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The jump from cinematographer to director doesn’t happen so often. Barry Sonnenfeld, Jan de Bont, Ernest Dickerson––an attractive list, if a short one. The latest to join their rank is Tato Kotetishvili, the Georgian Dp behind Uta Beria’s Negative Numbers and Levan Koguashvili’s Blind Dates, now on directing duty with Holy Electricity. The film, part city symphony, part docudrama, offers plenty of style and finds substance in unusual places. Results are compelling, if a little mixed.

It’s a film of real people in somewhat-unreal scenarios, built from precisely composed shots that are often medium, static, and doused with generous color and blunt irony. Take the opening: a shot of a family gathered around an open casket that cuts suddenly to a busted-up car in a scrap yard moments before it’s flattened by a slab of concrete. In the yard, Kotetishvili introduces his low-key, quixotic...

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)’s Hubert Bals Fund (Hbf) has selected 12 feature film projects for its 2024 Development Support scheme.

The 12 projects, which will receive a grant of €10,000 to support their development, were selected from a record 1,150 submissions.

Scroll down for full list

They include Christopher Murray’s Piedras Gigantes which will be among the first Chilean national fiction feature films shot on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the remote Pacific Ocean island.

Piedras Gigantes tells the story of the archaeologist Katherine Routledge arriving on the island in 1914, who played a conflicted role amidst an indigenous uprising. Murray’s The...

The International Film Festival Rotterdam’s (IFFR) Hubert Bals Fund has picked twelve feature films for its development support scheme, backing each project with €10,000 ($10,500) in production financing. The selection comes after the fund received more than 1,150 submissions, a new record.

Several IFFR alumni filmmakers are among the recipients. Brazilian filmmaker Lillah Hallah, whose Levante won the Youth Jury Award at IFFR 2024, will receive support for Colhões de Ouro, a dark musical comedy. Midhun Murali, who won a Tiger Special Jury Award for Kiss Wagon, secures backing for his new project MTV i.e. Mars to Venus.

Palestinian filmmaker Muayad Alayan, known for The Reports on Sarah and Saleem and A House in Jerusalem, receives funding for Conversation with the Sea. The film follows a Palestinian man ordered to pay his deceased son’s debt.

Christopher Murray’s Piedras gigantes will be one of the first Chilean fiction features shot on...

In what is quite frequent the case with first-time feature directors, Tato Kotetishvili‘s debut “Holy Electricity” is actually a collage of parts that could have been short movies by themselves. Quite impressively though, the Georgian manages to connect them in a fashion that is both absurdly entertaining and makes sense, mostly through the use of slapstick humor. The film won the Golden Leopard – Filmmakers of the Present in Locarno and is currently screening in Thessaloniki.

Holy Electricity is screening at Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Young Conga has just lost his father and his cousin, Bart, is promising to take care of him as if he was his own son. Bart, however, has some issues with loan sharks, and in general, his financial situation is not exactly great, in what it seems to be the case with everyone in Tbilisi. While searching in a metal waste dump to find something to sell,...

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April head the nominations for the 17th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa), each securing nods in five categories.

Both will compete for best film, best director, best screenplay, best cinematography and best performance at the awards, which will be presented on November 30 at a ceremony on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Scroll down for full list of nominations

All We Imagine As Light, billed as an ode to nocturnal Mumbai, premiered in Competition at Cannes, where it won the festival’s grand prix. April, the story of a Georgian ob-gyn who faces accusations,...

Two films by women directors, Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ lead the nominations for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Both films will compete in five categories – best film, best director, best screenplay, best cinematography and best performance – it was revealed Wednesday in a nominations announcement.

Also competing for best film are Yoko Yamanaka’s Tokyo-set story of a young woman’s mental illness, “Desert of Namibia” (Japan); Neo Sora’s future Tokyo tale of perilous social surveillance “Happyend”; and Jiang Xiaoxuan’s “To Kill a Mongolian Horse”, a portrait of a Mongolian horseman turned performer, based on a true story.

Four of the five films nominated for best film are from female directors, and in an Apsa first, all five best film contenders are first or second features.

In addition to Kapadia, Kulumbegashvili and Jiang, the nominees for best director include Tato Kotetishvili for “Holy Electricity,...

With a background in photography and cinematography, Tato Kotetishvili brings a keen visual eye to his feature directorial debut, Holy Electricity. Having honed his skills on productions like Negative Numbers, Kotetishvili takes the camera reins to share tales from his hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia.

At the story’s center are cousins Gonga and Bart. Still grappling with recent loss, the pair discovers promise in a chance finding—metal crosses primed for a new purpose. With neon lights in hand, their crucifix creations seem just what Tbilisi needs. And so their door-to-door business takes form, ushering them into an experiential tour of the city through its people.

Through static frames that immerse us in intimate scenes, Kotetishvili invites exploration of community on its peripheries. Among quirky residents and unfamiliar corners of Tblisi, fragments of meaning emerge. As Gonga and Bart’s bond balances wavering fortunes, their curiosity pulls focus from sales...

Blueberry Dreams. Elene Mikaberidze: 'I added a bit of artistic flair because I love working with visuals' Photo: Courtesy Cph:dox Georgian cinema has been rising on the global stage In recent years, with filmmakers such as Dea Kulumbegashvili, Sandro Koberidze, Salome Jashi, Elene Naveriani and Tato Kotetishvili gaining international recognition and prizes. Now, Elene Mikaberidze steps into the spotlight with her documentary Blueberry Dreams, which premiered at Cph:dox in March and received a Special Jury Mention in Odesa's European Competition in July.

The film tells the story of a Georgian family farming blueberries in Mingrelia, near the border of the occupied region, Abkhazia. In this interview conducted at Kutaisi International Short Film Festival (which also shows feature-length works such as Blueberry Dreams), Mikaberidze shares the journey behind the film and her reflections on its challenges.

How accidental was your encounter with the family who became the subject of your film?...

Exclusive: Twelve new works including a feature-length pic from Palestinian filmmaker Laila Abbas will screen as part of the Meet The Neighbors+ competition sidebar at this year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival.

The jury for this year’s Meet The Neighbors+ comp will feature Ukrainian filmmaker Maryna Er Gorbach, actress Manal Awad, and distributor Vassilis Sourrapas.

The top prize in the Meet The Neighbors+ comp is the Golden Alexander “Michel Demopoulos” for Best Full-length Feature Film. The award comes with a 10,000-euro cash prize, which is shared equally between the producer and film director. The Silver Alexander – Best Director Award comes with a 5,000-euro cash prize.

Abbas’ Thank You for Banking With Us is a Palestine-Germany-Saudi Arabia-Qatar-Egypt co-production. The film will arrive in Greece after screening at the London Film Festival. Abbas, a filmmaker and academic, first gained international attention in 2013 with the doc feature Ice & Dust. The Thank You for...

As the camera gazes at a scrapyard, uncovering the charm of finding lost objects, it sets the scene for a feature debut that marches to the rhythm of spontaneity. Cinematographer-turned-director Tato Kotetishvili approaches scenes of hurt, song and joy similarly, giving the impression that he stumbles upon them within the bustling life of Tbilisi, Georgia. His static framing does not shy away from the recurrence of episodic characters and their eccentricities, inviting the viewer to look beyond the protagonists' story and grasp an environment that is key to fully understanding them. In this context, the bond between a nephew and an uncle is explored warmly but also with a degree of nonchalance that makes for a disparate plot. Despite its tendency to lose sight of a unifying thread, Holy Electricity picks up a musical cadence, guiding the viewer through a series of moments that shine with a disarming honesty.

Gonga (Nika.

Georgian filmmaker Tato Kotetishvili, whose feature directorial debut, “Holy Electricity,” won the Golden Leopard in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente section at the recently wrapped Locarno Film Festival, is prepping his next film, a docufiction that follows a family trying to illegally enter the U.S. from across the Mexican border.

The director also released a trailer for his prize-winning debut, which plays this week in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Variety has been given exclusive access below.

The untitled project from the cinematographer-turned-director traces the odyssey of a Georgian family trying to make it to America via an arduous, three-week journey across Latin America. The family’s first trip overseas, it will be seen through the eyes of a child “who is not really concerned with the problems of the past or the anxieties of the future,” said Kotetishvili.

The film, which reunites the director with producer Tekla Machavariani of Tbilisi-based Nushi Film,...

Lithuanian cinema, not typically that well represented on the international film festival circuit, was the big story of this year’s Locarno Film Festival awards ceremony, with two films from the Baltic nation taking a number of top prizes between them.

“Toxic,” an auspicious debut from writer-director Saulė Bliuvaitė, won not only the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the fest’s premier International Competition — from a jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner — but also, in an unusual double, the top prize in the separately juried First Feature Competition. Bliuvaitė’s compatriot Laurynas Bareiša, meanwhile, won Best Director in the International Competition for his sophomore feature “Drowning Dry,” while the same film’s ensemble also collectively took one of the jury’s gender-neutral acting prizes.

A hard-hitting study of alliances and rivalries between teenage girls enrolled at a modeling school in small-town Lithuania, “Toxic” stood out in the Competition...

Toxic (Akiplėša), the debut feature from Saulė Bliuvaitė, has won the 2024 Golden Leopard, the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Toxic follows two teenage girls from a bleak industrial town who join an extreme local modelling school. Featuring a cast of non-actors, it was selected for Les Arcs work-in-progress programme in 2023, and was also a prize-winner at Meeting Point Vilnius this year.

Bendita Film Sales are handling sales. The film also won Locarno’s Swatch first feature award.

The Golden Leopard for best film includes a cash prize of Chf 75,000 to be shared equally between the film’s director and producer.

Akiplėša (Toxic), the feature debut from Lithuanian writer and director Saulė Bliuvaitė that explores the human body and mysterious model agencies, is the winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s 2024 international competition, which was honored with the Pardo d’Oro, or Golden Leopard, in the Swiss town on Saturday. Locarno77 organizers called the movie “an incisive portrayal of teenage girls and the crushing expectations imposed upon them.”

Meanwhile, the special jury prize went to Iraq-born Austrian auteur Kurdwin Ayub for her sophomore fiction feature Mond (Moon). The film follows former martial artist Sarah who leaves Austria to train three sisters from a wealthy Jordanian family. “It’s all about sisters, no matter where they come from, and about cages, no matter where they are,” according to Ayub.

Lithuania, which has a population of about three million people but was represented by two features in this year’s Locarno international competition,...

Die Jury um die österreichische Filmemacherin Jessica Hausner hat entschieden: Der Goldene Leopard des Locarno77 geht nach Litauen: „Toxic“ von Saulė Bliuvaitė gewinnt nicht nur den Hauptpreis des Schweizer A-Festivals, sondern kommt noch drei weitere Mal zum Zuge. Kurdwin Ayubs „Mond“ gewinnt vierfach.

Saulė Bliuvaitė gewann für ihr Debüt „Toxic” den Goldenen Leoparden (Credit: Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press)

Der Wettbewerb von Locarno77 zeichnete sich vor allem durch starke Beiträge von Regisseurinnen aus. Diese setzten sich schlussendlich auch durch: Jessica Hausner und ihre Jurykolleg:innen Diana Elbaum, Payal Kapadia, Luca Marinelli und Tim Blake Nelson vergaben die Hauptreise an von Frauen inszenierte Werke. Litauen zählte zu den auffälligsten Filmländern.

Mit ihrem Langfilmdebüt „Toxic“ hat die aus Litauen stammende Filmemacherin Saulė Bliuvaitė den mit 75.000 Schweizer Franken dotierten Goldenen Leoparden des Wettbewerbs von Locarno77 gewonnen. Dies hat die Jury um Jessica Hausner als Präsidentin bei der heutigen Preisverleihung im GrandRex verkündet. Das Coming-of-Age-Drama inszenierte Bliuvaitė nach eigenem Drehbuch,...

The Sarajevo Film Festival was born amid the Bosnian war, in 1994 during the four-year siege of the city. Sarajevo, the city, and the festival have done much to put that dark history behind them. But as the Sff celebrates its 30th edition, the festival continues to shine a spotlight on films that illuminate contemporary issues and politics, on films that celebrate the power of cinema even during the darkest times.

Of the nine movies screening as part of the Sff’s Competition Program, some deal with politics straight on — like Serbian director Vuk Ršumović’s Dwelling Among the Gods, which looks at issues of identity through the eyes of an Afghan refugee — or obliquely, as with Romanian filmmaker Andrei Cohn’s Holy Week, set in 1900 but around a clash of religions that still resonates today.

“As always, we are looking for original stories, new authors, and above all fresh and bold perspectives,...

Georgian producer Tekla Machavariani, in Locarno this week for the world premiere of director Tato Kotetishvili’s “Holy Electricity,” which plays in the Swiss fest’s Filmmakers of the Present section, has unveiled a slate of new features at her Tbilisi-based production company Nushi Film.

Among them is the first Georgian-Japanese co-production, a film inspired by the brutal Georgian Civil War of the early-1990s, and a movie set among the hip-hop generation of the 2000s in the crime-filled streets of Tbilisi.

“When I founded the company, my main goal was to work with my friends who were inspiring me. They taught me cinema,” said Machavariani, who launched Nushi Film in 2015. “For me, the most important thing is to make Georgian films with directors with whom I grow. We start with short films and then, slowly, we go through the journey together.”

“The Dog is Barking” is the ambitious feature...

For a richly pedigreed event that is intimately woven into the fabric of its host city, the Sarajevo Film Festival could be forgiven for resting on its laurels and choosing its 30th edition as an opportunity to look back — to reflect on its storied beginnings during the four-year siege that all but reduced the Bosnian capital to rubble in the early-1990s.

Instead, the organizers are introducing sweeping changes that will alter the look and feel of the event moving forward, with the nucleus of festival activities shifting from its historic home in the heart of Sarajevo’s old town to the modern part of the city.

Festival director Jovan Marjanović, who joined the Sarajevo fest two decades ago as a fresh-faced high-school graduate, tells Variety that while this year’s event will certainly pay homage to the past, festival leadership is “fully focused on the future,” adding: “I think...

Taking place August 7-17, the official selection for the 77th Locarno Film Festival has been unveiled, featuring a stellar-looking slate of highly anticipated films. Highlights include Hong Sangsoo’s second feature of the year, By the Stream, starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Yunhee; Ramon Zürcher’s The Sparrow in the Chimney, Wang Bing’s second part of his Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), as well as new films by Radu Jude, Bertrand Mandico, Courtney Stephens, Ben Rivers, Gürcan Keltek, Denis Côté, Kevin Jerome Everson, Fabrice Du Welz (featuring Abel Ferrara!), and many more. Also of particular note is the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored cut of The Fall, which features a slightly different edit as he recently noted.

Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival said, “We are very excited and happy with our selection for Locarno’s 77th edition, which we believe...

Elene Naveriani’s Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, starring Eka Chavleishvili as a woman navigating the prospect of growing older on her own, headed the winners at the inaugural Eliso awards, the new national film awards ceremony for Georgia.

Naveriani won best director, with Chavleishvili taking the best actress prize.

Ani Mogeladze received a special mention for her performance in the film; as did Nina Eradze for her role in Liza Go On.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes 2023.

Lomero Akhvlediani won the best cinematography prize for work on Luka Beradze’s documentary Smiling Georgia. The film also received...