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Titles include Sundance Jury prize winner ‘Utama’

Transilvania International Film Festival has unveiled the 12 films that will screen in its official competition.

Each title competing for the Transilvania Trophy will receive its Romanian premiere at the 21st edition of the festival, which is set to take place in the city of Cluj-Napoca.

The line-up features Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama, a Bolivian drama about an indigenous couple trying to survive a drought, which took home the Jury prize at Sundance Film Festival early this year.

Other titles include the directorial debut by French filmmaker Vincent Maël Cardona - Magentic Beats.

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” with cinematography by Greig Fraser, Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” with cinematography by Robert D. Yeoman, and Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” with cinematography by Dariusz Wolski, are among the movies selected in the main competition section of EnergaCamerimage. The 29th edition of the festival, which focuses on the art of cinematography, runs Nov. 13-20 in Toruń, Poland.

Villeneuve will be the recipient of this year’s Special Camerimage Award for Outstanding Director, with the Oscar-nominated French-Canadian filmmaker attending in person to receive the award and present his film to the audience.

Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” will also play in competition and will open the festival, with Coen and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel introducing the film in Toruń in person. Coen and Delbonnel previously worked together on “Tuileries”, “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.”

Other titles competing for the festival’s top prize,...

Documentary Exposure from The Babushkas Of Chernobyl director Morris gets its world premiere.

The 57th Chicago International Film Festival has unveiled its international competitions line-up, a roster that includes Venice Silver Lion winner The Power Of The Dog, Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers For The Stolen, and the world premiere of Holly Morris’s documentary Exposure.

The programme includes the international premiere of Franziska Stünkel’s The Last Execution. The festival runs October 13-24 and is the longest running competitive festival in North America.

The International Feature Competition line-up comprises: Péter Kerekes’s 107 Mothers (Slo-Czech-Ukr); Mohammed Diab’s Amira (Egy-Jor-uae-Saud...

‘The Rig’ First Look

Up top is your first look at Amazon Prime Video’s upcoming series The Rig, which shot in Scotland this year. The show stars Iain Glen, Emily Hampshire and Martin Compston as the crew of the Kinloch Bravo oil rig stationed off the Scottish coast in the dangerous waters of the North Sea. When they are due to be collected and return to the mainland a mysterious and all-enveloping fog rolls through, cutting them off from the outside world. The series was created by David Macpherson and directed by John Strickland; Amazon will release in 2022.

German Oscar submissions

German Films has named the shortlist for its International Oscar submission this year, with 10 titles in contention. A nine-member committee will watch each picture and select the film that will go forward to the Academy. The 10 movies are: Copilot (Die Welt Wird Eine Andere Sein) – dir. Anne Zohra Berrached...

Chryssos won the best director award for ‘A Pure Place’.

World premieres by Nikias Chryssos and Franziska Stünkel were among the winners of the German Cinema New Talent Awards at this year’s Filmfest München, which wrapped at the weekend.

Chryssos won the best director award for his second feature A Pure Place, an offbeat coming-of-age tale about two young siblings engulfed in a secret community obsessed with soap, located on a remote Greek island. He was selected by a jury comprised of actors Sophie von Kessel and Komi M. Togbonou, and Barbara Mundel, artistic director of the Münchner Kammerspiele.

Germany’s film industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, but the sector remains teeming with opportunities for domestic and international productions and looks set to spring back into action in the coming months.

Boasting 10 federal and regional film funders with more than €330 million ($359 million) for film and TV production and a number of major studio and VFX facilities, the country has become a favorite location for international producers.

Warner Bros.’ “The Matrix 4” and Sony Pictures’ “Uncharted” were all set to shoot at Studio Babelsberg near Berlin before work stopped amid the Covid-19 outbreak in March. While the studio initially let go hundreds of film crew members following the shutdown, it has since reinstated them after securing financial assistance from the federal labor agency, staving off a potential legal dispute.

Other recent international projects that lensed in Germany include Abel Ferrara’s Berlinale screener “Siberia,” starring Willem Dafoe,...

German actor Lars Eidinger will star in the historical drama, which wrapped shooting in Lünen last week after a total of 25 filming days all around Germany. The last scene of the historical drama Nahschuss by author and director Franziska Stünkel was shot last week. Stünkel is a German photographer, screenwriter and film director with a considerable amount of experience in documentary filmmaking. The story is set in 1981 and is inspired by a certain period in recent German history – namely, the Gdr years. Nahschuss, the title of the film, means “potshot” in English and refers to the real-life character of Dr Werner Teske, on whom the story is based. Teske was assassinated in East Germany for political reasons, and it is said that he was killed by a close-range gunshot. Inspired by his story, the protagonist of the film is engineer Franz Walter, who is recruited by the...