Movie News

The action sequel is set for a co-ordinated release in 12 countries across North America and Asia.

South Korea’s Contents Panda has sold action sequel The Witch: Part 2. The Other One to 124 countries including to Spendid Film for Germany, Benelux and Poland.

Director Park Hoon-jung’s follow-up to his 2018 Warner Bros-backed sci-fi action mystery The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion, the sequel stars Shin Sia as another girl with unnamed powers who escapes from a top-secret laboratory, pursued by multiple violent groups.

The film has also sold to China (Pumpkin Film), Japan (Twin), Cis and the Baltics (Volgafilm), Latin America

"The Walking Dead" has had its share of icky moments, but usually those involve human characters dying or bloated zombies that have been stuck down a well being ripped in half so that their entrails spill out all over the place. It's not often, on this or any other show, that you see a killer and a woman wearing a severed zombie face get intimate in the woods. But that's exactly what happened in "The Walking Dead" season 10, episode 9, "Squeeze."

After series lead Andrew Lincoln departed "The Walking Dead" in its ninth season, taking protagonist Rick Grimes with him, the show...

The post Remembering That Disturbing Love Scene on The Walking Dead (You Know the One) appeared first on /Film.

Seriesmakers will offer training and grants to film directors looking to switch to TV series.

Marti Noxon, Agnieszka Holland, Michael Hirst, Frank Doelger, Hagai Levi, Stefan Arndt, Cyril Tysz, Ossi Nishri and Michael Polle have been named as the speakers for the first edition of Seriesmakers, the training programme launched by French TV festival Series Mania to help feature filmmakers move into TV.

The programme aims to support film talent working on a new scripted series to develop a complete pitch deck, guided by experienced directors, show runners, writers, and producers.

Ten teams with an idea for a TV series

Sean Penn is known as a method actor, just like his "Carlito's Way" co-star, Al Pacino. Even before he became a five-time Oscar nominee, Penn was so dedicated to giving an authentic performance that he went method for his comedic role as the surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." In "Carlito's Way," however, Penn's determination to get a certain scene right tested director Brian De Palma's patience.

"Carlito's Way" was both Penn and Pacino's second collaboration with De Palma. Penn had first worked with De Palma on the 1989 Vietnam movie "Casualties of War,"...

The post Sean Penn Made Brian De Palma Shoot This Carlito's Way Scene 20 Times appeared first on /Film.

Rob Schroeder’s sci-fi-tinged debut feature nests a lot of plots inside but doesn’t really add them up

A nocturnal traveller caught in a freaky menage a trois; an isolated mistress to a powerful senator; a technician in an experimental facility who seems to feed lines to characters in the other dramas. Rob Schroeder’s sci-fi-tinged feature debut expends much effort arranging these nested realities in a furiously scrambled film that makes you feel like you’re the test subject in Inception’s dream machine – and one who’s sniffed a few tubes of Bostik before bedtime. It’s a brave storyteller’s gambit, but there’s something finally underwhelming and convoluted about Ultrasound once it deigns to join the dots.

Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) is out in his car at night when he drives over a makeshift stinger that means an enforced stop at the house of Art (Bob Stephenson

First edition to include 14 features.

An EU-backed European Film Festival is set to launch in Saudi Arabia this week, comprising 14 acclaimed features and a series of filmmaker events.

The festival has been organised by the Delegation of the European Union in the Saudi capital of Riyadh with support from media firm Arabia Pictures Group (Apg). Taking place from June 15-22 in Riyadh, it is intended to promote European cinema and foster contacts between European and Saudi filmmakers.

Subjects covered in the programme of films include female empowerment, climate change and disability. Titles selected for the inaugural edition include Polish drama Never Gonna Snow Again,

It is produced by Marta Romanova-Jekabsane of Riga-based Kultfilma.

Escape Net, the second feature project by Latvian director Dzintars Dreibergs won the top prize at the Sofia Meetings co-production market in Bulgaria on Sunday.

The project is based on a true story set in Soviet-era Riga about a young woman who joins a basketball team in the hope it will allow her to travel abroad and meet her brother.

According to producer Marta Romanova-Jekabsane of Riga-based Kultfilma,around 70 of the film’s € 1.5m budget is in place and she is looking to bring other co-producers onboard to close the financing.

It is a new role to promote disability equality both at the BFI and in the wider screen industries.

The BFI has appointed Clare Baines as its disability equality lead, a newly-created role to promote disability equality within the screen industries and internally at the BFI.

Baines joins from digital solutions firm Zebra Technologies, where she was an inclusion leader. She has a degree in biomedical engineering, and previously focused on how digital solutions and technology can better support disabled people.

Baines said: “I became blind at the age of 15 and, rather ironically, that is when my passion for film started.

Email sent to all reporters states ‘our newsroom has become the story’ but editor Bevan Shields insists ‘we are a great masthead’

Smh removes column and apologises over reporting of Rebel Wilson’s relationshipGet our free news app; get our morning email briefing

Anger about the Sydney Morning Herald’s reporting of Rebel Wilson’s new relationship has boiled over into the newsroom, with an anonymous staffer sending an email to colleagues claiming the paper’s reputation was being “trashed”.

“Here we are again – our newsroom has become the story,” the email sent on Monday afternoon stated. It referenced a February controversy when the editor, Bevan Shields, wrongly insisted a train network shutdown ordered by the state government was a strike.

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Filmed in 1931, this experimental film about Ukraine’s industrial might captures the revolutionary upheaval of its era with bold cuts and uproarious sound cues

The jittery, crazed, experimental brilliance of Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, subtitled The Symphony of the Donbas, still pulses after almost a century, although it should be said right away that the “enthusiasm” of the title is mainly for two things: first, Soviet Russia’s control of Ukraine and, second, coal. Neither of these commands quite the same excitement in 2022.

This was Vertov’s first sound film, celebrating the role played by the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and its mineral and agricultural riches in Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan, and nothing could have been less conventionally “symphonic”: a piercing, clanging, screeching sound-collage, mixing crowds, shouts, boots and industrial machinery as well as ordinary music and speech. Religion is swept away by Communist party orthodoxy. The pious,

Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival’s industry section, Eastern Promises, has unveiled its lineup of 35 film projects, which will be showcased during the Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch, First Cut+ Works in Progress and Odesa International Film Festival Works in Progress presentations. The most promising projects will receive awards totaling Euros 125,000.

The showcasing of projects to industry professionals will take place in Karlovy Vary during Kviff Industry Days. On July 4, are Works in Progress and Works in Development – Feature Launch; on July 5, First Cut+ Works in Progress and Oiff WiP Selection.

For Works in Progress, 10 fiction and documentary feature films in the late stage of production or post-production from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and North Africa have been selected. The prize will be decided by jury members Dennis Ruh (European Film Market), Óscar Alonzo (Latido Films

Pixar’s “Lightyear” will not be playing in Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Kuwait, among other West Asia territories, due to the inclusion of a same sex kiss in the “Toy Story” spinoff.

The scene, involving a new lesbian space ranger character named Alisha and her partner starting a family together and greeting each other with a kiss on the lips had been originally cut from the film by Disney.

But it was reinstated when Pixar animators spoke out against Disney in an open letter obtained by Variety, saying that Disney had demanded cuts, censoring “overtly gay affection” and in protest against Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s handling of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Variety understands that “Lightyear,” which is set for U.S. release in June 17, was never submitted to censors in Saudi, knowing that it would not pass. But the film had instead been

GlobalData provides data, insight and intelligence to businesses and clients covering a wide range of sectors including construction, energy, healthcare, agriculture and sport.

Media Business Insight, owner of Screen International, has been acquired by the UK stock market listed company GlobalData Plc in a move that will help accelerate growth and build out new products and services from Mbi’s leading brands in the TV, film and marketing sectors.

Mbi’s brands including Screen International, Broadcast, The Media Production and Technology Show, Alf, The Knowledge and Kftv, will join GlobalData group, one of the world’s fastest growing information and insight businesses.

Tel Aviv-based sales company Cinephil has acquired worldwide sales rights for documentary feature “A Story of Bones,” which is in competition at the ongoing Tribeca Festival.

Directed by Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere and produced by Yvonne Isimeme Ibazebo, the documentary follows Annina Van Neel, who, as the chief environmental officer for Saint Helena’s troubled 360 million airport project, learned of the island’s most terrible atrocity – an unmarked mass burial ground of an estimated 9,000 formerly enslaved Africans in Rupert’s Valley, one of the most significant traces of the transatlantic slave trade still on earth.

Haunted by this historical injustice, Van Neel now fights alongside renowned African American preservationist Peggy King Jorde and a group of disenfranchised islanders – many of them descendants of the formerly enslaved – for the proper memorialization of these forgotten victims. The resistance they face exposes disturbing truths about the U.K.’s colonial past and present.

Despite run-ins with the authorities Kirill Serebrennikov stayed put – until the invasion of Ukraine

On a sunny Friday evening in Amsterdam, Kirill Serebrennikov was feeling some pre-premiere nerves as guests started to arrive at the Dutch National Opera.

“Of course it’s different. Everything is different when you do it in person,” the celebrated Russian stage and screen director said in an interview an hour before the first performance of Der Freischütz.

Director Juan Palacios’s documentary maps out the ancient plains of central Spain, tracing the line between the rural and the modern, the boundless and the individual

Juan Palacios’s enigmatic documentary portrait of an unnamed village nestled in the vast flat plains of central Spain extracts the otherworldly out of the everyday. In a land where livestock seem to outnumber people, time is felt not in the ticking of a clock but in wordless quotidian activities. The sounds of herded cattle, beans being threshed or wet clothes slapped on a washboard by a babbling brook become a highly sensorial symphony that accentuates the stillness and the melancholy of the landscape.

But as daily vignettes slowly unfold, technology subtly makes itself known. Roaming from one dusty field to another, two young girls are dismayed that no creature shows up on their Pokémon Go app. In another otherworldly moment, shots of

In what promises to be an incredibly busy Annecy, Brinca Animation Studio will premiere its animated feature “Home is Somewhere Else” at the French animation meet’s Contrechamp section, its major sidebar.

Co-directed by Carlos Hagerman and Jorge Villalobos, the Mexican animated feature reflects on the lives of the many undocumented Hispanic immigrants arriving in the U.S.; less interested in simply stating the immense difficulty that this means for them and keener on observing with care the emotional consequences that it entails. Built around the voices of real characters and their families, the toon’s varied styles become deeply intimate. Seen from the protagonists’ worldview, the film becomes an earnest call for empathy in a country that is witnessing an unprecedented influx of immigrants.

A portrait of four different characters presented by a sharp-witted narrator called “El Deportee,” voiced by José Eduardo Aguilar – whose real-life story is also told

Part of what it describes as a bold and rapid expansion of its long-form animation department, London-based Oscar winning Passion Pictures has appointed Nicki Cortese as head of development for animated features and series.

Cortese joins Pixar veteran David Park, a production manager on “Coco” and animation department manager on “Toy Story 3,” who was himself hired as Passion head of production for long-form animation in 2021, as well as executive producer Debbie Crosscup.

Joining Passion ahead of Annecy, Cortese served as head of development for Elisabeth Murdoch’s Locksmith Animation, where she worked on Disney’s “Ron’s Gone Wrong” as well as the just-announced Netflix feature “That Christmas,” based on children’s books by “Four Weddings and a Funeral’s ”Richard Curtis. Cortese had a first-look deal with Brian Robbins’ studio, Awesomeness Films, and, prior to that, oversaw the “Divergent” franchise at Red Wagon.

Cortese comes to Passion after it

The Annecy Intl. Animation Festival is returning to a full-fledged in-person event in 2022, expecting more than 10,000 attendees, from more than 90 countries June 13-18.

“The world’s animation community will be back in Annecy — the key meeting place for the industry and artists,” says fest director Mickaël Marin, beaming.

The Annecy team has striven to maintain connections and momentum within the animation community during the pandemic, through the 2020 online edition and 2021 hybrid fest, complemented by yearround masterclasses, professional meetings, seminars and dedicated trips, including recent trips to Nigeria, Israel and Brazil.

The fest also collaborates with events such as Ventana Sur in Argentina and the Animation Day in Cannes.

Annecy’s 2022 lineup includes feature films and series produced in France, such as the opening film, “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” made at Illumination MacGuff for Illumination/ Universal; “Arcane,” made by Fortiche for Netflix/Riot Games; and “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai,

Short Film

Ahead of World Refugee Day on June 20, Unhcr, the Un Refugee Agency has released “Uprooted,” a powerful short film featuring and made by Ukrainian refugees now living in Germany. The film shows loud noises – a door slamming, the sirens of an ambulance, the bangs of a firework display – and how they can trigger terrifying memories of war. Some 50 refugees from Ukraine, including writers, choreographers, designers, casting producers, styling assistants, set dressing, make up, music and all the talent featured in the film, were involved in the project.

“Uprooted”, released Monday on Unhcr’s social media platforms, is being shown in select cinemas across the U.K. It was directed by Stink Films’ Andzej Gavriss who wrote the concept with Ukrainian choreographer, Konstantin Koval and Don’t Panic London’s creative partner, Rick Dodds. Production took place in Berlin, Germany.

Unhcr spokesperson, Joung-Ah Ghedini-Williams said: “The Ukrainian refugee cast