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Brazil has selected Walter Salles’ well-received comeback feature I’m Still Here to represent it in the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

The picture stars Fernanda Torres as the real-life figure of Eunice Paiva, whose husband Rubens Paiva disappeared in the early years of the 1964-1985 Brazilian military dictatorship.

Torres’ mother Fernanda Montenegro, who is considered one of the greatest Brazilian actresses of all time, also briefly shares the Eunice Paiva role, appearing as the protagonist in her final years. They are joined in the cast by Selton Mello as Rubens Paiva.

Related: Best International Feature Film Oscar Winners Through The Years: Photo Gallery

The project also reunites Salles with his regular collaborator, the director Daniela Thomas, who takes an artistic producer credit.

The picture enjoyed a buzzy world premiere in Venice in Competition, receiving a 10-minute ovation and going on to win Best Screenplay for Heitor Lorega and Murilo Hauser.

Last year the likes of Nara Normande and Tião (Venice 2023 selected Sem Coração) and Mo Harawe’s (Cannes 2024 selected The Village next to Paradise) received coin for their feature film projects. Coming from countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Lesotho, Nepal and Sudan, this year’s batch of ten Berlinale World Cinema Fund seelected projects include the latest from Lisandro Alonso – a new “sequel” project that we reported on last April. La Libertad doble will see Alonso revisit the protagonist (as well as the filmmaking methods) he employed for his 2001 Un Certain Regard selected La Libertad.…...

The Göteborg Film Festival has unveiled the competition titles selected for its 47th edition, which runs from January 26 to February 4. (Scroll down for the full list).

Göteborg is split into four competition strands. The main strand is the Nordic Competition, which features nine films from the Nordic region. The competition’s winner takes home the Dragon Award and a Sek 400,000 cash prize. The rest of the festival comprises the Nordic Documentary Competition, the Ingmar Bergman Competition for first-time filmmakers, and the International Competition.

Among the Nordic highlights is Madame Luna, Swedish filmmaker Daniel Espinosa’s return to Nordic filmmaking following a series of Hollywood titles such as Morbius and Safe House. Inspired by real-life events, the film follows an Eritrean refugee who gets stuck in Libya and becomes a notorious human trafficker known as “Mama Luna” with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. When she is forced to flee to...

Carolina Markowicz’s Toll earns four awards.

Vera Egito’s The Battle (A Batalha Da Rua Maria Antonia) won best fiction feature in the Première Brasil section at the 25th Rio International Film Festival closing ceremony.

As with most years, the ceremony showcased some of the strongest voices in Brazilian cinema. Unlike previous editions, however, the top winner received its world premiere at the festival and had not already enjoyed successful runs in international festivals like Cannes, Venice or Toronto.

The film’s title refers to Rua Maria Antônia, a street in the centre of Brazilian city São Paulo which...

Carolina Markowicz’s Toll earns four awards.

Vera Egito’s A Batalha da Rua Antônia (translated as The Battle Of Rua Antonia) won best fiction feature in the Première Brasil section at the 25th Rio International Film Festival closing ceremony on Sunday night.

As with most years, the ceremony showcased some of the strongest voices in Brazilian cinema. Unlike previous editions, however, the top winner received its world premiere at the festival and had not already enjoyed successful runs in international festivals like Cannes, Venice or Toronto.

The film’s title refers to Rua Maria Antônia, a street in the...

For their feature debut collaboration, Brazilian filmmakers Nara Normande and Tião returned to the heart of Guaxuma, the beachside setting in Alagoas, for their film Heartless (Sem Coração). This region, one of Brazil’s most impoverished states, is a microcosm that blends elements of violence and beauty, reality and fantasy. It was also the very location where they created the universe in their award-winning short film, bearing the same title, almost a decade ago. However, what lured them back to this place were its people.

This portrait of youth was selected for the 2023 Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. I had the opportunity to sit down with both filmmakers where we discussed how they developed the different characters including the titular Heartless (played by Eduarda Samara), how they embedded various working themes in the overall text and touched upon their working methodology.…...

Uruguayan filmmaker Lucía Garibaldi (who premiered The Sharks at Sundance in 2019), Abinash Bikram Shah (short film winner in Cannes 2022), Burak Cevik (one third of the filmmaking team with Sofia Bohdanowicz and Blake Williams in A Woman Escapes) and the tandem of Nara Normande and Tião who are heading to Venice with Sem Coração are some of the filmmakers who’ll receive some coin via the Berlinale World Cinema Fund (Wcf). Projects selected come from a bit everywhere on the globe: Bhutan, Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, Madagascar, Nepal, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Wcf Production Funding

A Bright Future (Uru-Ger)

Dir Lucía Garibaldi

Prods Montelona, Francisco Magnou Arnabal; Achtung Panda!,…...

Projects from Bhutan to Brazil to receive production and distribution funding.

The Berlinale’s World Cinema Fund (Wcf) has revealed 13 features it will support with a share of $380,000 in production and distribution funding.

Projects include Nothing In Its Place by Turkish filmmaker Burak Çevik, whose features The Pillar Of Salt, Belonging and Forms Of Forgetting each premiered at the Berlinale Forum.

His latest focuses on one of Turkey’s most bloody political massacres, which took place in the country’s capital of Ankara in 1978, and focuses on the night when a group of leftist youths who believed in unarmed revolution...

La BêteCOMPETITIONComandante (Edoardo De Angelis)The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)Dogman (Luc Besson) La Bête (Bertrand Bonello) Hors-Saison (Stéphane Brizé) Enea (Pietro Castellitto) Maestro (Bradley Cooper)Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)Finalmente L’Alba (Saverio Costanzo)Lubo (Giorgio Diritti) Origin (Ava DuVernay) The Killer (David Fincher)Memory (Michel Franco)Io capitano (Matteo Garrone)Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)The Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)The Theory of Everything (Timm Kröger)Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)El conde (Pablo Larrain)Ferrari (Michael Mann)Adagio (Stefano Sollima)Woman OfHolly (Fien Troch)Out Of COMPETITIONFictionSociety of the Snow (J.A. Bayona)Coup de Chance (Woody Allen)The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Wes Anderson)The Penitent (Luca Barbareschi)L’Ordine Del Tempo (Liliana Cavani)Vivants (Alix Delaporte)Welcome to Paradise (Leonardo di Constanzo)Daaaaaali! (Quentin Dupieux)The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (William Friedkin)Making of (Cedric Kahn)Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine)Hitman (Richard Linklater)The Palace (Roman Polanski...

Paris-based sales agent The Party Film Sales has acquired world rights for “Heartless” (Sem Coração), which has its world premiere in the Horizons section of the Venice Film Festival.

The feature, directed by Brazilian duo Nara Normande and Tião, is based on their short of the same name, which received the Illy Prize for Best Short at Directors’ Fortnight during the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

The film is set in the summer of 1996 on the north-east coast of Brazil, where Tamara (played by Maya de Vicq) is enjoying her last weeks in the fishing village she lives in before leaving for Brasilia for her studies. One day, she hears about a teenager nicknamed Heartless (played by Eduarda Samara), after a scar she has on her chest. Over the course of the summer, Tamara feels a growing attraction for this mysterious girl.

The directors comment: “Tamara’s journey is inspired by Nara...

Sem Coração

Based on the 2014 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight winning short of the same name, Nara Normande & Tião reunited on Sem Coração (aka Heartless) this past September for an on location shoot in the Northeast of Brazil. Maeve Jinkings is among the cast of actors here on a project that is set in the summer 1996 and delves into attraction and mystery. This directorial debut was selected for the Venice Gap market in 2021 and is produced by Emilie Lesclaux (Bacurau).

Gist: In the small village of Garça Torta, Tamara enjoys her last holidays before leaving for preparatory studies to enter college.…...

Cannes — Recife-based CinemaScópio Produções and Paris’ Les Valseurs have teamed on “A Garça” (The Heron), the feature debut from Brazil’s Nara Normande, co-authored by Tião.

Brazilian CinemaScópio is behind Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Brazilian Western-thriller “Bacurau,” in competition at Cannes. Les Valseurs is also presenting Qiu Yang’s short “She Runs” at Critics’ Week.

“The Heron” is the story of a group of kids in the summer of 1996 in an isolated fishing village on Brazil’s northeast coast. For a holiday 14-year-old Léo, a boy from the big city, comes to visit his cousins. He is introduced to their universe of freedom and meets a girl known to the other kids as ‘Sem Coração’ (Heartless), for a deep surgical scar she has on her chest.”

The feature is a follow-up of Normande and Tião’s 2014 short “Heartless,” which snagged the Illy Prize for best short film at...