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Syndicado Film Sales has boarded documentary “Bright Future,” which has its world premiere at IDFA. Variety debuts the trailer here. The film is the directorial debut of Romanian archive researcher Andra MacMasters.

“Bright Future” goes back to the summer of 1989 when thousands of young people from various nations gathered in North Korea for the 13th edition of the World Festival of Youth and Students. The festival, which championed peace, friendship and anti-imperialism, took place at a pivotal moment in history. The students “were dancing on the edge of a volcano,” as the film’s narrator states.

In a statement, the director said: “In the last chapter of the Cold War, for one week, North Korea became the global meeting point for 20,000 people coming from 166 countries. The event was the space of the other, involving travel and contact with otherness, the creation of dialogue, of cohesion in the production of intellectual and affective links,...

Leading documentary sales outfit Autlook Filmsales has appointed Stephanie Fuchs as new CEO.

Fuchs takes over from Salma Abdalla, who is stepping down after almost a decade at the helm of the Vienna-based company.

Abdalla is credited with expanding Autlook’s international reach – most recently entering the US market through a collaboration with LA-based senior executive Jason Resnick – while cultivating a strong network of partnerships and championing some of the strongest filmmakers in the sector.

Among the many award-winning documentaries Abdalla spearheaded for sales are Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin, The Mother Of All Lies and For Sama.

Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s TIFF-debuting Tata originated with a cry for help from a migrant worker being physically assaulted by his boss. The Romania-based filmmakers, partners in life and art, are both veteran investigative journalists in their region — Vdovîi an award-winning reporter from the Republic of Moldova who’s been nominated for the European Press Prize, Ciorniciuc a co-founder of the first independent media organization in Romania — so worker exploitation was a familiar beat. More troubling, however, was the familiarity of the man video messaging the duo from Italy: Vdovîi’s dad, a father who she’d long been estranged […]

The post “My Father Started Using the Hidden Camera to Send Messages Expressing What Seemed Like Regrets”: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc on their TIFF-Premiering Doc Tata first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc’s TIFF-debuting Tata originated with a cry for help from a migrant worker being physically assaulted by his boss. The Romania-based filmmakers, partners in life and art, are both veteran investigative journalists in their region — Vdovîi an award-winning reporter from the Republic of Moldova who’s been nominated for the European Press Prize, Ciorniciuc a co-founder of the first independent media organization in Romania — so worker exploitation was a familiar beat. More troubling, however, was the familiarity of the man video messaging the duo from Italy: Vdovîi’s dad, a father who she’d long been estranged […]

The post “My Father Started Using the Hidden Camera to Send Messages Expressing What Seemed Like Regrets”: Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc on their TIFF-Premiering Doc Tata first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Autlook has taken on international sales, excluding the US, for Ted Passon’s documentary Patrice: The Movie, ahead of its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Hulu has US rights to the film, which plays in TIFF Docs.

Patrice: The Movie combines observational documentary and fantastical stage-play recreations to follow Patrice Jetter who has found the love of her life, Garry Wickham. Both are disabled, and want to get married and live together, but doing either could jeopardise the government benefits they need to make ends meet. With long-time friend, director Passon, Jetter recreates scenes from her life,...

Vienna-based sales outlet Autlook Filmsales has picked up global rights to documentary “Tata,” directed by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc, set for its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

In the film, a journalist estranged from her violent father discovers that he has become a victim of work exploitation. When she agrees to help him expose the injustice, it reopens the wounds of their past.

After years of estrangement, Lina, a Moldovan journalist, receives a video message from her father, a migrant worker in Italy, showing bruises on his arms. Equipping him with a hidden camera so that he may find justice, Lina finds herself on a parallel journey — uncovering a pattern of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations.

Filmed across Italy, Moldova and Romania, “Tata” is a raw portrait of a family locked in a relentless struggle against toxic masculinity. It tells the story of...

A profile of the late Irish literary giant Edna O’Brien and a story about the haenyeo fisherwomen of South Korea are among the 21 TIFF Docs selections unveiled by Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday.

Joining Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road - The Edna O’Brien Story and Sue Kim’s The Last Of The Sea Women are Men Of War, an exploration of a failed coup in Venezuela from the team behind Cocaine Cowboys, and The Last Republican from Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink, who looks at how former Congressman Adam Kinzinger broke ranks and stood up to Donald Trump.

Nonfiction films about conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Venezuela, as well as documentaries about politician Adam Kinzinger, Irish writer Edna O’Brien and disability rights activist Patrice Jetter will screen at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, event organizers announced on Wednesday.

TIFF’s Docs program will consist of 21 films, two-thirds of them world premieres and 16 of them available for distribution. “The lineup is like holding up a mirror to what’s going on in the world today, which includes a lot of different things,” TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers told TheWrap.

The opening night film will be Eddie Huang’s “Vice Is Broke,” in which the former Vice host details the rise and fall of that media organization.

Other films include “From Ground Zero,” an anthology consisting of 22 short films made over the past year by directors who live in Gaza; Anastasiia Bortuali’s “Temporary Shelter,” about Ukrainian refugees; Hind Meddeb’s “Sudan,...

Eddie Huang, creator of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat comedy, is set to open the Toronto Film Festival’s TIFF Docs sidebar with a world premiere for Vice is Broke, a documentary about the rise and fall of Vice Media.

Huang will chronicle events leading up to Shane Smith’s Vice Media, a scrappy media player once valued at $5.7 billion, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023 to open the way for a sale of the company.

There’s also world bows in Toronto’s documentary strand for Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story, directed by Sinéad O’Shea, who did hours of interviews with the legendary Irish novelist in the last year of O’Brien’s life; Jen Gaiten and Screwball doc maker Billy Corben bringing Men of War, about a former U.S. Green Beret caught up in a failed 2020 coup to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro; and...

New projects from Cherien Dabis, Anders Thomas Jensen and Ameer Fakher Eldin have also been awarded

Ariane Labed’s feature-directing debut Sisters is among the 33 projects to receive funding from Eurimages second wave of 2023 co-production funding.

The French-Greek actor’s feature directing debut received €350,000 from the €9.7m pot. The Ireland, UK, Germany and Greece co-production is produced by Ireland’s Element Pictures. An English-language adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s gothic novel of the same name it follows two sisters who move to the countryside with their maniac depressive mother. Labed previously directed short film Olla which won three awards at...

Circle Women Doc Accelerator, an exclusive training program for female-identifying documentary filmmakers, has selected the projects that will take part in its showcase as part of the Cannes Docs program of the Marché du Film 2023.

For the fourth consecutive year, four alumnae of the program have the opportunity to present their works-in-progress during the Cannes Film Market.

Previous winners include “Twice Colonized” by Lin Alluna, which won the Docs-In-Progress award in Cannes last year before premiering in Sundance and opening both Cph:dox and Hot Docs; Ágnes Horváth-Szabó and Anna Nemet’s “Beauty of the Beast” (Nordisk Panorama Award 2020); and “Cent’anni” by Maja Prelog (Iefta Docs-In-Progress Award 2021).

“Ever Since I Knew Myself” by Maka Gogaladze, developed through Circle 2020, follows Maka, the daughter of a strict maths teacher and high-maintenance mother, on her journey around post-Soviet Georgia to observe children in the process of education. This quest is accompanied by...

“When encountering the societal and economic structures of everyday life, it’s not a rare dream for many to wonder what life may look like off the grid and out of the hands of a bureaucratic entity that doesn’t have your best interests in mind,” I noted in my review for Acasă, My Home, one of the essential documentaries this New Year. “For one family living in the vast water reservoir of the Bucharest Delta, they have made this their reality for the last eighteen years. The Enache family and their nine children call this abandoned area their home, sleeping in their homemade hut, fishing for food, and taking gentle care of this slice of nature directly outside the hectic Romanian capital. As outside interest in their homeland grows, Acasă, My Home director Radu Ciorniciuc captures the forces of civilization that cause an upheaval of their lives with a well-rounded eye,...

While “Acasa, My Home” continues to travel the festival circuit – a journey that has included it winning the cinematography award at Sundance, and screening this week at El Gouna in Egypt – and recently secured distribution in North America, its Romanian director Radu Ciorniciuc is hard at work on his next film, “Tata.” Co-directed with “Acasa’s” screenwriter and his partner, Lina Vdovii, it will focus on modern-day slavery.

“It’s about a father who is basically living and working in modern-day slavery conditions,” Ciorniciuc tells Variety. “He was violent to his daughter when she was young and now they meet. She is a journalist and she wants to confront him in Italy, where he works, coming from Moldova. She learns he has been [in this nightmarish situation of modern-day slavery] for the last two decades, and her investigation gives them a platform to explore their broken bond. So once again, it’s a family story,” he says...