When asked to name her organization’s biggest accomplishment so far, Charlene Deleon-Jones, the executive director for Film AlUla and Saudi Tourism leadership board member, doesn’t hesitate to name-check Norah, the first Saudi film to crack the Cannes lineup. The Tawfik Alzaidi-helmed indie movie, which will compete in the fest’s Un Certain Regard section, was shot in
International
In his short but prolific acting career, 17-year-old Finn Little has covered a lot of terrain, from desolate shorelines to U.S. ranchlands. And his latest, The Surfer, took him to the idyllic beaches of Western Australia. From director Lorcan Finnegan (2019’s Vivarium), The Surfer centers on a man (Nicolas Cage), who takes his son (Little) to the beach where he used to surf
The 2024 Cannes Film Festival competition jury, led by president Greta Gerwig, met the international press Tuesday — and it didn’t take long before the assembled stars were urged to address the various fraught political issues swirling around this year’s edition of the world’s most glamorous film fest. On the eve of the 77th festival, Cannes artistic director
Chinese sales company Parallax Films has notched a batch of sales deals for director Qiu Jiongjiong‘s Locarno 2021 jury prize-winning historical drama A New Old Play. The acclaimed Chinese indie film has sold to France’s Carlotta Films, Japan’s Katsuben Cinema Club, and Singapore’s Cineaste Production House for distribution across all Southeast Asian territories, excluding Indonesia and Vietnam.
Mark Damon, who starred in the Vincent Price horror classic House of Usher and spaghetti Westerns before revolutionizing the foreign sales and distribution film business and producing features including 9 1/2 Weeks, Monster and Lone Survivor, has died. He was 91. Damon died Sunday of natural causes in Los Angeles, his daughter, Alexis Damon Ribaut, told
Veteran European film executive Tanja Meissner has been named the new director of Berlinale Pro*, a newly-created position that will include running the Berlin film festival‘s European Film Market. New Berlin film festival director Tricia Tuttle announced Meissner’s appointment on Friday, May 10, describing the Berlinale Pro* position as “a reshaped role [encompassing] the directorship
Tilda Swinton‘s feature directorial debut is up for an award at Sheffield DocFest where it will get its world premiere as part of a lineup of 48 world premieres from 56 different countries. The U.K. documentary festival, taking place June 12-17, revealed its full program on Wednesday. Its theme for the 31st edition this year
The Cannes film festival has responded to calls for a proposed strike by festival workers over pay and labor regulations. On Tuesday, the festival issued its first official statement, saying it hoped “solutions will be found” to prevent film festival workers from disrupting the 2024 festival, which kicks off May 14. Yesterday, a group calling
A French collective representing the interests of French film festival workers has called for a general strike “of all employees of the Cannes Film Festival and of its sidebars.” The Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke Behind the Screens) collective, made the call in a public statement on Monday. The group has long been sounding
Nishta Jain’s Farming the Revolution, a film about Indian farmers rising up against new laws, picked up the best international feature documentary prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival on Friday night. The top jury prize win at the festival means Jain’s film, which world premiered at Hot Docs, will qualify for consideration
Switzerland is set to take center stage at the 2024 Cannes Film Market, with the Alpine nation picked as this year’s country of honor at the Marché du Film, which runs May 14-22 alongside the Cannes Film Festival. National film promotion group Swiss Films, together with the Swiss Federal Office of Culture and Swiss public
The Sheffield DocFest will open its 2024 edition with the world premiere of Kevin Macdonald’s Klitschko: More Than a Fight on June 12 at Sheffield City Hall. The annual documentary festival in England also unveiled Roger Ross Williams, the first African American director to win an Academy Award for his 2010 doc short Music by
Cillian Murphy, Kin season two and Paul Mescal were among the winners of the Irish Film & Television Awards 2024, which were handed out during a ceremony in Dublin on Saturday. Lies We Tell, about an orphaned teenage heiress in 19th-century Ireland who is forced to embrace the dark legacy of her family, led the
BAFTA has confirmed the date for next year’s film awards ceremony, which will be held Sunday, February 16, 2025. The date means the BAFTAs will come exactly two weeks before the 2025 Oscars, set for March 2. Once again, the British awards will take place smack in the middle of the Berlin Film Festival, which
French actor Guillaume Canet is starring, writing, and producing the new Netflix thriller Ad Vitam Rodolphe Lauga (It’s Complicated) is directing the action film, which has begun shooting in Paris. Netflix will release the movie worldwide next year. Canet plays Franck Lazareff who, after surviving an attempt on his life, finds his wife has been
The Cannes Critics’ Week, the parallel film festival sidebar organized by the French film critics’ union, has unveiled its 2024 selection. The psychological thriller Ghost Trail, the first feature from acclaimed French shorts director Jonathan Millet, will open the 2024 sidebar. Adam Bessa (star of 2022’s Un Certain Regard winner Harka) plays the lead in
It’s official: Donald Trump — or at least a fictionalized version of him — is heading to Cannes. The prestigious French film festival unveiled its 2024 official film selection Thursday in Paris, and Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice was among the titles revealed for the event’s main competition. The biographical drama stars Sebastian Stan as
Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki is revered in China as much as he is anywhere. The 83-year-old filmmaker’s Oscar-winning swan song The Boy and the Heron opened last Wednesday in China to take advantage of the country’s Qingming public holiday and by Sunday it had earned $73 million — more than its totals in both
David Barrington Holt, who established and ran the first Creature Shop on the West Coast for The Jim Henson Company during his two-plus decades with the firm, has died. He was 78. Holt died March 13 of complications from cancer at his home in Los Angeles, his son, Chris Holt, announced. Holt started out with
Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning swan song The Boy and the Heron has taken flight at China’s box office in a major way. The enigmatic Studio Ghibli hit opened in China on Wednesday and soared to $13.7 million (RMB 99.1 million), nudging aside Warner Bros and Legendary Entertainment’s prior box-office champ Godzilla x Kong:
Cannes is getting into the remake business. The Cannes film market, the Marché du Film, is launching a one-day event focused entirely on remakes and local-language adaptations of existing titles. Together with the CNC, the French national film board, and with support from Spain’s Institute of Cinematography & Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), Italy’s Directorate General for
The ever-busy Japanese character actor Tadanobu Asano — currently having a moment as one of the stars of Disney’s hit samurai series Shōgun — has joined the cast of Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang‘s upcoming culinary thriller Morte Cucina. The actor and director last collaborated two decades ago on the romantic crime film Last Life in the Universe (2003),
The Black Guelph, a dark Irish crime thriller centered on Ireland’s Travellers community, has secured a U.S. release. John Connors’ directorial debut premiered at the Oldenburg Film Festival in 2022, where it won both best film honor and the best actor for star Graham Earley. It is billed as the first film from an Irish
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has updated its classification guidelines, informed by its largest-ever public consultation, meaning its age ratings will change according to changing public opinion, including on the on-screen depiction of violence, sex and drug use. Throughout 2023, the BBFC spoke to 12,000 people across the U.K. “to explore what matters
The makers of Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey 1 & 2 are at work on another twisted take on A.A. Milne’s children’s story. The prolific low-budget genre labels Jagged Edge Productions and ITN Films have unveiled plans to swing their bloody axe again with Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble, a slasher horror pic set to shoot this year
Eiko Ishibashi provides more than just music for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s movies, with her compositions being central to the Japanese filmmaker’s dramas, so much so that they take on the life of a supporting character. There have been consecutive Asian Film Awards (AFA) wins for Ishibashi’s work on, first, the Oscar-winning Drive My Car and, this
Dark Winds and Blood Quantum actor Kiowa Gordon and Sera-Lys McArthur (Café Daughter, Outlander) have joined the cast of Many Wounds, a contemporary re-imagining of Lee Tamahori’s ground-breaking 1994 Maori film Once Were Warriors, set among indigenous communities in Canada. Skye Pelletier (Prey) stars in Many Wounds as Mashka, a young teenager on the cusp
Seven years after his career imploded amid dozens of sexual misconduct accusations, Kevin Spacey’s ongoing efforts to resurrect his career have taken him to Italy. The two-time Oscar winner will star as The Devil in The Contract, one of three projects that will soon involve Italian filmmaker Massimiliano Caroletti and his wife, the former porn
Oppenheimer continued its dominant awards season form on Sunday night at the American Society of Cinematographers‘ ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards, with Hoyte van Hoytema taking the prize for theatrical feature film. The win was Van Hoytema’s first ASC award, after previously being nominated for Dunkirk (2018) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2012). On the TV
Kate Winslet revealed that fans often recognize her more in public from her role in The Holiday rather than Titanic. The actress stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, where she talked about some of her biggest projects throughout her career with the host. “People come up to me in the streets