Notícias

Panicked single-mother Anja (Saskia Rosendahl) searches for her daughter. She calls out, but Greta's interest is consumed by the animal carcass she's poking with a stick. When she finds her, Anja isn't alarmed by her daughter's morbid and unsettling behaviour — she only reprimands her for running off. Cicadas' (Zikaden) story is a playground for Greta and her mischievous friends, which partially explains director Ina Weisse's choice of opening scene, but inside of it is a discreet metaphor.

The story revolves around Isabell (Nina Hoss), who abruptly realises that her childless marriage to Philippe (Vincent Macaigne) is in crisis. She flits between Berlin and her parents' modernist weekend house in Brandenberg, which was designed by her father, an accomplished architect whose career was cut short after a brain haemorrhage.

Isabell recognises the need to sell the house, which is only going to fall into disrepair given that her parents are.

In “Cicadas,” top German actress Nina Hoss (who also serves as executive producer) reunites with filmmaker Ina Weisse, the director of her 2019 drama “The Audition,” in which she played a tightly wound woman whose life is unraveling. That same logline could also describe Weisse’s latest, where Hoss embodies 48-year-old Isabell, a high-end Berlin realtor who is trying to care for her aging parents at the same time that her childless marriage to a French engineer is falling apart. Meanwhile, she’s drawn to Anja (Saskia Rosendahl), a struggling single mother from the Brandenburg countryside where Isabell’s architect father built a striking modernist home. Playing out in several non-complementary registers and burdened with a lot of barely sketched-out backstory, “Cicadas” is more confounding than compelling.

The underlying theme of the movie is family relationships, with the duty that parents owe to their children and grown children to their parents,...

Germany-based Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on Ina Weisse’s Cicadas ahead of its world premiere in Berlin Panorama next month.

Cicadas tells the story of a woman – played by Nina Hoss – whose life takes a turn when an enigmatic single mother and her young daughter weave themselves into her life.

Saskia Rosendahl and Vincent Macaigne are also on the cast.

The film is produced by Felix von Boehm and Katrin Jochimsen for Germany’s Lupa Film, in co-production with 10:15! Productions and Zdf, with support from arte. Backing came from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Film Forderungsanstalt, the Cnc Mini Traité...

Exclusive: German Films, the agency that promotes German cinema globally, has revealed the seven participants for its annual Face to Face campaign, which include talents who have worked on projects such as Unorthodox, We Children From Bahnhof Zoo and Tides.

This year, which marks the 10th anniversary of the Face to Face initiative, will see German Films introduce seven burgeoning talents from the German film and TV industry to the international film community at the Berlin Film Festival next month. The initiative has long been considered a significant platform for showcasing German talents to the wider film and television spheres.

This year’s selection includes actors Aaron Altaras, Lea Drinda and Thea Ehre, writer-directors Leonie Krippendorff and Mariko Minoguchi, as well as director Mala Reinhardt and Director of Photography Tim Kuhn.

They are following in the footsteps of filmmakers and stars Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Burhan Qurbani, Saskia Rosendahl, Alexander Fehling,...

German actress Nina Hoss (Phoenix, Tár, Barbara) has signed on to star in The Other Side, an upcoming adventure thriller from German director Mariko Minoguchi.

Hoss will play Hanna, a doctor who, during the midst of an epidemic, goes into self-isolation in the mountain wilderness to protect herself and others.

Best known for her many collaborations with German director Christian Petzold —including 2007’s Yella, 2012’s Barbara and 2014’s Phoenix — Hoss played Cate Blanchett’s wife in Todd Field’s Oscar-nominated Tár (2022) and had a recurring role as Astrid in seasons 5 and 6 of Showtime’s Emmy-winning series Homeland and in Amazon’s action series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. More recently, Hoss co-starred in Claire Burger’s coming-of-age romantic drama Langue Étrangère, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last month, and in Radu Jude’s freewheeling feminist satire Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, which...

Unabashedly sporting the most inauspicious of titles, a three-hour running time and a logline that features terminally ill elders and self-destructive descendants, German feature Dying (Sterben) looks like a hard sell on paper. And yet writer-director Matthias Glasner’s crisscrossing family drama manages to be exceedingly funny, often in some of its darkest moments, as well as expectedly sad.

Anchored by a nuanced, detailed performance by Lars Eidinger as Tom, an orchestra conductor juggling all manner of personal and professional commitments, and pitch-perfect turns by Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg and Ronald Zehrfeld as the rest of his combustible nuclear family, this richly rewards the time investment it requires. Sure, a few trims here and there wouldn’t have necessarily ruined it, and some might suggest this could work better as a multi-part limited series for upscale TV.

But it’s hard to imagine watching the musical performance set pieces anywhere...

Ready for another deliciously outré performance from Lars Eidinger, everybody’s favorite German arthouse weirdo (known for his work in Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria, White Noise, and on and on)? Well, strap in for Sterben (Dying) from German director Matthias Glasner.

In the exclusive first trailer from The Match Factory (see below), Eidinger plays Tom, a Berlin conductor with more than a few personal issues to deal with.

Dying is a rare new feature from Glasner who, unlike his prolific star, has kept his filmography tight. (His last feature was 2012’s Gnade.) Judging by the trailer, and Glasner’s previous work, including 2006 Silver Bear winner The Free Will, Dying looks like another powerful mix of melodrama, wry humor and philosophical ponderings about the “big questions” of life and, given the title, of death.

“The name of the piece… is ‘Dying’,” a high-strung composer, played by Robert Gwisdek, instructs the orchestra.

Exclusive: German Films, the agency that promotes German cinema globally, has unveiled the seven participants for the ninth edition of its annual Face to Face campaign, which include talents who have worked on projects ranging from television series such as Deutschland ‘89 and Kafka to feature film Turning Tables.

This year’s edition, which is dubbed Face to Face with German Films – The Filmmakers, will showcase seven filmmakers who have made a lasting impact on the German film industry with their creative and artistic work. The initiative is considered a prominent platform for showcasing German talent to the international film and television worlds.

The participants this year are: actor Jan Bülow; writer and director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay; actor Banafshe Hourmazdi; writer-director Moritz Müller-Preißer; production designer Mona Cathleen Otterbach; writer-director Eva Trobisch; and writer-director Soleen Yusef.

They are following in the footsteps of such respected filmmakers as internationally renowned stars Sandra Hüller,...

The 2023 German mini-series A Thin Line is definitely a masterpiece, conveying a strong message about the environmental issues caused due to rapid urbanization. We have come across films and series like Before the Flood and Plastic Ocean with strong messages against environmental damage, but the passion that the characters display in this series is unique and beyond articulation. The love for the environment with which the series has been made rings right through the brilliant portrayal of the motives of the characters. The directors Sabrina Sarabi and Damian John Harper have done justice to the screenplay by putting able actors like Hanna Hilsdorf and Saskia Rosendahl to action. The two sisters, Anna and Benjamina (Benni), are eager to cross their lines in seeking justice against the flawed policies and regulations for the environment. While Benjamina resorts to illegal means to seek justice, Anna stays within the judicial limits and tries to protect her sister.

German regional fund Medenboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) has made its latest funding decisions.

Films directed by Wes Anderson, Agnieszka Holland, Emily Atef, Pablo Larrain and Karim Ainouz are among 14 projects to receive more than €5.2m in total production support from the German regional fund Medenboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) in its latest funding decision.

The largest single amount of €1.5m went to an as-yet untitled project by Wes Anderson which will see the US director continuing his long-standing collaboration with Studio Babelsberg with whom he has partnered on five previous films including The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.

The...

The German-based distribution and production company Port au Prince Film And Kultur Produktion has hired Roshanak “Rosh” Khodabakhsh as a producer and executive board member.

Khodabakhsh will start the role on March 1. One of her tasks will be to further expand and lead the company’s Berlin branch.

Khodabakhsh mostly recently spent three years at the German distributor-producer Dcm, where she was a producer. Prior to Dcm, Khodabakhsh spent six years as a freelance production coordinator and production manager on projects such as Netflix’s Sense8, UFA’s Charité, and the X Filme series Babylon Berlin. She has also worked with directors such as Tom Tykwer, Sönke Wortmann, Fatih Akin (The Golden Glove), Jan Schomburg (Divine), and Ilya Khrzhanovsky (Dau).

Port Au Prince Producer and Managing Director Jan Krüger previously collaborated with Khodabakhsh in 2009 on Ali Samadi-Ahadi’s Grimme Award-winning doc The Green Wave.

“I would like to thank Marc Schmidheiny,...

Ahead of Paramount+‘s U.K. launch later this week, the streaming service has announced a slate of seven new international titles, including a French fantasy horror series, a Mexican drama about El Chapo’s teenage beauty queen wife, and a German “hacktivist” thriller starring Saskia Rosendahl The streamer unveiled the slate on Monday, June 20, while also revealing a plan to commission 150 international originals by 2025. This comes after Paramount previously committed to greenlighting 50 international scripted originals in 2022, with titles including Sexy Beast (U.K.), Bosé (Spain), The Chemistry of Death (Germany), Impact (France), and Los Enviados (The Envoys) (Mexico), and many more. Among the newly announced titles is France’s Marie Antoinette Serial Killer, an 8-hour young adult fantasy-horror that follows four American girls on spring break in Paris who find themselves caught up in a mysterious, almost supernatural murder spree. Based on a novel by author Katie Alender, the...

New titles include series about the Circeo massacre and El Chapo’s wife.

US streaming platform Paramount+ has unveiled a seven-strong film and series international slate ahead of its launch in the UK and Ireland later this week (June 22).

The originals will be produced in partnership with Vis, Paramount’s international studio. Paramount+ is aiming to commission 150 international originals by 2025.

New projects are Mexican suspense thriller film One Must Die, about seven people who are kidnapped and suddenly find themselves part of a deadly game. It Is directed by and stars Colombian actor Manolo Cardona, with Spanish actress Maribel Verdú also starring.

As Paramount+ prepares for UK rollout this week and in advance of tonight’s swanky London do, the streamer has greenlit a seven-strong international slate including a French fantasy horror thriller, series on the Circeo Massacre, two shows from Mexico and two from Germany including The Sheikh.

Scroll down for the full slate below as Paramount+ deepens its international push and prepares to unveil the shows at an event with the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Jessica Chastain and Gillian Anderson, amongst other A-listers. Paramount+ has taken over London’s West End for the day with a Walk of Fame-esque Walk of Stars, with 50 illuminated stars including Stallone, Anderson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Viola Davis.

Paramount Global plans to commission 150 international originals for Paramount+ within three years

The slate, Paramount+’s second major international roster, includes France’s Marie Antoinette Serial Killer, a fantasy horror thriller about four young American girls who...

Dominik Graf has been busy turning out termite art for decades. Finding a home on German TV shows like Tatort and Police Call 310, which air feature-length episodes with self-contained storylines, his work is modest but powerful, somewhere between Michael Mann and Johnnie To. Though subject of a retrospective at New York’s Anthology Film Archives in 2019, he has only recently received much attention outside Germany. His dedication to genre cinema––to which he has devoted two documentaries––and disdain for New German Cinema helps explains this, as does the infrequency with which subtitled TV is imported here. Two of his best films, Cold Spring and Bitter Innocence, are acridly cynical examinations of capitalism’s effect on German family life, mixing family melodrama with thriller.

Fabian: Going to the Dogs takes seemingly familiar ground and breathes new life into it. Set in 1931, it shows the gradual rise of fascism as a...

Dominik Graf, one of contemporary cinema’s most vigorous and engaged filmmakers—not to mention prodigious, having made nearly 20 features in the last ten years—is making a welcome return to movie theaters. After the commercial failure of Die Sieger, a big screen crime epic, Graf pivoted to focus on television movies, whose verve and density easily put to rest any argument about the cinematic capacity of the small screen. All his TV movies are good, many are great; almost all are unknown outside Germany. Thus the release in cinemas of a new feature is a relatively rare opportunity for audiences to see a special filmmaker at work.The caveat here is that like Hitchcock and Kubrick before him, and Fincher and Soderbergh now, Graf is obsessed with the idioms of genre cinema, but is also too knowing to master its transparent experience. He so thoroughly knows what makes a...

German Films, an agency that promotes German cinema worldwide, has announced the talent who will feature in its 7th annual Face to Face With German Films campaign. The high-profile platform sets out to bring international visibility to the wealth of ground-breaking talent working in film and TV in Germany, and shaping the future of the industry.

This year’s selected talent are documentary writer-director Sarah Noa Bozenhardt (“Among Us Women”), actor-producer-writer Sara Fazilat (“Nico”), actor-director Jerry Hoffmann (“Shahada”), film editor Julia Kovalenko (“System Crasher”), writer-director Matthias Luthardt (“Pingpong”), cinematographer and director Zamarin Wahdat (“Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)”) and actor Anne Zander (“For Jojo”).

After spotlighting well-known actors, writers and directors such as Saskia Rosendahl (“Lore”), Alexander Fehling, Burhan Qurbani (“Berlin Alexanderplatz”) and Jonas Nay in its first five years, last year’s Face to Face With German Films – The Filmmakers campaign broadened its...

To the uninitiated, Princess Diana biopic “Spencer” might appear like the quintessential British film, albeit with a Chilean director and an American star. But it is, in fact, German, Simone Baumann, managing director of German Films, says. It’s a German-u.K. co-production to be exact, but shot in Germany, with a German producer, Komplizen Film, on board, and 70% of the financing was German.

Other German co-productions this year include Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” with Studio Babelsberg as a co-producer, as well as a host of arthouse films not in the German language, such as Leos Carax’s “Annette,” which was co-produced by Detailfilm, Michelangelo Frammartino’s “Il Buco,” co-produced by Essential Filmproduktion, and Tatiana Huezo’s “Prayers for the Stolen,” co-produced by Match Factory Productions.

At AFM, there are 31 German productions and co-productions screening, represented by nine German sales companies, gathered under the German Films umbrella. German...

Jury prizes returned this year following a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Prize money totalling €125,000 was handed out to 10 films screening in this year’s Filmfest Hamburg (September 30-October 9), which saw jury prizes return following a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic.

On Friday evening (October 8) at Hamburg’s producer awards, the jury comprising producer Martina Haubrich and directors Julian Pörksen and Arman T. Riahi presented the producers award for German cinema productions, worth €25,000, to Jonas Weydemann of Weydemann Bros for Sabrina Sarabi’s No One’s With The Calves, which had been screened in the Grosse Freiheit section.

Sarabi...

The company made its name with Nora Fingscheidt’s ‘System Crasher’ in 2019.

Falling Into Place, the directorial debut of German actress Aylin Tezel, Damian John Harper’s Fresh, with Dark star Louis Hoffman and Sophia Bosch’s mother-daughter drama Milk Teeth are all on the anticipated new production slate of Weydemann Bros, the German production outfit behind 2019 local box office hit System Crasher.

Tezel is known for her recent performances in Almanya: Welcome To Germany and 7500. Falling Into Place is a love story that she has also written and will star when it shoots in 2022.

Berlin-based distributor Port Au Prince which released System Crasher,...

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay CashINTERNATIONAL Competition(Jury: Eliza Hittman, Kevin Jerome Everson, Philippe Lacôte, Leonor Silveira, Isabelle Ferrari)Golden Leopard: Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Edwin) | Read our reviewSpecial Jury Prize: A New Old Play (Jiongjiong Qiu) | Read our reviewBest Direction: Abel Ferrara (Zeros and Ones) | Read our reviewBest Actress: Anastasiya Krasovskaya (Gerda)Best Actor: Mohamed Mellali and Valero Escolar (The Odd-Job Men)Special Mention: Soul of a Beast (Lorenz Merz) and The Sacred Spirit (Chema García Ibarra) | Read our reviewFILMMAKERS Of The Present( Jury: Agathe Bonitzer, Mattie Do, Vanja Kaludjercic)Golden Leopard: Brotherhood (Francesco Montagner)Special Jury Prize: L'Été l'éternité (Émilie Aussel)Prize for Best Emerging Director: Hleb Papou (The Legionnaire) Best Actress: Saskia Rosendahl (No One's with the Calves) | Read our reviewBest Actor: Gia Agumava (Wet Sand)First Feature(Jury: Amjad Abu Alala, Karina Ressler, Katharina Wyss)Best First Feature: She Will (Charlotte Colbert...

Golden Leopard goes to filmmaker from Indonesia for first time.

Indonesia’s Edwin has received Locarno Film Festival’s top honour, the Golden Leopard, for his latest feature Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, which had its world premiere in the Swiss festival’s International Competition.

The Indonesia-Singapore-Germany co-production – adapted and based on a literary work by Eka Kurniawan – is being handled internationally by The Match Factory.

It is also the first time in Locarno’s 74-year history that the Golden Leopard has gone to a filmmaker from Indonesia.

Accepting the award on behalf of Edwin, who had already...

Given that, after its shuttered 2020 edition, the 74th Locarno Film Festival’s ident features a prowling, growling, resurgent leopard and the distinctly tumescent tagline “Cinema is Back” it’s somewhat ironic that the festival’s top prize should go to a film about erectile dysfunction.

In other ways, however, Indonesian director Edwin’s fabulously if nonsensically titled “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” is perhaps the ideal Golden Leopard winner, in what is a strange year for the world, and a strange year for the Swiss festival, which is finding its footing under the new artistic direction of Giona A. Nazzaro.

As an admixture of several distinctly populist genres that still, as Variety critic Jay Weissberg noted, uses impotence as a metaphor “to make a broader critique of a toxic culture that puts so much emphasis on virility,” the film is among the best exemplars of Nazzaro’s avowed...

In his latest work, “Fabian — Going to the Dogs,” Dominik Graf adapts a work that defines the tragic, hedonistic and dysfunctional era of the Weimar Republic from a writer widely known for his children’s books.

Set in 1931 Berlin, the story, based on Erich Kästner’s novel of the same name, is seen through the eyes of Jakob Fabian (Tom Schilling), a fatalistic writer who finds solace in his love for Cornelia, played by Saskia Rosendahl (“Never Look Away”) and his best friend Stephan (European Shooting Star Albrecht Schuch), and the wild nights of the city’s outlandish establishments while longing for the return of decency in a society gone astray.

The film premiered in competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and screened this week at Rotterdam Film Festival.

Graf, one of Germany’s preeminent filmmakers, is behind such lauded works as “The Cat,” “A Map of the Heart,...

German author Erich Kästner is most celebrated for the children’s novel Emil and the Detectives, but he was one of the more renowned men of letters of his day, publishing poetry, reviews, and satirical columns in Berlin liberal newspapers like Berliner Tageblatt and Vossische Zeitung––both of which were shut down as the Third Reich ascended to power. His novel Fabian – Going to the Dogs was published earlier in 1932, but is now perceived as a prophetic harbinger for the Weimar Republic’s demise. And of course, notions of liberal democracy’s twilight are rich in the minds of artists and commentators today, so here we have German literary film-specialist Dominik Graf with a timely and maybe predictable adaptation of Fabian.

Except, as sundry early viewers of Fabian have identified, this is a story and milieu bathed in overfamiliarity, and Graf’s three-hour film version doesn’t distinguish itself well...

It is a welcome sight indeed to find Dominik Graf, one of contemporary cinema’s most vigorous and engaged filmmakers—not to mention prodigious, having made nearly 20 features in the last ten years—in the spotlight of the Berlinale’s competition. After the commercial failure of Die Sieger, a big screen crime epic, Graf pivoted to focus on television movies, whose verve and density easily put to rest any argument about the cinematic capacity of the small screen. All his TV movies are good, many are great; almost all are unknown outside Germany. Thus a premiere in Berlin is a relatively rare opportunity for an international audience to see a special filmmaker at work.The caveat here is that like Hitchcock and Kubrick before him, and Fincher and Soderbergh now, Graf is obsessed with the idioms of genre cinema, but is also too knowing to master its transparent experience. He...

Four titles have landed on the first edition of the grid.

Dominik Graf’s period drama Fabian – Going To The Dogs has set the early pace on Screen’s Berlin 2021 Competition jury grid, with a score of 3.1.

The result came from seven of the eight critics, and included three “excellent” scores of four stars from Die Zeit’s Katja Nicodemus, Sight & Sound’s Nick James and Screen’s own critic.

The Morning Star’s Rita di Santo and Anton Dolin of Meduza and Film Art awarded it an “average” mark of two stars each.

Set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic,...

With a strong showing at this year’s Berlin Film Festival that includes the directorial debut of Daniel Brühl and new works by Maria Schrader and Dominik Graf in competition, German films are set to garner much of the spotlight at the accompanying European Film Market.

Brühl, who is set to reprise his role as the vengeful Helmut Zemo in the upcoming Marvel series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” explores the contradictions of present-day Berlin in “Next Door.” The seemingly self-referential story has Brühl playing Daniel, a successful actor living in the city’s Prenzlauer Berg district, who is about to jet off to audition for a role in a superhero movie. His life suddenly changes when he is confronted by a disgruntled neighbor, played by Peter Kurth (“Babylon Berlin”), a victim of gentrification in former East Berlin and one of the many losers of German reunification.

Written by bestselling author Daniel Kehlmann,...

Germany is on its postwar sickbed, and perched on the edge of self-destruction, in Dominik Graf’s epically sized yet intimately scaled, cracked picture of Weimar Berlin after WWI, and with omens of the next one creeping in. A 178-minute bildungsroman in the true sense, “Fabian – Going to the Dogs,” shot with primarily handheld digital camera and in the boxed-in Academy ratio, While perhaps padding its running time too robustly with strange and often even grotesque side characters, the movie ultimately falls squarely on Tom Schilling’s shoulders, the idealist of the title who chooses falling in love over ambition.

At 32 years old, Jakob Fabian is a 32-year-old war veteran back in the city and rattled by Ptsd, which is somewhat keeping his literary aspirations at bay as he works by day as an ad man for a cigarette company. Based on Erich Kästner’s novel of the same name,...

Though little known in the English-speaking world, Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s “Fabian – Going to the Dogs” is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious. Set in a teetering world of dissoluteness and disillusion in which a good man without professional ambition awakens to life’s promise only to have it all torn away, the story has modern resonances that Graf (“The Beloved Sisters” among many others) keenly underlines, and while the film’s core is affectingly developed, the rest tries too hard to expose...

This year’s Berlin International Film Festival will look a bit different this year, with a virtual edition taking place March 1-5 for industry and press, then a public, in-person edition kicking off in June.

The complete lineup has now been unveiled, including Céline Sciamma’s highly-anticipated Portrait of a Lady on Fire follow-up Petite Maman, a surprise new Hong Sang-soo feature, the latest work from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, along with new projects by Radu Jude, Xavier Beauvois, Dominik Graf, Pietro Marcello, Ramon Zürcher & Silvan Zürcher, and more.

Check out each section below.

Competition Tiles

“Albatros” (Drift Away)

France

by Xavier Beauvois

with Jérémie Renier, Marie-Julie Maille, Victor Belmondo

“Babardeală cu buclucsau porno balamuc” (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn)

Romania/Luxemburg/Croatia/Czech Republic

by Radu Jude

with Katia Pascariu, Claudia Ieremia, Olimpia Mălai

“Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde” (Fabian – Going to the Dogs)

Germany

by Dominik Graf

with Tom Schilling,...

New film by Dominik Graf’s is based on 1930s Berlin-set novel of Erich Kästner.

Paris-based Les Films du Losange has boarded world sales on German director Dominik Graf’s 1930s Berlin set drama Fabian, which has been selected for competition in the Berlinale’s two-part 2021 edition.

Graf’s first feature in five years, it is adapted from the 1931 satirical novel by German writer Erich Kästner, best known internationally as the author of the 1929 children’s book Emil And The Detectives.

Set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, it stars Tom Schilling, whose credits include Never Look Away, as the...

This week of Berlin International Film Festival announcements comes to a close with the main course – the Competition and Special Screenings programs. Scroll down for the full lists.

The 15-strong Competition – all world premieres – includes titles from filmmakers including Celine Sciamma, Daniel Bruhl and Xavier Beauvois.

Celine Sciamma is following on from her Golden Globe-nominated Portrait Of A Lady On Fire with her next movie, Petite Maman, which only went into production in November; plot details are hush but it is understood to star two eight-year-olds.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Bruhl also plays the protagonist in his directorial debut, Next Door, which centers on a film star and his troublesome neighbor.

Xavier Beauvois, whose credits include the Cannes Grand Prix winner Of Gods And Men and the 2017 film The Guardians, presents his eighth work, Albatros, which follows a police captain whose life goes into a tailspin.

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude will also present his latest work,...

Actor Daniel Bruhl’s directorial debut and new titles from Radu Jude, Celine Sciamma, Hong Sangsoo and Xavier Beauvois are among the 15 competition titles in the Berlin Film Festival, all of which were revealed Thursday.

Five of the titles are from female filmmakers (some of whom are co-directors on titles), on par with last year’s competition, when six of the 18 competition titles were helmed by women.

The festival also revealed the 11 titles in the Berlinale Special strand.

Festival executive director Mariette Rissenbeek introduced the format of this year’s festival, after which artistic director Carlo Chatrian presented the films selected.

As first revealed by Variety, the festival’s 71st edition will take place in two stages. Industry platforms European Film Market, Berlinale Co-Production Market, Berlinale Talents and the World Cinema Fund will be online March 1-5. Meanwhile, June 9-20 will see a physical summer public event, pandemic permitting.

Explaining the rationale,...

Fabian

German director Dominik Graf ends a six year hiatus next year with Fabian, a period piece produced by Felix von Boehm of Lupa Film and Daniel Blum of Zdf. Graf lands Tom Schilling in the lead, with a supporting cast of Saskia Rosendahl. Albrecht Schuch, Eva Medusa Gühne and Meret Becker. Revered for his detective and police television dramas, Graf has twice competed for the Golden Bear in Berlin, with 2002’s A Map of the Heart and his last feature, 2014’s Beloved Sisters. Notably, his participation in the trilogy omnibus Dreileben premiered in Berlin (which included two other segments directed by Christoph Hochhausler and Christian Petzold).…...

A German boy who witnesses Nazi horrors grows up to become a painter in this overcooked but affecting melodrama

At a key early moment in German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s acclaimed art-drama/suspense-thriller hybrid (which reportedly received a 13-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival last year), a young boy confronted by a terrible sight holds his hand in front of his eyes. At first, we think he’s doing it to blot out the spectacle of his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) being bundled into an ambulance in Nazi Germany. But the truth is more complex. As young Kurt (a wonderfully wide-eyed Cai Cohrs) holds his palm a few inches in front of his face, we see what he sees – the hand coming into close focus, rendering what’s behind it slightly blurry. When his hand drops down, the awful truth beyond remains momentarily fuzzy – creating...

After making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and receiving the Leoncino d’Oro Agiscuola Award, the first UK trailer has arrived for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘Never Look Away’

‘The Lives of Others’ filmmaker, Henckel von Donnersmarck, makes a bold return to German language filmmaking with two nominations at this year’s Academy Awards® for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography.

The film stars Tom Schilling (Oh Boy), Sebastian Koch (Bridge of Spies, The Danish Girl), Paula Beer (Frantz), Saskia Rosendahl (Lore) and Oliver Masucci (Netflix’s Dark).

Also in trailers – Keira Knightley stars in first trailer for ‘Official Secrets’

The film is released in the UK and Ireland on 5 July

Never Look Away Synopsis

Inspired by real events and spanning three eras of German history, the film tells the story of a young art student, Kurt (Tom Schilling) who falls in love with a fellow student,...

German production company Weydemann Bros. has unveiled two projects in the works, including an English-language drama written and directed by one of Germany’s most prolific young actresses.

Aylin Tezel is making her directorial debut with “Falling Into Place,” a love story set in Scotland and London that follows a romance between Kira and Ian, two 30-somethings who meet while on the run from themselves.

Tezel, a film and television actress who has starred in Ard’s hit “Tatort” crime drama franchise and Showtime’s “Homeland,” next appears in Patrick Vollrath’s upcoming airplane thriller “7500,” alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Producer Jakob Weydemann said the script, written by Tezel, offers a portrait of today’s restless generation as it struggles with such existential questions as: “How do we use the time that is given to us? Who do we share it with? And do we have to chase, escape or let...

O-t Fagbenle

English actor O-t Fagbenle (The Handmaid’s Tale) will appear alongside Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow, the Marvel movie which marks the Hollywood debut of director Cate Shortland.

Marvel president Kevin Feige is producing the movie, the origin story of Johansson’s Kgb spy assassin Natasha Romanoff, who was introduced in Iron Man 2 and ultimately became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and an Avenger.

Production is due to start in London in June. Shortland won the assignment last year from a field of 49 candidates including Amma Asante (Belle), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) and Maggie Betts (Novitiate).

Johansson reportedly admired Shortland’s work with Saskia Rosendahl as the lead in the WWII drama Lore.

The Black Widow screenplay by Ned Benson, who wrote The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby trilogy, is a rewrite of a script by Jac Schaeffer.

In The Handmaid’s Tale Fagbenle plays Luke Bankole,...

Oliver Masucci as Professor Antonius van Verten, in Never Look Away. Photo by Caleb Deschanel, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Art and history meld in the Oscar-nominated Never Look Away, a German-language epic tale that begins in 1937 Nazi Germany, and follows Kurt, an artistically-gifted young German, from his boyhood under the Nazis, to life in communist East Germany, and finally in the West in the 1960s. The personal story is used to explore life in eastern Germany under two repressive regimes, and those regimes shifting views on modern art under those regimes. Naturally, the drama also touches on Nazi war crimes, the war itself and its aftermath under communism but the lens is this child’s experience in wartime and then as a young artist.

Never Look Away is an Oscar nominee in this year’s Foreign Language category and also in the Cinematography category, for Oscar-winner Caleb Deschanel’s stunningly lush work.

Like everyone else, Caleb Deschanel was taken by surprise with his sixth Oscar nomination for German-language nominee, “Never Look Away,” about the horrors of war and the artistic process. The legendary cinematographer, best known for “The Black Stallion, “The Right Stuff,” and “The Natural,” now becomes the sentimental favorite to win his first Academy Award.

“People kept coming up and raving about ‘Cold War’ and ‘Roma’ and I sheepishly told them that I had a foreign-language film and they said they had the DVD somewhere,” Deschanel said.

Clearly, enough branch members (bolstered by the large international bloc) were swayed by Deschanel’s exquisite cinematography to give him the nod. “Never Look Away,” directed by Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”), fictionalizes the life of experimental abstract German painter Gerhard Richter, who finds his artistic voice in the film after falling in love with a fashion student...

German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmark made a splash in the foreign language box office over a decade ago with The Lives of Others, which took the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. He is back again with Sony Pictures Classics for Never Look Away, which is also vying for Oscar this year. Also out in theaters beginning Friday is Greenwich Entertainment’s WWII-era drama, The Invisibles, which was the first pick up for the company back in 2017. And on a decidedly different note, Cinedigm is mixing camp and horror with Dead Ant starring Tom Arnold and Sean Astin.

Also this weekend, Focus Features is taking Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman back to theaters following its six Oscar nominations. The company said the film, which grossed over $48.5M in its initial run in theaters starting last August, will play 168 theaters around the country beginning Friday. Said Focus president Lisa Bunnell, “We...

Just nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign-Language Film and for the extraordinary cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, Never Look Away concerns itself with love and war and the limitless reach of art. These are big themes and easy to bungle over the course of this three-hour-plus epic from German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In his third film, after the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others and a misbegotten 2010 merging with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie to create The Tourist — a mega-flop for the ages — von Donnersmarck returns triumphantly to form.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on Milan Kundera: "He says great novels are written where history is kind of alive. In a way, I think that goes for Germany also." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second installment of my conversation with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on his now Oscar-shortlisted Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), the director of the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen), spoke about his longtime editor Patricia Rommel, who also worked with Angelina Jolie after Jolie starred opposite Johnny Depp in Florian's The Tourist.

Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer)

Little Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) sees the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition with his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). A museum guide (Lars Eidinger) proclaims his Nazi ideology, but neither of them buy it. This sets the tone in Never Look Away, co-produced with Jan Mojto, Quirin Berg, Max Wiedemann,...

How did Caleb Deschanel end up being the cinematographer on “Never Look Away,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s three-hour-plus German-language film?

“I had known Florian for a number of years because we had been on some various committees at the academy,” Deschanel shared at Gold Derby’s Meet the Experts: Cinematographers panel, moderated by this author (watch above). “He had met with Gerhard Richter, the painter, and he had done a lot of interviews with him and he was really fascinated by his life. He then called me and we met and we sat down for about four hours and he sort of told me this story and it was before he had written the script, but I was really fascinated by this character.”

Inspired by Richter’s life, “Never Look Away” tells the fictional story of a painter, Kurt (Tom Schilling), who grew up in Dresden, Germany, during World War II,...

One of the biggest challenges when making a film about a fictitious artist must be coming up with art that doesn’t make audience members question the admiration for the artist. In that sense, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck covers his bases by using Gerhard Richter’s photorealistic pieces as the inspiration for the work created by Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), the protagonist of Never Look Away. So by the time a frustrated Kurt realizes he can turn painful memories into haunting paintings that see beyond the “reality” of a photograph, we are so immersed in his story that unexpected chills are the only possible reaction we can have upon seeing his first completed piece.

The other challenge of a quasi-biopic must certainly be writing a backstory plotty enough to feel novelistic, but subtle enough to feel as random and unplanned as real life, so that the more cynical...

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor) director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on Martha's (Ina Weisse) marriage to the monstrous Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), father to Ellie (Paula Beer): "You can sense she has a different spirit but yet she is so subjugated by everything that she can't even dare to live it."

Elements from Gerhard Richter’s life story inspired the role of Kurt Barnert, played by Generation War and Jan Ole Gerster's Oh Boy (aka A Coffee In Berlin) star, Tom Schilling, in the latest film from the director/screenwriter of the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others. In Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor), Germany's Oscar submission for the 91st Academy Awards, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck sets the bar far higher for himself than he did for his Hollywood misfire The Tourist, starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (with Anne-Katrin Titze) on his...

In 2006, a 33-year-old German director named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took Hollywood by storm with his Oscar-winning debut, a manipulative and wantonly middle-brow spy drama about a heartless Stasi captain’s long road to redemption. Told with a watchmaker’s precision and finished off with a tear-jerking gut punch of a finale (complete with a freeze frame for good measure), “The Lives of Others” offered a seductive peek at a shadowy part of history, and seemed to herald the arrival of a filmmaker who might be able to class up some Hollywood fare, or even sell American viewers on the idea of reading subtitles. Then von Donnersmarck made “The Tourist,” and that was the end of that.

Now, eight years since his disastrous — but Golden Globe-nominated! — dalliance with the studio system, von Donnersmarck is ready to walk his own long road to redemption (even if his most grievous crime was...

“Never Look Away,” which had its world premiere in Venice earlier this year, might just turn the man with one of the most formidable names in the movie business, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, into a comeback kid.

Donnersmarck’s first feature, 2006’s brilliant “The Lives of Others,” scored an upset victory over “Pan’s Labyrinth” in that year’s Oscar race for Best Foreign Language Film, its win no doubt due to a rule that no longer exists in the category: In order to vote, you had to see all five nominees in a theater. Like the Oscar voters who picked it, nobody who saw it was likely to forget the quietly engrossing story of an East German Stasi agent drawn into the life of a couple he was surveilling.

Hollywood was impressed enough to come calling, but the director went from triumph to disaster. His English-language debut was the widely derided flop “The Tourist,...

A disused newspaper factory in the south of England is to be converted into a film studio complex. The Daily Mail printing press in Oxfordshire has been acquired by media company Rebellion, the games developer, motion capture firm and publishing outfit which owns the 2000 Ad comic book IP, which includes Judge Dredd. The complex is being lined up as a home for Duncan Jones’s Rogue Trooper film and Judge Dredd TV show Mega-City One. Six sound stages will be available at the 220,000 sq ft site, which is due to open in the spring. Rebellion founders Jason Kingsley and Chris Kingsley were producers on the 2012 feature film Dredd and set up Rebellion Productions in 2017 to develop and produce film and TV based on the company’s IP. Variety first reported news of the studio.

Shoot on hit German crime series Babylon Berlin by Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten and...