Ioncinema

The Cannes Film Festival’s La Résidence is welcoming Harry Lighton, Emma Branderhorst, Joecar Hanna, Saulé Bliuvaité, Mansi Maheshwari and Oliver McGoldrick to their 51st session. From March 16th to July 31st, this next generation of international filmmakers will reside in Paris where they will benefit from a personalized screenwriting residency program and a collective program of meetings with film professionals. Lighton took the Un Certain Regard section by storm with his fun queer dom rom com Pillion (read review) while Saulé Bliuvaité won the big daddy prize Golden Leopard at Locarno with Toxic (read review).… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Ordeal by Innocence: Loznitsa Mines the Terrors of Naïveté

A good man is hard to find, and if one were to be found, he’s likely wet behind the ears. So begins a retrospective parable in Two Prosecutors, the first narrative feature from perennial documentarian Sergei Loznitsa since 2018’s galvanizing Donbass (read review). His latest is an adaptation of a short story by Russian writer Georgy Demidov, a physicist who later served his own lengthy stint as a political prisoner only a year after this narrative’s setting. In comparison to Loznitsa’s previous narrative films, his latest happens to be his most straightforward, arguably simple.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Matthias Schoenaerts, Makita Samba and Marton Csokas have been cast in Ellie Foumbi‘s spicy sophomore feature which gathered plenty of steam when Halle Berry joined the project last August. The trades announce that production on Fleur began this week. The list of producers on the project appears to have grown we have: Killer Films’ Christine Vachon, HalleHolly’s Halle Berry and Holly Jeter, Plot Twist Pictures Gabriel Mayers. We imagine that Foumbi might attempt to make a return to the lido (where she premiered Our Father, the Devil as a work in progress) but that is likely too tight.

This tells the story of a New York housewife (Berry) who flees America and her husband of 30 years (Csokas) to reinvent herself in Paris as Fleur, an upscale escort and dominatrix carving out her own power and identity.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

A lucky eight film projects have landed support via Hubert Bals Fund’s HBF+Europe support schemes. The HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme provides advanced financing for production, whilst HBF+Europe: Post-production Support helps consolidate funding once shooting is complete. Among the filmmakers receiving support worth The Mother of All Lies filmmaker Asmae El Moudir landing support for Don’t Let the Sun Go Up On Me which already gathered momentum at the recent Atlas Labs at Marrakech — the docu project looks like something truly out of the ordinary. After receiving Hubert Bals Funding in 2021, Brazil’s Maya Da-Rin has been long at work on her sophomore feature titled Nightsong, while Kamila Andini (who were recently profiled) could very well receive a major Cannes Film Festival invite for Four Seasons in Java.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire and today we can confirm some exciting news – the Nuri Bilge Ceylan camp is indeed moving forward on his next feature film which will roll out this summer. We add mentioned a tidbit of casting news last week, and now we have a title and official synopsis via the Arte France Cinéma folks who are backing a half dozen new film projects. Titled Soleil blafard (Yorgun Günes) (or the direct translation of Pale Sun), Sabri lives alone in the suburbs of Ankara. His daughter, who lives in Istanbul, invites him to spend a few days with her and her young son at her seaside vacation home.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

With her sweeping and ambitious fourth feature, Palestine 36, Annemarie Jacir gives emotional weight to the history books, excavating the roots of nearly a century of loss, injustice, and colonial brutality. Through interwoven stories of villagers, laborers, and intellectuals, she crafts a richly human portrait of resistance, identity, home, and displacement—revealing how the long shadow of the 1936–1939 uprising continues to shape Palestinian life today. As in Salt of This Sea (2008), When I Saw You (2012), and Wajib (2017), Jacir grounds political upheaval in personal histories and lived realities, but here she pushes further back into the past to show how inseparable contemporary Palestinian experience is from this earlier moment.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Not that we have any issue with a legitimate tie, but it does make you wonder how many voters there actually are in the Best Live Action Short Film category, where The Singers and Two People Exchanging Saliva ended up sharing the prize. All told, we correctly called 19 of the 24 competitive Oscar categories—good for a solid 79.17% batting average. The One Battle After Another team won the top prizes with a half dozen trophies, with Sinners making to leave its mark with a quartet of awards. Here are last night’s winners!

Best Picture
“Bugonia”
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another” WINNER
“The Secret Agent”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”
“Train Dreams”

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet” WINNER
Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”
Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”
Emma Stone, “Bugonia”

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”
Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”
Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
Michael B.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

After dazzling the critic elite at Telluride and cementing its frontrunner status at TIFF, Hamnet appeared poised to gallop away with the Oscar race, but the season took a dramatic turn when Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another opened to a thundering response and galloped through awards season, scooping up the Golden Globes, WGA, PGA, and DGA awards. Sinners from Ryan Coogler emerged as a late-breaking dark horse, from an April release (not unlike Everything Everywhere All at Once three years back) turning tonight’s Oscars into what now feels like a genuine photo finish. One thing is certain: if Sinners starts collecting trophies in the telecast’s first two hours, we could be headed for a truly electric finale and if there are two key categories to watch out for it’s the Best Supporting categories.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

Berlin-based visual artist Ann Oren transitioned from more than a decade immersed in short-form, docu and experimental cinema into her audacious feature debut, Piaffe — a bold, body-conscious fever dream that signaled the arrival of a striking new voice. As noted in our Nicholas Bell’s ★★★★ review, the film is nothing short of arresting, a work that fuses tactile sensuality with conceptual rigor. Its selection for competition for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 2022 further cemented Oren’s emergence from the gallery space into from promising debut into a sophomore feature that may contain overlapping themes of desire and control, here is everything we know so far … for Ann Oren’s Objet A.… Read the rest

Continue reading…

We are nearing the four-year gap between projects that celebrated Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan typically allows between films so while this tidbit of news is slightly unconventional it logistically makes sense. Our friends at World of Reel have learned that Turkish actress Pınar Deniz is set to join the master filmmaker for what will be a summer shoot – lining up for a premiere for what is already a promising 2027 edition with Ruben Ostlund, Alice Rohrwacher and Bertrand Bonello as possible Palme d’Or competitors.

Ceylan’s 2023 About Dry Grasses (read review) gave actress Merve Dizdar the Best Actress award so this casting news is a big deal for Deniz — best known for the series Yargı (Family Secrets) (2021–2024).… Read the rest

Continue reading…