filmmakers in attendance will be Maite Alberdi, Ja Bayona, Robin Campillo, Isabel Coixet, Víctor Erice, Michel Franco, Matteo Garrone, Craig Gillespie, Jonathan Glazer, Kitty Green, Todd Haynes, Tran Anh Hung, Ladj Ly,...

French filmmaker Claire Denis has been announced as the jury president for the Official Section of the 71st San Sebastian Film Festival, running from September 22-30.

Denis will be joined by the German director Christian Petzold; Chinese actress Fan Bingbing; Colombian producer, director, and writer Cristina Gallego; French photographer Brigitte Lacombe; Hungarian producer Robert Lantos; and Spanish actress Vicky Luengo.

The jury awards the Golden Shell for Best Film and the Silver Shell awards for Best Director, Best Leading Performance, and Best Supporting Performance, as well as jury prizes for Cinematography and Screenplay. The Official Awards will be announced and presented at the festival’s Closing Gala on September 30.

The festival also announced today that it will hand Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki an honorary Donostia Award for career achievement. Miyazaki will receive the award virtually during the opening ceremony on September 22.

Filmmakers also set to attend San Seb include Maite Alberdi,...

Aussie filmmaker Kitty Green’s latest pic, The Royal Hotel, starring Julia Garner, and Fingernails, the latest film from Christos Nikou, with Riz Ahmed and Jessie Buckley, have been added to San Sebastian’s competition lineup.

Overall, six films have been announced as late additions to proceedings in San Seb. The other titles are Kalak (Isabella Eklöf), The Successor (Xavier Legrand), Great Absence (Kei Chika-Ura), and the debut from Tzu-Hui Peng and Ping-Wen Wang, A Journey in Spring. Additionally, the French pic A Real Job, directed by Thomas Lilti, will play the fest’s special screenings section.

The Royal Hotel is Kitty Green’s first feature since her 2019 breakout, The Assistant. The film tells the tale of two backpackers (Garner and Jessica Henwick) who take a job in a pub in the remote Australian Outback. Neon has acquired North American rights to the film. Following his debut Apples, which played Telluride,...

Headlined respectively by “Sound of Metal” lead Riz Ahmed and “Matrix” stars Jessica Henwick and Hugo Weaving, Christos Nikou’s “Fingernails” and Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” figure among seven newly unveiled films which will play in main competition at September’s San Sebastian Film Festival.

Also in the running are buzz titles “A Journey in Spring,” from Taiwan’s Peng Tzu-Hui, Wang Ping-Wen, and “Kalak,” directed by Denmark’s Isabella Eklöf.

Announced Friday, the new additions are comprised by one debut (“Spring”) and five second features from emerging talent ranging from Japan’s Kei Chica-ura to France’s Xavier Legrand, nominated for an Academy Award for best live action short film for 2013’s “Just Before Losing Everything.”

The new titles confirm a 2023 main competition which, including previously announced titles, frames three feature debuts – Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” Isabel Herguera’s “Sultana’s Dream...

Thomas Lilti’s A Real Job will premiere as a special screening.

Films from Xavier Legrand and Kitty Green are among the new titles in the competition line-up of the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

French director Legrand, whose 2017 feature Custody won best film at the Cesars and best director in Venice, brings The Successor, about a designer who discovers a shocking secret after his father dies.

Australian director Green follows up her fiction feature debut hit The Assistant (2019) with The Royal Hotel, about two backpackers who start working at a pub in the remote Australian outback. Julia Garner once again stars in the film,...

The line-up includes Niclas Larsson’s Mother, Couch! starring Ewan McGregor, Taylor Russell and Ellen Burstyn

San Sebastian International Film Festival has unveiled the 11 first and second features competing for the New Directors award.

Among the selection is Niclas Larsson’s Mother, Couch! starring Ewan McGregor, Taylor Russell and Ellen Burstyn. The film is a co-production between the US, Sweden and Denmark and sees three estranged siblings brought back together by their mother’s bizarre behaviour.

The strand will open with Miang Ling’s second film Carefree Days which follows a 25-year-old woman with a terminal illness who embarks on...

Les Films du Losange has unveiled the trailer for “Un Silence,” Joachim Lafosse’s thought-provoking film starring Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Devos that will world premiere in competition at San Sebastian Film Festival.

Tackling themes of abuse, the timely film revolves around Astrid (Devos), the wife of an acclaimed lawyer (Auteuil). Silenced for 25 years, her family balance suddenly collapses when her children initiate their own search for justice.

One of Belgium’s leading filmmakers, Lafosse is best known internationally for 2012’s “Our Children,” a heart-wrenching drama based on a true story starring Emilie Dequenne and Tahar Rahim. “Our Children” represented Belgium in the Oscars race. “Un Silence” will mark Joachim’s follow up to “The Restless,” which competed at Cannes in 2021 and also explored imploding family dynamics.

Auteuil, who previously won Cesar and BAFTA awards, notably starred in “La belle époque” by Nicolas Bedos, and “Hidden” by Michael Haneke; while Devos,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSMay December.The first flurries of fall festival news have arrived. The New York Film Festival opens on September 29 with the North American premiere of Todd Haynes's May December—read Lawrence Garcia's take on the "immediately invigorating" film here, toward the conclusion of his Cannes dispatch. The San Sebastián Film Festival (September 22 through 30) has announced its first group of competition titles: among them, Cristi Puiu’s Mmxx, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Martín Rejtman’s La prática, and Robin Campillo’s Red Island. Finally, the Venice Film Festival will open on August 30 with the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers.Lucile Hadžihalilović has announced her follow-up to Earwig (2021), the 1970s-set La Tour de Glace. Based on a brief plot synopsis,...

Spain’s San Sebastian film festival unveiled its first group of competition titles Friday, naming a typically eclectic mix of established art house favorites — Cristi Puiu, Joachim Lafosse, Robin Campillo — and rising talents, including Maria Alche, Benjamín Naishtat and American debutant Raven Jackson whose first feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, will be competing for San Sebastian’s Golden Shell this year.

Produced by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is described as a lyrical exploration of the life of a Black woman in Mississippi and stars The Woman King‘s Sheila Atim.

A second American title, the comedy Ex-Husbands from director Noah Pritzker (Quitters), also made the San Sebastian cut. Rosanna Arquette, Griffin Dunne, Miles Heizer, James Norton and Eisa Davis are part of the ensemble cast in a story focused on a father (Dunne) overwhelmed by the twin crises of an impending divorce...

The 71st San Sebastian Film Festival runs September 22-30.

Robin Campillo’s Red Island and Cristi Puiu’s Mmxx are among the first titles to be selected in competition for this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival (September 22-30).

Campillo makes his first appearance competing at the festival with French-Belgium co-production Red Island about the French colonisation of Madagascar. The French director’s previous film Bpm (Beats Per Minute) screened in the festival’s Pearl strand in 2017 after winning the jury prize at Cannes earlier that year.

Also competing in competition for the first time is Argentinian director Martín Rejtman...

A bevy of established auteurs – Joachim Lafosse, Cristi Puiu, Robin Campillo and Martín Rejtman – rub shoulders with the fast-rising figures of Maria Alche and Benjamín Naishtat and new U.S. discovery Raven Jackson among a first batch of directors contending in main competition at September’s San Sebastian Film Festival.

Also in the mix, announced Friday, is U.S. writer-director Noah Pritzker (“Quitters”) whose “Ex-Husbands” headlines “After Hours” co-stars Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette.

Always open to a broader gamut of movies than many other “A” festivals, the first features confirmed for San Sebastian on Friday include four comedies with a change of register to lighter comedy for both Naishtat and Alche, who triumphed at 2018’s San Sebastián with “Rojo” and “A Family Submerged,” best director and Horizontes winners respectively.

The biggest movie event in the Spanish-speaking world – which means ever more as Spanish-language titles hit big viewerships on streaming...

The San Sebastián Film Festival has revealed the Official Selection for its latest edition, which is due to unfold from September 22 — 30.

The festival, which is celebrating its 71st edition, will screen Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu’s latest film Mmxx in competition. The festival describes the pic as a story that captures the “wanderings of a bunch of errant souls stuck at the crossroads of history.”

Belgian filmmaker Joachim Lafosse returns to San Sebastian this year with his tenth full-length film, A Silence, a drama starring Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil. In 2015, he won the fest’s Silver Shell for Best Director for The White Knights, and two of his films have screened in the Perlak sidebar: After Love (2016) and The Restless (2021).

American filmmaker Raven Jackson will enter Competition with her debut film, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. The festival described the pic as “a lyrical exploration of the life of a woman in Mississippi.

In Bpm (Beats Per Minute), Robin Campillo found in Nahuel Pérez Biscayart a face and voice to communicate the by turns ecstatic and wrenching role of being an activist for Act Up Paris during the early 1990s. Now, in House of Sand and Fog director Vadim Perelman’s latest, Persian Lessons, the Argentine actor, who exudes an unwavering and mournful certainty whenever he’s on screen, has found another project worthy of his talent.

Persian Lessons concerns a young Belgian Jew named Gilles (Biscayart) who’s arrested in occupied France in 1942 by SS soldiers. On the way to a concentration camp in Germany, he avoids execution by swearing that he’s Persian. Subsequently, he’s tasked with teaching Farsi to the head of Camp Koch, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran after the war. What results is an intense game for survival, as Gilles pretends to know Farsi,...

Paris-based Playtime has unveiled a strong Cannes film market sales slate, which includes competition titles “About Dry Grasses” and “Homecoming.”

“About Dry Grasses” is by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who won the Palme d’Or in 2014 for “Winter Sleep.” The film follows Samet, a young art teacher, who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in, and hopes that his encounter with fellow teacher Nuray will help him overcome his angst. Deniz Celiloğlu, Merve Dizdar and Musab Ekici are among the cast.

“Homecoming,” by French director Catherine Corsini who won the 2021 Queer Palm for “The Divide,” follows Khédidja, who minds a wealthy Parisian family’s children for a summer in Corsica. She brings along her own two...

Memento Distribution in France has revealed the first official trailer for a film titled Red Island, the latest from acclaimed director Robin Campillo - best known for his AIDS drama 120Bpm before this. That one first premiered at Cannes 2017, but his next one is skipping the festival entirely - which seems a bit strange. L'île Rouge, aka Red island, is set in the 1970s on the African island of Madagascar - taking place at one of the last French outposts at the end of their time as colonialists. The synopsis says it's about "soldiers and their families living through the last illusions of colonialism," with a very specific focus on a 10-year-old boy named Thomas, observing it all through young eyes. This stars Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutierrez, Charlie Vauselle, Amely Rakotoarimalala, Hugues Delamarlière, Sophie Guillemin, and David Serero. This is opening in France at the end of May, though there's...

After earning much acclaim and some awards at Cannes Film Festival in 2017 for Bpm (Beats per Minute), Robin Campillo is back this year with a new feature, but curiously one that is not part of the festival’s lineup. Set for a May 31 release in France, the first trailer has now arrived for Red Island, with the film’s runtime also confirmed at 116 minutes.

Here’s the synopsis: “At the beginning of the 70s, in Madagascar, a few armed forces and their families live in one of the last French military bases abroad, a relic of the ending French colonial empire. Influenced by his reading of the intrepid comic book heroine Fantômette, Thomas, a ten-year-old boy, sweeps with a curious glance what surrounds him. Beneath the carefree expatriate life, his eyes are gradually opening to another reality.”

See the trailer below for the film starring Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Quim Gutierrez, Charlie Vauselle,...