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Mahdi Fleifel is a Danish-Palestinian film director who graduated in 2009 from the UK National Film & TV School. In 2010 he set up the London-based production company Nakba FilmWorks with Irish producer Patrick Campbell. His debut feature documentary, A World Not Ours (2012), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and picked up over 30 awards, including the Peace Film Prize and the Panorama Audience Award at the 2013 Berlinale and the Edinburgh, Yamagata and Doc:nyc Grand Jury Prizes. Mahdi’s 2016 short film, A Man Returned, won the Silver Bear and the European Film Nomination at the Berlinale and his latest film, A Drowning Man, formed part of the Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival 2017 and was nominated for a BAFTA award. His fiction feature film debut, a co-production of UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece (Homemade Films), Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Palestine, “To A Land Unknown” had its world premiere at the 2024 Quinzaine...

Movies about immigrants have been increasing significantly during the last decade, with the various warzones in the Middle East unfortunately giving significant material for the filmmakers to work on. Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel comes up with a version revolving around two Palestinian immigrants stranded in Athens.

To A Land Unknown is screening at Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Chatila and Reda are cousins, who are desperately trying to move from Greece, where they were brought by a smuggler, and find passage towards Germany, where the former dreams of opening a cafe, employing Reda and also bringing his family in. Reda, on the other hand, and his drug addiction constantly causes problems for the two, with the latest one essentially ruining them financially. The two of them also feel the need to take care of a kid that has been stranded in Greece on his way to Italy, Malik, with Chatila eventually coming...

Even without the “Welcome to Marathon” flyer that greets Katerina (Angeliki Papoulia) and Yannis (Vangelis Mourikis) upon their arrival in “Arcadia,” it’s clear that they’ve entered one of Greece’s stranger corners: a resort town where they will look into the untimely death of a loved one. An unnerving and curious meditation on grief, Yorgos Zois’ second feature will satiate those looking for deeper cuts from the Greek Weird Wave than Yorgos Lanthimos and Christos Nikou, but will hold limited appeal for those who generally look to find comfort at the movies; Zois offers more of the opposite.

Still, there’s something compelling at the core of “Arcadia,” which takes literally the idea of Marathon becoming a ghost town in its off-season. In a place where tourists come and go, but the residents who cater to their whims can feel stuck in purgatory, Katerina and Yannis aren’t...

Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu’s “Three Kilometers to the End of the World,” a Palme d’Or contender at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, took home the top prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival Friday night.

The third feature from the actor-turned-director was awarded by the jury headed by U.S. writer-director Paul Schrader (“First Reformed”) that included Swedish actor and producer Noomi Rapace (“Lamb”), Finnish director-writer Juho Kuosmanen (“Compartment No. 6”), Sarajevo-born, Paris-based director, writer and editor Una Gunjak (“Excursion”) and Slovenian actor Sebastian Cavazza (“Men Don’t Cry”).

“Three Kilometers,” which follows a 17-year-old who’s the victim of a homophobic attack in a small town in Romania’s Danube Delta, examines the assault’s fallout on his rural community from multiple perspectives. Variety’s Guy Lodge described it as a “claustrophobic study of personal and institutional prejudice closing in on a community misfit,” praising the “cinematic heritage...

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,...

To a Land Unknown.When Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown (2024) premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, its rapturous reception was a rare moment of solidarity in a festival environment that otherwise sought apoliticality. The only Palestinian film to be selected across all sections of the Cannes Film Festival, To a Land Unknown offered a vital link to an ongoing, real-world crisis, breaking the bubble of the festival landscape. Palestinian flags soared inside the theater at the film’s debut screening, while down the Croisette at the Théâtre Debussy, several journalists were asked to remove pin badges expressing their political commitments, some to the Palestinian cause and others to the labor activity of the festival workers. What use can a festival have in a time of genocide if it neither acknowledges political struggle nor centers stories by and about oppressed peoples? The story of two refugees, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and...

By the time we meet them, Chatila and Reda already are down in the lower depths. Cousins from Palestine, they have spent much of their lives living as refugees on the run. Having made it as far as Athens, a kind of holding zone for people from the Middle East trying to slip into Europe, they are trying to scrape together money to get to Germany.

Ferrety Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) is masterminding the cousins’ next fundraising operation in one of Athens’s pleasantly proletarian parks, directing his sweet-faced cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah) to fall over on his skateboard in front of a middle-aged woman who almost certainly will help him. Chatila’s job is to snatch her handbag and run. It’s mean, it’s shabby, and it’s miserably cheap. Their mark’s purse contains 5 euros, the price of a couple of coffees. They won’t be able to...

The story behind the making of Palestinian-Danish director Mahdi Fleifel’s second feature, To a Land Unknown, is probably as intriguing as the film itself. Shot on the fly in Greece, with production beginning exactly a month after the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the movie was somehow completed in time to premiere at Cannes just over six months later.

That may be something of a record in terms of delivering a feature, but it also speaks to the precarious and volatile situation the film is depicting: that of Palestinian refugees stuck in Athens en route to someplace else, caught in a purgatory between a home they can’t return to and a new one they don’t know.

For best friends Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), the heroes of Fleifel’s melancholic, shaggy-dog street movie, that purgatory has been going on for some time. When we first see the two 20somethings,...

The brilliant Palestinian-Danish documentarian Mahdi Fleifel (“A World Not Ours”) leaps successfully into fiction with a feature debut that borrows a narrative container from “Midnight Cowboy” and a tormented soul that is all Palestinian.

The film opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Said: “In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” These words have been cutting since the moment they were first spoken years ago, but released into the world now during the horrific genocide in Gaza, they have an extra, desperate bite, as another generation is forced to seek displacement as the only alternative to violent death. Premiering at Cannes in this climate, Fleifel’s portrait of two individual characters asks questions that cannot be confined to the screen. Where do you belong after you have been driven from your homeland?...

The tragic predicament of the Palestinians and what they’re now being subjected to begs to be analyzed and dissected, with various areas of dubious historical consensus put to new scrutiny; in Mahdi Fleifel’s fiction debut To a Land Unknown, we’re solely in a disorienting present tense, where there’s seldom time to think and reflect, only to agitate for survival.

The director himself was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a background echoed in the film’s key characters, before he settled in Denmark and studied in the UK; thus, he’s never lived under direct contact with the Israeli occupation. Acclaimed docs followed, most notably I Signed the Petition, a 10-minute short that went semi-viral, concerning the calls to boycott Radiohead’s 2017 concert in Tel Aviv. Evidenced by To a Land Unknown, his move to fiction is quite seamless, if always abetted by the...

None of Us Strangers: Zois Probes Unrest of Our Shadows

“It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them,” states a character in Tom Stoppard’s celebrated 1993 play Arcadia, a word which connotes an Edenic or utopian realm. There’s a much more ironically melancholic context in the similarly titled sophomore film from Greek director Yorgos Zois. A peripheral alumni of the Greek Weird Wave (he had a small role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2011 film Alps), Zois is reunited with Angeliki Papoulia in this rather sorrowful study on the stages of grief and the circuitous evolution of love.…...

Deadpan stoicism has become the default mode of the Greek Weird Wave. Though equally strange, the wavelengths of the films by such proponents of the movement as Babis Makridis, Athina Rachel Tsangari, and—before vaulting to Hollywood’s big leagues—Yorgos Lanthimos don’t always align. But there’s a sense of cold, wry detachment that informs the way in which these works probe the friction between human nature and nurtured civility.

The Greek Weird Wave movement’s films are inseparable from their constituent tropes. Many of them set out to concoct visions of a society where human society is seen merely as unhinged, irrational, or paradoxical. That’s not an untrue observation, but it doesn’t help that the experimental potential afforded by absurdism squanders itself so easily by way of uninspired and hackneyed reiterations of the tropes and conventions that define the movement.

Arcadia, Yorgos Zois’s second feature following 2015’s Interruption,...

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Zois, who’s set to bow his sophomore feature, “Arcadia,” in the competitive Encounters strand of the Berlin Film Festival Feb. 18, is developing his first TV series.

“Play” follows a lone cinephile who joins a mysterious group of strangers that reenact scenes from movies in real life. The eight-part mystery-drama series tells the story of ordinary individuals who gradually lose themselves in the hazy realm between reality and fiction.

Zois says the show, which is produced by Athens-based Foss Prods. and repped internationally by Beta Cinema, is his personal attempt to “bridge the gap between cinema and series.”

“I really like exploring new territories,” he tells Variety, noting that he first conceived of “Play” as a feature film. Eventually, however, the director decided that an episodic series would allow him to “experiment” while pushing against the boundaries of a new form.

Zois’ latest feature, “Arcadia,” is a similar,...

The trailer has debuted for Yorgos Zois’ fantasy-drama “Arcadia,” which has its world premiere in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival. Beta Cinema will be selling the film at the European Film Market.

The film centers on neurologist Katerina and Yannis, a former doctor, who are heading off to a deserted seaside resort. Silence descends on the car as they travel across dunes in a windy autumn, matching the less-than-pleasant occasion: Yannis has been called to identify the victim of a tragic accident at the hospital of the small town.

When the local policeman informs them that the victim’s vehicle had plunged over the parapet of a stone bridge and leads them to the morgue, Katerina sees her worst suspicions confirmed.

Together with Yannis, but also on her own nightly excursions to a mysterious, rustic beach bar called Arcadia, they begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together,...

Beta Cinema has acquired all rights except Greece to Yorgos Zois’s Arcadia which world premieres in the Berlinale’s Encounters section.

Greek director Zois’s second feature is a drama fantasy starring Vangelis Mourikis, who was at the Berlinale in 2014 with Yannis Economides’ Stratos and in 2020 with Georgis Grigorakis‘ Digger, and Angeliki Papoulia, best known for her performances in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth and The Lobster.

Arcadia follows neurologist Katerina and Yannis, a former well-respected doctor, heading off to a deserted seaside resort where Yannis has been called to identify the victim of a tragic accident. Together with Yannis, but...

A "bizarre dance sequence" could be a square in a game of Yorgos Lanthimos-themed Bingo. When I watched "Poor Things" (screenplay by Tony McNamara) at the New York Film Festival, the film's contender for Greatest Guffaws occurred when the free-spirited Bella Beatrix (Emma Stone), a Frankensteinesque reanimated woman, bounces onto the ballroom floor with abandon. Her rakish paramour Duncan Wedderburn (a hilarious Mark Ruffalo) joins in and marvels at her untamable spirit, though she would end up burning out his patience later. Living in a steampunk Victorian setting of futurism and antiquity, Bella's dance is her proverbial middle finger to restrictive "polite society."

Weird dancing — or odd choreography — is a vital ingredient to Lanthimos' directorial idiosyncrasies, given that dance is an extension of power, control, or conformity. His early 2005 "Kinetta" engages in a litany of sloppy homicide reenactments, and several of his films followed up with his signature "weird dances.

Picture Tree Intl. has come on board to handle the international sales of black comedy “Shooting Blanks,” written and directed by Žiga Virc. The Slovenian film looks at what happens when a family goes to war with itself.

The film is in post-production. Pti will present a first private market screening at the Marché du Film in Cannes.

Vida’s father France worships his father, a hero of the partisan resistance. When a German supermarket chain decides to build a new store in his hometown, demolishing a statue of his father in the process, France declares war on this new “enemy.”

Vida could not care less about the past – she is trying to get pregnant, and it is not going well. While she and her husband Toni wait for news from the fertility clinic, France leads local volunteers dressed up as partisans and Nazis into maneuvers against the supermarket.

But...

In August 2011, The Guardian ran a two-page spread that wound up christening a brand-new cinematic movement. Written by Steve Rose, “Attenberg, Dogtooth, and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema” began with two questions: “Are the brilliantly strange films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari a product of Greece’s economic turmoil? And will they continue to make films in the troubled country?” Greece, as it turned out, continued to be troubled, the Greeks continued to make films, and the Greek Weird Wave somehow stuck as a catch-all term to denote what Rose then hyperbolically called “the world’s most messed-up cinema.” But the several films that earned the label since have only questioned its meaning and applicability. Messed-up and inexplicably strange the descendants of Attenberg and Dogtooth no doubt remain, but the many different shades of weird they brim can hardly be accounted for by an increasingly empty buzzword.

Ari Aster, the horror maestro behind Hereditary and Midsommar, is out with Beau Is Afraid on four screens as A24 presents the film in LA (AMC Century City and Burbank) and New York, in Imax on both coasts, followed next week by a regional Imax expansion and into to a wider national rollout April 21.

The film is getting some love from Martin Scorsese, who will join Aster in conversation Monday night after an Imax showing in NYC. Opening weekend will feature Q&As with Aster and cast, which includes Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan and Parker Posey.

The director has a dedicated fan base, and that’s invaluable in looking to break out with the specialty market still tentative compared with the Super Mario Bros-sized rebound of the broader box office. Presales indicate a strong debut.

Deadline’s review calls...

With only two feature films, German director Helena Wittmann has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in international cinema. Her 2017 debut Drift and her latest film, Human Flowers of Flesh invite audiences on transcendent, formally bold voyages, creating a space for reflection while feeling wholly transported to her locales. Starring Dogtooth’s Angeliki Papoulia, with an appearance by Denis Lavant, her latest film follows a woman who sets sail on an aquatic adventure with five male members of the French Foreign Legion, none of whom speak the same language.

While in town for her New York Film Festival premiere last fall, I caught up with Wittmann to discuss her connection with the sea, casting, how she pulled off some of the film’s incredible shots, being inspired by Claire Denis, and more. Check out the conversation as the film enters a limited release this weekend, beginning at Metrograph and expanding.

"A towering, teetering and exquisitely-wrought puzzle box." The Cinema Guild has released an official US trailer for a French-German indie film titled Human Flowers of the Flesh, which originally premiered at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival last year. Opening at the Metrograph in NYC in April, with hopefully more cinemas to follow. In her spellbinding followup to the critically acclaimed Drift, Helena Wittmann invites us to relinquish control and join her on a Mediterranean voyage unlike any other. Ida lives on a sailing yacht with a crew of five men. While on shore leave in Marseilles, she becomes fascinated with the French Foreign Legion and decides to sail to Sidi Bel Abbès (see Google Maps), the Legion's former headquarters in Algeria. This stars Angeliki Papoulia as Ida, along with Steffen Danek, Gustavo Jahn, Ingo Martens, and Denis Lavant. The film looks extremely experimental and intensely meditative, definitely not for everyone,...

One of the most exciting directorial debuts of recent years is Helena Wittmann’s 2017 feature Drift, a formally audacious aquatic journey. The German filmmaker returned to the festival circuit last year, at Locarno and the New York Film Festival, with her follow-up Human Flowers of Flesh, which proved a natural extension of her transportive cinematic interests in the sea while greatly expanding her canvas. Ahead of a theatrical release from Cinema Guild release beginning at Metrograph on April 14––alongside a full retrospective of Wittmann’s work, including Drift, 4 short films, and a live performance piece––we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer and poster.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Human Flowers of Flesh follows, Ida (Dogtooth’s Angeliki Papoulia), who, after a stirring encounter with the French Foreign Legion sets sail with her own corps of five men, none of whom speak the same language, to trace the route of this fabled troop.

On the Adamant.Competition(Jury: Kristen Stewart, Golshifteh Farahani, Valeska Grisebach, Radu Jude, Francine Maisler, Carla Simón, Johnnie To)Golden BearOn the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert)Silver Bear — Grand Jury PrizeAfire (Christian Petzold) (read interview)Silver Bear — Jury PrizeBad Living (João Canijo)Silver Bear for Best DirectorPhilippe Garrel (The Plough) (read more)Silver Bear for Best Leading PerformanceSofía OteroSilver Bear for Best Supporting PerformanceThea Ehre (Till the End of the Night) (read more)Silver Bear for Best ScreenplayAngela Schanelec (Music) (read more)Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic ContributionHélène Louvart (Disco Boy)HereENCOUNTERS(Jury: Dea Kulumbegashvili, Angeliki Papoulia, Paolo Moretti)Award for Best FilmHere (Bas Devos)Special Jury AwardOrlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)Samsara (Lois Patiño)Award for Best DirectorTatiana Huezo (The Echo)Generation — Kplus(Jury: Venice Atienza, Alise Ģelze, Gudrun Sommer)Crystal BearSweet As (Jub Clerc)Special MentionSea Sparkle (Domien Huyghe)Best Short FilmQueenie (Lloyd Lee Choi)Special...

The Berlinale Film Festival on Wednesday announced the four women and two men who will join Jury President Kristen Stewart to judge this year’s international competition lineup.

Veteran Hong Kong director Johnnie To (Election, Vengeance), Iranian-French actress Golshifteh Farahani (Paterson), Berlinale Golden Bear winners Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging Or Looney Porn) and Carla Simón (Alcarràs), German director Valeska Grisebach (Western), and U.S. casting director and producer Francine Maisler (12 Years A Slave, Babylon) will help pick the Berlinale winners this year.

Berlin also added Art College 1994, an animated feature set in 1990s China from Chinese director Liu Jian, to the 2023 competition line-up. With the last-minute addition, there are now 19 films in the running for the 2023 Gold and Silver Bears.

In addition to the main jury, the Berlinale named the three-member jury for its Encounters section, with Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili (Beginning), Greek actor Angeliki Papoulia (Dogtooth) and Former...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed its juries, and the addition of Liu Jian’s animated feature “Art College 1994” to its competition lineup, which now has 19 films and is complete.

In addition to the already announced actor Kristen Stewart as president, the International Jury members will be actor Golshifteh Farahani (Iran/France), director and writer Valeska Grisebach (Germany), director and screenwriter Radu Jude (Romania), casting director and producer Francine Maisler (U.S.), director and screenwriter Carla Simón (Spain), and director and producer Johnnie To.

“Art College 1994” is set in China in the 1990s. It follows a group of young people who “prepare to face a world caught between tradition and modernity,” according to the festival. The film, represented for world sales by Memento Intl., was originally destined for Cannes, but Liu and the film were reported to have faced bureaucratic obstacles, which put the kibosh on those plans. The director...

Director Liu Jian was previously in Competition with ‘Have A Nice Day’ in 2017.

The Berlinale has made a last-minute addition to its Competition lineup with Chinese filmmaker Liu Jian’s animated feature Art College 1994 and revealed its competition juries.

Art College 1994 will receive its world premiere at the festival’s 73rd edition, which runs February 16-26, and marks Liu’s third feature after 2010’s Piercing I and Have A Nice Day, which became the first Chinese animation ever selected to play in Competition at the Berlinale in 2017.

Art College 1994 is set among a group of students in China in the...

The Berlinale Film Festival has unveiled the jury members for its main International Competition, which will be presided over by Kristin Stewart

They comprise Iranian-French actress Golshifteh Farahani, German director Valeska Grisebach, Romanian director Radu Jude, US casting director and producer Francine Maisler, Spanish director Carla Simón, and iconic Hong Kong director and producer Johnnie To.

Stewart’s appointment as jury president was announced in December.

The festival also unveiled the three-member jury for its Encounters strand comprising Georgian writer, director and visual artist Dea Kulumbegashvili, Greek actor Angeliki Papoulia and Former Cannes Directors’ Fortnight artistic director and programmer Paolo Moretti, who hails from Italy.

Additionally, the festival also announced it was adding Chinese director Liu Jian’s feature animation Art College 1994 to the International Competition line-up.

The film revolves around a group of young people preparing to face a world caught between tradition and modernity in 1990s China.

The...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSNewly-minted Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough in To Leslie.The 95th Academy Awards unveiled their full list of nominees yesterday. Browse the categories and relevant coverage on Notebook to prepare for the ceremony, airing March 12. (Andrea Riseborough made the cut.)On Monday, the Berlinale announced their main competition lineup, including new films by Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, Margarethe Von Trotta, and Philippe Garrel. Meanwhile, their Encounters section features new films from Hong Sang-soo, Dustin Guy Defa, Tatiana Huezo, and more. Notebook has the full lineup here.Last Wednesday, January 18, filmmaker, critic, and producer Paul Vecchiali died at the age of 92. Patrick Preziosi summed up a bit of his impact in his Notebook Primer on Vecchiali’s film company, Diagonale, “a solar system of the utopian possibilities of cinematic community.

Like all the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, "The Lobster" left me completely cold when I first saw it -- he's clearly one of the most original directors around, but my more optimistic outlook clashed with his bleak view of humanity. The film made far more cruel sense when I became single again after 21 years. Tucked away in a long-term relationship, I suppose I was cozily insulated from the horrors of dating and the pressure society places on people to be with someone. Nobody wants to be the crazy cat person, right?

The Twin Towers were still standing the last time I was actively seeking a partner, so I'm a long way away from wanting to date again. Still, those pressures that regularly cast single people as loners or weirdos have compelled me to check out Tinder to see what all the fuss is about. It really is as horrible as...

After breaking out with a debut role in the film that ushered in the Greek Weird Wave and becoming one of his country’s most accomplished theater actors and directors, Christos Passalis makes his feature directorial debut with “Silence 6-9,” a haunting, melancholic love story that plays in competition this week at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Passalis’ first feature premiered in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where it earned rapturous praise from Variety’s Jessica Kiang, who described Passalis’ “absorbing, surreal, retro-futurist love story” as a “beautifully crafted solo debut.”

“After a beginning unmistakably located deep within the familiarly bizarro, alien reaches of the Greek Weird Wave aesthetic, Passalis’ solo directorial debut gradually distinguishes itself by moving to a more human and humane place,” she wrote.

The film begins one night with a stranger arriving in a strange town. As he walks down a deserted...

The boundlessly playful and inventive films of Argentine director Gastón Solnicki have been a delight to witness these last few years. Earlier in 2022, the director premiered his latest work, the portrait of Vienna A Little Love Package, at Berlinale and now, ahead of the film’s Austrian release on November 18th, we’re pleased to premiere the exclusive trailer. Featuring Angeliki Papoulia, Carmen Chaplin, and Mario Bellatin, the film will also play at the Viennale, La Roche Sur Yon, Warsaw, Thessaloniki, IDFA, Ica, and Porto Post Doc.

“A Little Love Package is a film in which I wished to pursue my filmic transition, in the sense of working with materials inherently related to a certain tradition of narrative filmmaking, though still invested in a documentary register and the epiphany of the unexpected – which has always felt very natural to me. For the first time, I made a film based on a more preconceived structure,...

Hamburg-based Fünferfilm co-produced, lining up third film with writer-director Helena Wittmann.

Cinema Guild has picked up North American rights to Helena Wittmann’s Locarno selection Human Flowers Of Flesh, which screens at Filmfest Hamburg this week.

Wittmann’s follow up to her 2017 debut feature Drift will receive its US premiere at New York Film Festival next week.

Cinema Guild plans a theatrical release in 2023 on the story starring Dogtooth’s Angeliki Papoulia as a woman who enlists the help of five men who don’t speak each other’s languages and embark on a trip around the Mediterranean.

“A film...

Cinema Guild has acquired North American distribution rights for Human Flowers of Flesh directed by Helena Wittmann (Drift).

The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and will make its U.S. bow at the New York Film Festival next week. A theatrical release is planned for 2023.

It follows Ida (Dogtooth’s Angeliki Papoulia), a woman sailing the Mediterranean Sea with a crew of men, none of whom speak the same language. In Marseille, where the French Foreign Legion is based, she become enamored with this fabled troop and sets off on a voyage to trace its route, leading to Corsica and finally to Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, the historical headquarters of the Legion. Along the way, boundaries blur as life at sea produces a special kind of mutual understanding.

“Helena Wittmann has a unique gift for crafting singular, richly sensorial cinematic experiences,” said Cinema Guild President Peter Kelly. “We...

Helena Wittmann on Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) in Human Flowers of Flesh: “She’s not looking for fulfilment of any sort, but only following her curiosity.”

Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.

Helena Wittmann with Anne-Katrin Titze on Denis Lavant as Galoup: “I mean, you met him, so you know. He’s really a rich personality.”

Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew from different countries cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in...

Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her crew, from different countries, cross the Mediterranean on a sailboat to explore the original headquarters of the French Foreign Legion in Sidi-Bel-Abbès in Helena Wittmann’s quietly disturbing Human Flowers Of Flesh (a highlight in the Currents programme of the 60th New York Film Festival).

Marguerite Duras’s The Sailor From Gibraltar, and, more obscurely, Swiss legionnaire and writer Friedrich Glauser’s Gourrama are washed ashore as literary flotsam, cultural remnants of boredom, dust, and heat and ultimately the longing for connection with another being in this world. And there will be Galoup, as played already a quarter of a century ago by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.

Lavant, wonderfully unpredictable and agile as ever sashays along the...

Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).In Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift (2017), two women holiday in Sylt, the northernmost island in Germany. Theresa and Josefina return to the port city of Hamburg temporarily and then, across a cut, Theresa appears alone in Antigua. Soon afterward, she sails across the Atlantic, via the Azores, back to Hamburg—but before she sails, Theresa stops at a beach in Antigua, where she gathers shells and dried coral.Within the first ten minutes of Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to Drift, a woman hands another woman a piece of dried coral—“from Antigua,” she says in French. She is not Theresa and the film does not return to Antigua. Ida, played by Angeliki Papoulia, nonetheless shares with Theresa the experience of a trip there, where she came across a shoreline “like the cemetery of a coral reef.”Human Flowers of Flesh shares a...

In A Little Love Package, Vienna’s institutions, people, buildings, and overlapping epochs make for a stiff drink: a bright, effervescent, lightly intoxicating film easily downed in one. The director is Gastón Solnicki, a nicely ruminative Buenos Aires filmmaker whose make-it-up-as-you-go approach allows his films to meander. Solnicki’s work has a playful spirit: it’s episodic both in form and content, though never amorphous; and he moves between narrative, documentary, still imagery, and immersive sound with seamless élan. Forged in lockdown, Love Package is a breezy collage of meteorites and cigarettes; cheese and boiled eggs, and how best to make them. But at heart it’s about how eras end, what they leave behind, and how new ones begin.

Solnicki’s previous film, Introduction to the Dark, was his first based in Vienna; it opened with images of the Prater amusement park, where Harry Lime once tallied the merits of Switzerland.

Early into Helena Wittmann’s 2017 feature debut, Drift, a character recounts a Papua New Guinean tale of the world’s creation. Back when the planet was all water, a giant crocodile kept paddling around preventing the sand to settle; only after a warrior slaughtered the beast did the land jut into being. A few minutes into Human Flowers of the Flesh a sailor shares another legend, this one from Ancient Greece. As he chopped Medusa’s head, Perseus dropped it on the shore; the seaweed absorbed the Gorgon’s petrifying powers, and that’s how coral was born. Wittmann has a knack for myths, and her cinema radiates a certain mythical grandeur, a pleasure as primeval and untimely as the stories her projects orbit around. Flowers, in that, feels both ancient and novel. It’s a film whose visual experiments invite one to see the world anew, even as the...

. The ocean is a source of ongoing fascination to German director Helena Wittmann, whose debut feature, “Drift” was set in a largely dialogue-free realm aboard a boat as a woman charted a course across the North Sea. This time around, the woman in the largely dialogue-free realm aboard a boat is charting a course across the Mediterranean Sea, a visual distinction that may only be detectable to marine professionals and Atlantic Ocean enthusiasts. Irrespective of the conceptual similarities to her debut, “Human Flowers of Flesh ” is a meditative gem powered by images, shot by Wittmann herself, that, on their own terms, make the film worth your time.

Ida (Angeliki Papoulia of “Dogtooth”) is a Greek wanderer with the mien of a woman more at home on the road than in any fixed abode. She carries herself with the resolute, slightly detached energy of someone driven by highly personal motives, coming...

Sodium streetlights buzz. Antennas hum. Insects chirrup — or is that the bleeping of some faraway, half-dreamt electronic machine? The world of Christos Passalis’ sensitive, surreal, slow-reveal “Silence 6-9” is quiet, but its silences are full of strange, prophetic noise, if you just listen hard enough. After a beginning unmistakably located deep within the familiarly bizarro, alien reaches of the Greek Weird Wave aesthetic, Passalis’ solo directorial debut gradually distinguishes itself by moving to a more human and humane place, where the singing in the wires and the voices calling through the whine make pining Wichita linemen out of all its lonesome, liminal inhabitants.

A stranger arrives in a very strange town. It’s just after nightfall, in those glimmering, fading few hours between dusk and midnight that best suit Giorgos Karvelas’s clinical yet crepuscular cinematography. Aris — played by Passalis himself — is walking down a deserted, unkempt highway when two things happen,...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival has revealed the lineup for its 75th edition, sticking to its promise of discovering new talent.

A slew of debuting filmmakers will showcase their works, from Italy’s Nicola Prosatore with “Piano Piano” to Caterina Mona, focusing in “Semret” on an Eritrean single mother working at a Zurich hospital and dreaming of becoming a midwife.

Thomas Hardiman’s U.K.’s proposition “Medusa Deluxe,” a murder mystery set in a competitive hairdressing competition — boarded by New Europe Film Sales — is also bound to generate some excitement.

“‘Medusa Deluxe’ is one of the coolest debuts of the year,” the company’s CEO Jan Naszewski enthused to Variety.

“I’m sure it will rock the Piazza Grande and give the festival a great spark.”

But Locarno will also bring in heavyweights, starting with a screening of the much-anticipated Brad Pitt vehicle “Bullet Train,” directed by “Atomic Blond” helmer David Leitch,...

"What would you miss if you were to disappear?" Screen Daily has revealed an early festival promo trailer for a Greek indie drama titled Silence 6-9, premiering soon at the 2022 Karlovy Vary Film Festival taking place July in Czechia. Aris and Anna meet one evening in a half-abandoned town surrounded by antennas. In this strange, dreamlike world the two solitary souls gradually start to develop feelings for one another... This sounds quite intriguing, not just a simple romance, with much more going on. "This melancholic love story with its mesmeric atmosphere and striking visuals is proof that Greek cinema has lost nothing of its originality." The film stars Angeliki Papoulia and Christos Passalis as Anna and Aris, along with Sofia Kokkali, Maria Skoula, Marisha Triantafyllidou, and Vassilis Karaboulas. Modern Greek cinema is always so strange and peculiar, but also heartfelt and hopeful deep within. This definitely looks intriguing. Here's the...

Christos Passalis directs and stars in the project.

Screen can reveal the first trailer for Christos Passalis’ Silence 6-9, which will have its world premiere in the main competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Passalis stars alongside Angeliki Papoulia as a man and woman who meet one evening in a half-abandoned town surrounded by antennas. In this strange, dreamlike world the two solitary souls gradually start to develop feelings for one another.

The project is produced by Greece’s Homemade Films and co-produced by Ert, Asterisk Post. Producer is Maria Drankaki and co-producers are Vicky Miha,...

By way of improvisation, relying heavily on events to naturally develop, Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki presents a meandering ode to the city of Vienna, its customs, cultures, facades, and the near-sacrilege of enacting a smoking ban in cafes city-wide.

In, “A Little Love Package,” two main protagonists become the vehicles through which the minutiae of everyday life in Vienna unfolds. Experimental aural and visual cues present themselves as Angeliki (Angeliki Papoulia) and Carmen (Carmen Chaplin) seek the perfect apartment in a city suspended in time.

Produced by Little Magnet Films, out of Austria, and Solnicki’s Argentine production company, Filmy Wiktora, “A Little Love Package” is the fifth cinematic feature for Solnicki, whose entire catalog was recently acquired by Moma.

Ahead of its debut in the Berlinale’s Encounters strand, he spoke with Variety about the allure of Vienna, breaking from cinematic tradition, and shooting a film during the pandemic.

Garai’s first feature as director is a classy chiller where a haunted war veteran is offered uneasy solace by a twinkly-eyed nun

Actor-turned-director Romola Garai makes her feature debut with this accomplished upscale British horror with touches of Eraserhead and Alien; it’s that particular kind of crepuscular indie chiller which you could call “body horror”, where the body in question is every single manky, mouldy surface and inanimate object. The film might not fully absorb all its images and ideas, and the dynamic between the male lead and two different female co-stars in the story’s “past” and “present” sections feels in some ways like a slightly redundant duplication. But it’s stylish and well-acted, and leads up to a surreal image of evil.

Alec Secareanu plays Tomas, an ex-soldier from a central European war zone haunted by his memories. While in uniform, he had befriended a fugitive...

Human Flowers of Flesh

In what sounds like a cerebral high stakes at sea, Helena Wittmann‘s promising sophomore feature concluded filming in October of 2020 but wasn’t rushed into a prime 2021 film festival slot. Wittmann’s 2017 debut Drift premiered in Critic’s Week at the Venice Film Festival and Human Flowers of Flesh was featured in Locarno’s The Films After Tomorrow program (2020) for productions halted by the pandemic. Starring Angeliki Papoulia, Denis Lavant, Vladimir Vulevic, Mauro Soares and Gustavo Jahn this will likely set sail soon.

Gist: Ida (Papoulia) lives on a sailing yacht with a crew of five men.…...

"We can only greet the strange and unusual with love." Mubi in the UK has debuted another official trailer for the psychedelic, mind-expanding hand-drawn animated film Cryptozoo, which initially premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. As cryptozookeepers struggle to capture a "Baku" (a legendary dream-eating hybrid creature) they begin to wonder if they should display these rare beasts in the confines of a cryptozoo or if these mythical creatures should remain hidden and unknown. With the voices of Lake Bell, Michael Cera, Alex Karpovsky, Zoe Kazan, Louisa Krause, Angeliki Papoulia, Thomas Jay Ryan, Peter Stormare, and Grace Zabriskie. We already featured two other trailers for this film earlier in the summer before it opened in the US (back in August), but with a European release from Mubi coming up in October, why not share some more footage. If you haven't seen this yet and you love psychedelics,...

Comic book writer-turned-director Dash Shaw (“My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea”) has conjured the wildest, most surreal animated feature of the year with the 2D “Cryptozoo.” It’s about a group of cryptozookeepers in the late ’60s who create a utopia safe haven for rare, fantastic beasts to protect them from becoming weaponized by the U.S. military. However, the search for the most revered creature — the nightmare-sucking Baku — by cryptid hunter Lauren Grey (Lake Bell) reveals the harmful implications of such an idealistic pursuit.

Shaw, who collaborated with his animator wife Jane Samborski, described “Cryptozoo” as a counter-culture version of “Jurassic Park.”

“When the movie starts, your mind goes to ‘Jurassic Park’ and you’re thinking how it’s going to fail in ‘Cryptozoo,'” Shaw said. “But whereas ‘Jurassic Park’ has a cleaner, allegorical space that’s defined by Spielberg, ‘Cryptozoo’ makes more unusual associations and a collage of different tones.

United Artists Releasing opens Flag Day, directed and starring Sean Penn, in a uneven specialty market where the Delta Variant spike has theaters in key cities requiring proof of vaccination, theaters are hard to book, and hits have been rare since the industry reopened.

Eventually “We’ll crack the code, because good movie and good stories win out.” said Erik Lomis, President, Distribution at Uar. Older demos — the meat-and-potatoes of arthouse — “are less comfortable coming back than we all hoped. It’s a tough, tough market to crack… but there’s nothing like seeing it in a movie theater.”

The film from MGM Studios premiered at Cannes and debuts in 24 theaters in 10 markets. It expands next weekend to 24 markets and 50 theaters. “We’ll continue to roll out like that until we really step on the gas depending upon market conditions,...

This review of “Cryptozoo” was first published after the film’s premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

If you ever talk to an animator, they are likely to share two opinions very quickly: one, “Animation is not a genre.” And two, “Animation isn’t exclusively for children.” Dash Shaw is one of many contemporary artists expanding the idea of what animation can do, and who it can be for, and with his second feature, “Cryptozoo,” his well of imagination is matched only by his precision at executing his ideas.

“Cryptozoo” delivers on the promise of Shaw’s first feature, “My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea.” This time out, the writer-director (in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski) is even more assured as both a storyteller and as a crafter of images, be they outrageous or gorgeous, haunting or hilarious.

Underneath it all, Shaw seems to revel in genre,...