News

The Sarajevo International Film Festival has unveiled the nominees for its second annual TV awards with 17 series from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Slovenia represented across the nominees.

The local series up for awards are: Advokado, Besa 2, Block 27, Black Wedding, Strange Kind of Loves, Dolina rož, Awake, Lenin’s Park, Crazy, Confused, Normal, Underneath 2, Mrkomir I, Bad Blood, The Last Socialist Artefact, United Brothers, Killers of My Father 5, The Silence and Time of Evil.

This year, the award categories have expanded to include drama series and comedy and winners will be honored with the fest’s lauded Heart of Sarajevo award, a prize usually given to the festival’s competition winner.

The Sarajevo Film Festival established the awards for TV series last year, with the aim of promoting and showcasing the highest quality regional television series in the past 12 months to promote their international placement.

Mina Djukic’s film wins best film, director and actress in National Class; Free Entry by Hungary’s Yvonne Kerekgyarto gets Cineuropa Award in Fresh Danube Film section.

The seventh Cinema City international film festival, which took place June 21-28 in Novi Sad, Serbia, wrapped with Mina Djukic’s Sundance title The Disobedient winning the Ibis Statuettes for best film, best directing and best female role for Hana Selimovic in the National Class, dedicated to Serbian films.

The best male role award went to Muhamed Dupovac for Slobodan Skerlic’s So Hot Was The Cannon.

The jury consisting of Wide Management’s Managing Director Loic Magneron, official delegate for Cannes Critics’ Week and Programme Consultant for the Hong Kong International Film Festival Raymond Phathanavirangoon, and Peter Stumbur, a programmer for Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, also gave out two special mentions: to Milan Todorovic’s horror title Nymph, and Dragan Nikolic’s documentary The Undertaker.

The Fipresci...

Exclusive: New York-based Visit Films has lined up a typically compelling slate for Park City, all of which will make their market premieres at the Efm in Berlin next month.

Visit Films chief Ryan Kampe announced he has taken international rights to Next entry War Story starring Catherine Keener as a traumatised war photographer who is forced to deal with her Ptsd when she encounters a young refugee while visiting her mentor in Sicily.

War Story also stars Ben Kingsley and Hafsia Herzi and marks the second film in Mark Jackson’s Island trilogy after 2012 Spirit Award winner Without.

Visit has taken worldwide rights excluding Australia/New Zealand for 52 Tuesdays. Sophie Hyde’s World Dramatic Competition entry chronicles how a 16-year-old’s route to adulthood is accelerated when her mother announces plans to switch gender and sends the youngster to live with her father.

Del Herbert-Jane and Tilda Cobham-Hervey star in the Australian production.

Visit holds worldwide...

The 2014 Sundance Film Festival is right around the corner, and the Sundance Institute has released the full line-up for the competition films that will be premiering!

This year there were 12,218 total submissions, and 117 films were accepted from 37 countries around the world. It looks like there's a lot of good selection of films this year.

The Sundance Film Festival 2014 runs from January 16th to the 26th, and the GeekTyrant team will be there to cover as many movies as we possibly can.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

The 16 films in this section are world premieres and, unless otherwise noted, are from the U.S.

“Camp X-Ray” — Directed and written by Peter Sattler. A young female guard at Guantanamo Bay forms an unlikely friendship with one of the detainees. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Payman Maadi, Lane Garrison, J.J. Soria, John Carroll Lynch.

“Cold in July” — Directed by Jim Mickle, written by Nick Damici.

Sundance Film Festival continues to be one of the most popular, and arguably one of the most important, events on the industry calendar, launching as it does some of the most prominent independent films at the start of each year.

This year will be no different, with Sundance announcing last night the initial line-up of films screening in competition, led by Song One, starring Anne Hathaway; Camp X-Ray, starring Kristen Stewart; Infinitely Polar Bear, with Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana; Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas, starring Anna Kendrick, Melanie Lynskey, Mark Webber, Lena Dunham, and Swanberg himself; The Skeleton Twins, with Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig, Luke Wilson, and Ty Burrell; Life After Beth, with Aubrey Plaza, Dane DeHaan, and John C. Reilly; Listen Up Philip, with Jason Schwartzman and Elisabeth Moss; Whiplash, starring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons; and many, many more.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

Presenting the world premieres of 16 narrative feature films,...

God’S Pocket

Sundance Institute announced today the films selected for the U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competitions and the out-of-competition section of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, January 16-26 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.

Robert Redford, President & Founder of Sundance Institute said, “That the Festival has evolved and grown as it has over the past 30 years is a credit to both our audiences and our artists, who continue to find ways to take risks and open our minds to the power of story. This year’s films and artists promise to do the same.”

For the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, 118 feature-length films were selected, representing 37 countries and 54 first-time filmmakers, including 34 in competition. These films were selected from 12,218 submissions (72 more than for 2013), including 4,057 feature-length films and 8,161 short films. Of the feature film submissions, 2,014 were from the U.S. and 2,043 were international. 97 feature films at...

It’s among the two sections that we usually don’t put much focus on (yes, we love subtitles, but we’re more concerned, naturally more inclined to cover the deluge of American Indie film offerings) but among the dozen film selections in the World Cinema Dramatic Comp section we find the latest from Argentinean director Natalia Smirnoff (she gave us the Berlin Film Fest winner The Puzzle) who returns with Lock Charmer, we find the highly anticipated film from Hong Khaou (Lilting) and a title which we start speculating on last year in Stuart Murdoch’s God Help the Girl which stars Emily Browning, Olly Alexander and Hannah Murray (see pic above). Also worth the mention is the directing debut from writer Eskil Vogt – who co-wrote Reprise and Oslo, August 31st for Joachim Trier. Here are the dozen selected.

“52 Tuesdays” (Australia) — Directed by Sophie Hyde, written by Matthew Cormack.

The U.S. and World Cinema Dramatic and Documentary Competition lineups for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival were announced today and just below I have featured pictures from the 16 films that will be competing in the U.S. Dramatic competition and they feature a lot of names you're going to recognize. The titles begin with Camp X-Ray, which stars Kristen Stewart as a guard in Guantanamo Bay, where she forms an unlikely friendship with one of the detainees. Jim Mickle made an impact earlier this year with We Are What We Are and he returns with Michael C. Hall with Cold in July. Fishing Without Nets looks to tell a story similar to that of Captain Phillips, only this time from the Somali side of things; God's Pocket is "Mad Men" star John Slattery's writing and directorial debut and he's lined up an impressive cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Jenkins,...

White White World

Directed by Oleg Novkovic

Writen by: Milena Markovic

Serbia, 2010

Trying too hard may be what stunts the otherwise portentous storyline and hefty characterisation in White White World by Serbian director Oleg Novkovic, a fourth feature film well-travelled around European festivals. Staking its bets on oft-employed tropes of Balkanness such as grotesque modes of conflict resolution (bottles smashed on heads, fist fights in dumpsters), feral non-verbalised feelings, and the mandatory array of freakish characters set against a fuzzy backdrop of some national tragedy or other (in this case, hopeless industrial decline and generalised national despondency), the film, although abounding in dramatic energy, fails at invoking sympathy for the larger-than-life protagonists.

And sympathy is what they are all after: each main character is granted a dirge-like singing act lamenting the tragedy of their respective destinies. Wading full-on into Greek tragedy territory, the story centres around a fatal teenage beauty,...