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Arab distributor Mad Solutions has taken world rights to Firas Khoury’s “Dear Tarkovsky,” the Palestinian filmmaker’s follow-up to his fiery Cairo Film Festival winner “Alam” (The Flag). Khoury will be introducing the project to prospective partners this week at the Durban FilmMart.

The director’s sophomore feature follows 35-year-old Farouk, a resident of Ramallah who dreams of making his first film, “A Bridge to Jaffa,” a period piece about a Palestinian resistance fighter. A graduate of Russian film school and a devotee of Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky, Farouk is searching for an outlet for his artistic ambitions beyond the schlocky wedding videos he produces to make ends meet.

But the first-time director struggles to finance his provocative film, which includes scenes of his protagonist on the battlefield in armed combat with Israeli soldiers. As his frustration mounts, he cooks up a scheme to con one of Ramallah’s...

The second day of Dublin’s Storyhouse screenwriting festival kicked off with a bang on Friday as established writer-directors Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), Mounia Akl (Costa Brava Lebanon) and Stacey Gregg (Ballywalter) all discussed at length the process of how they achieve their best work and how they balance the writer-director relationship.

“I think it’s not necessarily a process of digging deeper – sometimes it’s about digging sideways,” Abbasi told the Light House cinema audience. “I don’t necessarily think that working on something for ten years makes it better.”

Abbasi’s Holy Spider is a film noir based on the true story of the “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei who saw himself as on a mission from God as he killed 16 women who were sex workers between 2000 and 2001 in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad, and Abbasi said that when it came to making the Palme d’Or contender...

The Venice Film Festival is rolling out a juried impact award that will mark the first time a major film festival has awarded a prize focused solely on impact.

Impact campaigns are crafted around documentaries and some narrative films that have strong social or political messages that can inspire action among audiences and the industry at large. While the field has been around for the last decade, Venice’s Collateral Impact Award, which was created in partnership with ThinkFilm Impact Production, is the first time an impact-specific award is being presented at an A-list festival.

“This is an industry first — it’s not been seen anywhere,” ThinkFilm Impact Production founder and CEO Danielle Turkov Wilson told Variety. “I’ve been working at Cannes at the industry level for years, but to see something like this at the competition level is wonderful.”

Venice organizers said the award will honor a film...

The 2023 Venice Film Festival has unveiled its Main Competition jury.

Under president Damien Chazelle, the jury will include Jane Campion, Mia Hansen-Løve, Laura Poitras, Martin McDonagh, Saleh Bakri, Gabriele Mainetti, Santiago Mitre, and Shu Qi. The 80th annual festival will run from August 30 to September 9.

The Main Competition jury will award the Golden Lion for Best Film, Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize, Silver Lion for Best Director, Coppa Volpi for Best Actress, Coppa Volpi for Best Actor, Special Jury Prize, Award for Best Screenplay, and “Marcello Mastroianni” Award for Best New Young Actor or Actress.

Last year’s jury was overseen by Julianne Moore, awarding the Golden Lion to 2023 jury member Poitras’ documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.”

Silver Lion winner Luca Guadagnino returns to the 2023 festival with Opening Night film “Challengers” starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist as three tennis players caught up in a game of love.

The trailer has debuted for feature documentary “Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano,” which will have its world premiere in the Main Competition at Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

Cyril Aris’ film centers on the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion at the port of Beirut on Aug. 4, 2020, which leaves a large part of the Lebanese capital in ruins. In the midst of the chaos, a film crew face an overwhelming decision: to continue the production of their movie or abandon it? They are torn between their firm belief in the transformative power of cinema and a deep sense of cynicism about its ability to effect change in a nation plagued by economic turmoil and societal collapse.

In a statement, Aris said: “For a region mired in political strife and economic difficulties, art has always been deemed as luxury not only by most Arab governments, but by the general population. Thus,...

Six upcoming projects selected for development platform.

Upcoming projects from Golden Bear-winning producer Celine Loiseau and Charlotte de la Gournerie of Oscar-nominated Flee are among six titles selected for the Full Circle Lab Nouvelle-Aquitaine workshop programme.

The third edition of the lab, organised by France’s Tatino Films, will host four projects at script stage and two in the editing stage, offering support through the development phase, as well as during the post-production and promotion of their features.

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Projects include documentary La Détention by Guillaume Massart, produced by Loiseau of France’s Ts Production, who...

Josh Charles, Dali Benssalah, and Yumna Marwan have been cast in the upcoming FX limited series “The Veil,” Varety has learned exclusively.

The series, which will air exclusively on Hulu, was originally picked up to series in August 2022 with Elisabeth Moss in the lead role.

Per the official logline, the series “explores the surprising and fraught relationship between two women who play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Asia to Europe. One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it.”

Exact character details are being kept under wraps, but Charles will star as Max, Benssalah as Malik, and Marwan as Adilah.

Charles most recently starred in the critically-acclaimed HBO series “We Own This City” from David Simon and George Pelecanos. His other recent credits include “Away” at Netflix and “In Treatment” at HBO. He is perhaps best known for his roles in “The Good Wife,...

Costa Brava, Lebanon Kino Lorber Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net, linked from Rotten Tomatoes by Harvey Karten Director: Mounia Akl Screenwriter: Mounia Akl, Clara Roquet Cast: Nadine Labaki, Yumn Yunna Marwan, Saleh Bakri, Nadia Charbel, Geana Restom, Seanna Restom Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 8/19/22 Opens: September 13, 2022 streaming A snail-paced drama about a […]

The post Costa Brava, Lebanon Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

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Given the direction of the world in recent years, it’s perhaps no surprise that Participant — Jeff Skoll’s socially conscious production powerhouse — has been as prolific as ever. But its output isn’t all about shining a torch on today’s most pressing concerns, as Academy Awards winners such as Roma, Green Book and Spotlight attest.

That said, the studio comes to Venice with two somewhat topical documentary features. In All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras (an Oscar winner for her Participant film CitizenFour) follows artist and activist Nan Goldin in a deeply personal battle as she fights to hold the Sackler family to account for the opioid crisis.

Meanwhile, A Compassionate Spy from Hoop Dreams director Steve James (also behind Participant’s first TV series, America to Me) tells the story of Ted Hall, who as a physicist on...

The BFI London Film Festival has revealed eight titles that will be in official competition.

The films include Santiago Mitre’s political drama “Argentina, 1985” (Argentina); Clement Virgo’s brotherly love tale “Brother” (Canada); Marie Kreutzer’s irreverent period drama “Corsage” (Austria-Luxembourg-Germany-France); Fyzal Boulifa’s atmospheric domestic drama “The Damned Don’t Cry” (France-Belgium-Morocco); Mark Jenkin’s folk horror tale “Enys Men” (U.K.); Hlynur Palmason’s historical epic “Godland” (Denmark-Iceland-France-Sweden); Soudade Kaadan’s poignant family film “Nezouh” (U.K.-Syria-France); and Alice Diop’s courtroom drama “Saint Omer.”

The nominated films are all on the festival circuit this year. “Argentina, 1985” and “Saint Omer” are debuting at Venice and both are up for the Golden Lion. “The Damned Don’t Cry” and “Nezouh” are also set for Venice bows. “Brother” will bow at Toronto, while “Corsage” won best performance at Cannes and best actress at Sarajevo for Vicky Krieps. “Enys Men” and “Godland” were also in Cannes.

After its debut at Sundance in January, where it earned the World Cinema Dramatic Competition award for directing, Ukrainian wartime drama “Klondike” nabbed top honors for best international film at the Chile’s 18th Santiago International Film Festival (Sanfic).

“Klondike,” written, directed and edited by Ukrainian filmmaker Marina Er Gorbach (“Omar and Us”), tells the story of expectant couple Irina and Anatoly who live in the village of Grabove, near the Russia-Ukraine border during the high conflict that coincides with downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The couple faces devastation up-close as Irina refuses to relocate, even as troops close in.

Best director went to Chile’s Roberto Baeza for his documentary effort “Punto de Encuentro,” a gripping portrait of filmmakers striving to recreate the story of their fathers, tortured and imprisoned under the dictatorship.

Tyler Taormina (“Ham On Rye”) feature “Happer’s Comet,” which examines alienation by focusing on characters from his Long Island hometown,...

Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to first-time Lebanese director Mounia Akl’s timely drama “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” which launched positively last year from Venice.

“Costa Brava” provides an acerbic take on Lebanon’s waste management crisis and its turbulent political landscape and combines the country’s strife with the global climate crisis.

The darkly comic drama pairs Oscar-nominated Lebanese star and filmmaker Nadine Labaki (“Capernaum”) and Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri (“The Band’s Visit”) as a couple who has moved from Beirut to live idyllically in the mountains, until one day the government decides to build a garbage landfill right beside their house.

After bowing from Venice “Costa Brava” segued to the Toronto and London fests, where it won prizes.

The pic’s production team boasts about it being the first feature in the Arab region to implement green measures on set, with strict sustainability protocols about recycling, water use,...

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Kino Lorber has picked up North American rights to Costa Brava, Lebanon, a darkly comic tale set against the current political and environmental crises in Lebanon.

Mounia Akl’s directorial debut, which premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti Extra sidebar last year, stars actress/director Nadine Labaki (Capernaum) and Saleh Bakri (The Band’s Visit). Kino Lorber is planning a theatrical release for Costa Brava, Lebanon on July 15.

Aki’s intergenerational family story focuses on the free-spirited Badri clan, who, in an effort to escape the toxic pollution and social unrest of Beirut, build a mini-utopia off the grid. But the world intervenes when the Lebanese government begins construction on a garbage landfill right outside their fence. The country’s trash and corruption is literally being brought to their doorstep. The Badris are forced to either stay true to their ideals and live outside the...

Mounia Akl’s long-awaited “Costa Brava, Lebanon” (2021) marks an impressive first feature. Eight different countries backed “Costa Brava”’s production, in addition to Akl’s own three completed residences at Cannes, Sundance, and Torino. The film’s international reception has also been warm. With a world premiere at Venice, a North American premiere at Toronto, and now a screening at Sffilm, “Costa Brava” ushers in Akl as an up-and-coming icon of Lebanese cinema. Crowds at home agree too: this film was recently selected as the Lebanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards.

The accolades are not unwarranted. “Costa Brava” masters the universal and the local at once. In this contemporary fiction, three generations of the Badri family reside in an idyllic mountain home. Though the location is picture-perfect, familial arguments bubble up beneath the surface. Grandmother Zeina (Liliane Chacar Khoury), ex-singer Soraya (Nadine Labaki...

Germany, US, India among countries represented.

Italy’s TorinoFilmLab (Tfl) has selected 10 fiction feature film projects at an advanced development stage for its 2022 FeatureLab, which will run from June to November this year.

The projects include six debut features and four second features; there are 21 participants across the 10 creative teams, including 14 women, six men and one non-binary person. They were selected from 134 applications from 60 countries.

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Among the selection are Mexican writer-director Marta Hernaiz Pidal with Straight Ahead, On Your Right. The film centres on the meeting between a group of posh teenage...

With last year’s surprise nominee “The Man Who Sold His Skin” hailing from Tunisia, Oscar handicappers should be sure to give West Asia and North Africa titles close scrutiny this time around.

Among the 11 submissions are several titles likely to be highly competitive in the international feature category. These include Iran’s social media critique “A Hero” from previous two-time winner Asghar Farhadi; Israel’s “Let It Be Morning”, a wry satire helmed by Eran Kolirin, about a Palestinian village put under military lockdown by the Israeli army; and Lebanon’s “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” a darkly comic commentary on the realities of modern-day Lebanon from feature debutant Mounia Akl.

Although “A Hero” may not be prime Farhadi, it already boasts the Grand Prix from Cannes. The narrative focuses on one of life’s losers, a likeable working-class man who, while on a short furlough from debtors prison, engineers events...

In other prizes Mounia Akl’s Costa Brava, Lebanon clinches Fipresci prize and inaugural Green Award.

Finnish director Teemu Nikki’s dark comedy-drama The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic scooped the El Gouna Film Festival’s $50,000 Golden Star award for best narrative film over the weekend.

Its star Petri Poikolainen also won best actor for his performance as a blind man who ventures out of his small apartment and onto the streets to travel by train to spend time with his long-distance girlfriend.

The film world premiered in Venice’s new Horizon Extras where it won the audience award.

Teemu Nikki’s Venice and Antalya winner “The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic” won the Golden star for best film at the 5th El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt, which wrapped Friday. The award carries a cash prize of $50,000.

The film’s lead Petri Poikolainen won best actor, while Maya Vanderbeque, the young star of “Playground,” won best actress.

Egyptian filmmaker Omar El Zohairy’s Cannes winner “Feathers,” which also won the Variety award at El Gouna earlier, won best Arab narrative film.

Directors Aleksey Chupov and Natasha Merkulova’s “Captain Volkonogov Escaped” won the Netpac award and bronze in the narrative category.

Michel Franco’s “Sundown” won silver in the narrative competition, while Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta” scored a special mention from Netpac.

Mounia Akl’s “Costa Brava, Lebanon” won the Fipresci award and the Green Star award for tackling environmental issues.

Panah Panahi’s “Hit the Road,” Laura Wandel’s “Playground” and Liz Garbus’ “Becoming Cousteau” have won the feature competition awards at the 65th BFI London Film Festival.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and BFI chief executive Ben Roberts led a judging panel to award “True Things” filmmaker Harry Wootliff the £50,000 Iwc Schaffhausen bursary, which recognizes emerging talent.

Family road trip movie “Hit the Road” won best film at the festival’s official competition.

Malgorzata Szumowska, official competition president, said: “The best film award recognises inspiring and distinctive filmmaking that captures the essence of cinema. The essence of life. At all times in cinema history, but perhaps during a pandemic especially, we are looking for ways to connect to life. Our choice is for a film that made us laugh and cry and feel alive.”

“Playground,” the harsh world of playground politics as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl, won the...

After opening the Venice Film Festival and continuing on to the New York Film Festival, Oscar winner Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers from Sony Pictures Classics will have a red-carpet premiere at this year’s AFI Fest at the Tcl Chinese Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 13.

In the movie, two women, Janis and Ana, played respectively by Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit, coincide in a hospital room where they are going to give birth. Both are single and became pregnant by accident. Janis, middle-aged, doesn’t regret it and she is exultant. The other, Ana, an adolescent, is scared, repentant and traumatized. Janis tries to encourage her while they move like sleepwalkers along the hospital corridors. The few words they exchange in these hours will create a very close link between the two, which by chance develops and complicates, and changes their lives in a decisive way. Cruz won the Volpi...

Amid ongoing disruption in the Arab world’s unstable fest landscape, Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival is staying the course and increasingly proving its mettle in promoting the cream of the region’s cinematic crop while also providing key support in nurturing new works.

El Gouna chief Intishal Al Timimi proudly points out that the fifth edition of the Oct. 14-22 event has secured eight high-profile features from Arab directors, most of which will be having their Middle Eastern premieres in the Egyptian Red Sea resort after bowing in Cannes and Venice.

They comprise French-Moroccan veteran Nabil Ayouch’s high-energy hip-hop drama “Casablanca Beats”; and two works from Lebanon: Mounia Akl’s dramedy “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” which targets Lebanon’s political malaise; and Ely Dagher’s “The Sea Ahead,” about a young woman who returns from Paris to Beirut and reconnects with the life she had left behind. There...

Kenneth Branagh’s black-and-white drama “Belfast” has won the People’s Choice Award at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF announced on Saturday.

The gentle drama, which is based on Branagh’s childhood growing up in Northern Ireland, won over Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson’s “Scarborough,” a story of three low-income children that finished second, and Jane Campion’s revisionist Western “The Power of the Dog,” which finished third.

In its review of the film from TIFF, TheWrap wrote, “Visually stunning, emotionally wrenching and gloriously human, ‘Belfast’ takes one short period from Branagh’s life and finds in it a coming-of-age story, a portrait of a city fracturing in an instant and a profoundly moving lament for what’s been lost during decades of strife in his homeland of Northern Ireland.”

Other films in competition for the award included “Dear Evan Hansen,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “The Guilty.

Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night. The prize is often considered a bellwether for the Academy Awards, as the winner for the past nine years has gone on to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination. This includes last year’s winner “Nomadland,” which went on to win Best Picture. See the full list of the 2021 TIFF winners below.

The People’s Choice Award winner based on votes, as revealed during the ceremony, was between “The Power of the Dog,” “Belfast,” and “Scarborough.”

Alongside the announcement of the People’s Choice Award, prizes were doled out to “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” star Jessica Chastain (TIFF Tribute Actor Award supported by the Tory Family), “The Power of the Dog” star Benedict Cumberbatch (TIFF Tribute Actor Award), “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve (TIFF Ebert Director Award), filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin (Jeff...

The Toronto International Film Festival, the International Federation of Film Critics (Fipresci)[/link] and the Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema (Netpac)[/link] have named their award winners for work screened at TIFF 2021.

“We are thrilled to announce that Anatolian Leopard has received the 2021 Fipresci Jury Award,” said Diana Sanchez, senior director, film, TIFF. “Every year we are amazed at the creativity and audaciousness of the filmmakers in our line-up. Anatolian Leopard, directed by Emre Kayiş is no exception.”

This year’s Fipresci jury members included Andrew Kendall, Esin Kücüktepepinar, Caspar Salmon, Gilbert Seah[/link], and Teresa Vena.

The 2021 Fipresci jury released a statement that called its winner “a perfectly controlled comedy of manners, Anatolian Leopard takes the temperature of a country torn between the old ways and modernity – not to say between honor and corruption – while offering up a melancholy portrait of a man at odds with his surroundings. Emre...

Mounia Akl’s feature debut, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” comfortably occupies a space between “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from “Honeyland”: Each movie deals with environmental dilemmas, ranging from climate change to the loss of biodiversity, but in their own ways and their own approaches. “Honeyland” takes the narrative nonfiction tack, chronicling the travails of a Macedonian beekeeper; “Beasts of the Southern Wild” grieves Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath with magical realism.

Continue reading ‘Costa Brava, Lebanon’ Is A Stellar Near-Future Family Drama [TIFF Review] at The Playlist.

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...

“Where will we run away to this time?” asks Soraya Bakri (Nadine Labaki) of her husband Walid (Saleh Bakri), partly joking but mostly not, when what looks like all the trash in Beirut appears on their rural hideaway’s doorstep. Mounia Akl’s “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” is mostly a bittersweet dramedy built from an intimate, sprightly understanding of internal family dynamics, but it is fringed with the implicit melancholy of Soraya’s question. When she and Walid left noisy, polluted Beirut eight years prior to raise chickens, vegetables and two daughters on a little plot of land in the countryside, were they running-toward or running-away-from? And if living off-grid is your dream — or the dream of the one you love most — what do you do when the grid comes to you?

Dealing with an issue that locates it sometime during the 2015 Beirut Garbage Crisis, when the streets of the city were overflowing with uncollected trash,...

Lebanese multihyphenate Nadine Labaki’s most recent directorial effort, the Oscar-nominated “Capernaum,” shed light on Beirut’s desperation before her city was blasted last year by one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. She is in Venice this year as an actor in Mounia Akl’s first feature “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” which against all odds started shooting two months after the blast, also defying the pandemic and Lebanon’s economic collapse.

The potent pic, which screened in Venice Horizons, sees Labaki and Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri (“The Band’s Visit”) playing Soraya and Walid, a couple who have left Beirut with their children for an idyllic, isolated life in the Lebanese mountains, until one day the government decides to build a garbage landfill right beside their house. Labaki spoke to Variety about how important it was for her to get back to work on a pic that says a lot about her country’s plight,...