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Here’s a rundown of some of the top Hungarian projects in the pipeline or selling at the Cannes Market:

Semmelweis

Director: Lajos Koltai

Producer: Tamas Lajos (Film Positive)

Sales: N/A

Set in 1847, as a mysterious epidemic rages in a maternity clinic in Vienna, this period drama from the Oscar-nominated cinematographer and director Koltai (“Malena”) stars promising young thesp Miklos H. Vecsei as the titular doctor Ignác Semmelweis, who spurns traditional medical theories to find a cure.

The Lefkovicses Are in Mourning

Director: Ádám Breier

Producers: Kázmér Miklós, Felszeghy Ádám, Ausztrics Andrea

Sales: N/A

Breier’s feature debut is a dramedy about a generous but stubborn elderly boxing coach who gets along with everyone except his own son. While the two haven’t spoken in years, they’re reunited during after the death of the old man’s wife and forced to face old grievances.

Cat Call

Director:...

When a young Viesturs Kairiss started to dream about becoming a filmmaker thirty-some-odd years ago, he knew his path wouldn’t be straightforward or easy. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, aspiring Latvian directors would have to travel to Moscow or St. Petersburg to enroll in venerable Soviet film schools. After independence, Kairiss was among the first class of graduates from the newly launched film studies program at the Latvian Academy of Culture, one of many ways in which the small Baltic republic attempted to assert its own identity after half a century of Soviet rule.

“We didn’t have any technique,” Kairiss admits of he and his film school peers, laughing. For his first feature film, “Leaving by the Way” (2001), he enlisted friends for below-the-line work and recruited actors from the local theater school. When the film bowed in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival,...

Fifteen countries represented amongst the 18 individuals.

European producers platform Ace Producers has selected 18 producers for the latest edition of its Ace Producers’ Network programme, running in 2022 and 2023.

The 18 producers include Nadim Cheikhrouha of France’s Tanit Films, who will produce Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s next feature Mime. Cheikhrouha and Ben Hania secured an Oscar nomination for best international feature film last year for The Man Who Sold His Skin.

Scroll down for the full list of producers

Sara Laszlo, CEO at Hungary’s Campfilm, is another Ace Producers participant, through Denes Nagy’s The Vacation. Laszlo’s previous...

On the outskirts of Budapest, a big-budget period drama is recreating the fateful day that sparked the Hungarian war of independence in 1848. Construction is underway at the state-owned Mafilm studio complex on a massive set that will stand in for the Hungarian capital in the 19th century. With 100-plus shooting days planned through September, director Balázs Lóth describes “Now or Never!” as “the most ambitious Hungarian film ever made.”

That ambition is being matched by Hungary’s National Film Institute, which awarded “Now or Never!” a 12.5 million production grant — the largest amount given to a feature film since the fall of communism in 1989.

It’s the second big swing on a splashy historical drama taken by the Nfi in the past year, after it awarded 29 million to “Rise of the Raven,” an epic drama series produced by Robert Lantos’ Serendipity Point Films (“Crimes of the Future”) and Beta Film (“Gomorrah...

‘Tick, Tick…Boom!’ and foreign-language titles ‘Wesele’ and ‘Kurup’ are also new.

Holdovers from the major studios look set to dominate the UK-Ireland box office this weekend, with Chloe Zhao’s Marvel epic Eternals aiming to build upon its debut last week, where it made £5.5m from 642 locations.

Universal’s No Time To Die has enjoyed six weekends in the top two with its total standing at £89.9m. Matching Spectre’s £95.2m is still possible, but Skyfall’s £103.2m now seems out of reach. Another strong contender for the top five is Warner Bros’ Dune, which took £1.6m in its...

To cast his gruelling war drama, Dénes Nagy combed Hungary’s farms for people ‘with exhaustion in their face’ – then shot it in the Latvian winter. The result? Awards, praise … and fierce criticism

The publicist from the film company won’t be able to make it to the hotel in Leicester Square to introduce me to the Hungarian film-maker Dénes Nagy, whose gruelling slow-burn war drama Natural Light recent won him the best director prize at Berlin. But he emails to say that spotting Nagy shouldn’t be too difficult: “In the nicest way, he looks like the director of Natural Light.” And it’s true. There is a man in the foyer with an unmistakably auteur-like air: small wire spectacles, intellectual high forehead and a haircut he could have snipped himself in front of a mirror.

Natural Light is an unapologetically serious and beautiful piece of hardcore arthouse cinema.

A massive fire that broke out at Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival on Wednesday is now under control, organizers have confirmed.

Shortly after the fire broke out, dramatic videos of the incident were posted on social media.

Watch: A massive fire has broken out in the main hall of the El Gouna Film Festival site in Egypt, one day ahead of the opening ceremony, according to local media reports. #Gff https://t.co/13Z78ZM5ik pic.twitter.com/J1HYCjLSj8

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) October 13, 2021

“El Gouna Film Festival Management announced the control of a fire that broke out in El Gouna Conference and Culture Center. The fire damaged a small part of the hall prepared to receive the opening activities of the festival,” the festival management said in a statement. “Once the fire broke out, El Gouna Film Festival Management coordinated with the Civil Protection Forces...

When producer Robert Lantos began developing the big-budget historical drama series “Rise of the Raven,” adapting Hungarian author Bán Mór’s series of bestselling novels presented obvious challenges. “It’s an 11-volume novel, each volume being 500-600 pages long,” says Lantos. It took several writers and the better part of a decade to find a way forward, something the producer describes as “finding a creative solution to a jigsaw puzzle.”

With a budget that Lantos describes as “competitive with English-language productions of that scope and that size,” financing the series was the second challenge, with the producer determined to secure the majority of the show’s financing from the host country. “It’s ambitious. It’s certainly by far the biggest thing done in that part of the world, not just in Hungary,” he says. The last puzzle piece finally fell into place when Hungary’s National Film Institute (Nfi...

Films include Emerald Fennell’s ‘Promising Young Woman’ and Blerta Basholli’s ‘Hive’.

More films than ever before are eligible for this year’s European Film Awards’ feature film and documentary film selection, with 40 feature films and 15 documentary films, and further feature film titles to be revealed in September.

Titles in the feature film selection include Blerta Basholli’s Sundance hit Hive and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. The latter is eligible despite being listed as a film of US origin. The European Film Academy (Efa) told Screen this was because the film reaches the number of points in...

The awards were held on the closing night of the first Hungarian Motion Picture Festival (Hmpf).

Balázs Krasznahorkai’s Ravine was named best feature film at the Hungarian Motion Picture Awards, held at Balatonfüred’s Anna Grand Hotel on Saturday night as the closing event of the first Hungarian Motion Picture Festival.

Krasznahorkai’s feature debut had previously been shown this year at the Sofia International Film Festival and the Goa International Film Festival, whilst lead Levente Molnár picked up the best male actor award at the CineFantasy festival in Sao Paulo last month.

The story revolves around a Hungarian obstetrician and soon-to-be father,...

Nearly 90 films to screen at inaugural event.

The world premiere of Péter Varsics’ romantic comedy Perfect As You Are is set to open the first edition of the Hungarian Motion Picture Festival (Hmpf) (June 23-26).

The open-air screening will take place in the medieval town of Veszprém, a European Capital of Culture in 2023, and will kick off the new showcase event for Hungarian cinema.

A total of 89 films will be screened during the festival, which will take place in Veszprém, Balatonfüred and Balatonalmádi across the country’s Lake Balaton region. Hmpf is the successor to the long-running Hungarian Film Week,...

Producers of ‘Another Round’ and Silver Bear winner ‘Natural Light’ selected for networking platform.

The producer of Oscar winner Another Round is among those selected for European Film Promotion’s (Efp) networking platform Producers on the Move, which will again take place online.

The 20 producers selected for this year’s programme would usually gather at the Cannes Film Festival and take part in meetings, roundtable sessions and case studies. But although Cannes has committed to host a physical festival in July, Efp will run the programme online from May 17-21 to avoid possible pandemic restrictions.

Among this year’s line-up is Kasper Dissing,...

The six-month programme kicks off with a workshop in May.

The TorinoFilmLab (Tfl) has unveiled the 10 projects at an advanced stage by first or second-time international directors selected for this year’s FeatureLab.

The prestigious six-month programme kicks off with a workshop in May – held online due to the pandemic - and will be followed by second one in September to be held physically in Austria, if possible. The Austrian Film Institute and the Comunidad de Madrid and Ayuntamiento de Madrid are partnering on this iteration of the Lab.

Scroll down for the list of projects

The FeatureLab is led...

The producers of this year’s International Feature Film Oscar winner “Another Round” and Berlin Silver Bear winner “Natural Light” have been selected for European Film Promotion’s Producers on the Move program, which promotes promising producers and fosters international co-productions. The 20 participants for the program, which runs online from May 17-21, will be presenting their latest projects in speed meetings and during roundtable sessions. More than half of the selection are women.

The participants, who were selected for the program from all of the nominations submitted by the Efp member organizations, are Annabella Nezri (Belgium), Nikolay Mutafchiev (Bulgaria), Bojan Kanjera (Croatia), Marek Novák (Czech Republic), Kasper Dissing (Denmark), Jean-Christophe Reymond (France), Maite Woköck (Germany), Sára László (Hungary), Ruth Treacy (Ireland), Marica Stocchi (Italy), Iris Otten (The Netherlands), Gary Cranner (Norway), Beata Rzeźniczek (Poland), Tathiani Sacilotto (Portugal), Bianca Oana (Romania), Katarína Tomková (Slovak Republic), Andraž Jerič (Slovenia), Clara Nieto (Spain...

Tabitha Jackson and Carlo Chatrian shared challenges of upcoming events.

The directors of the Sundance and Berlin film festivals have revealed increased uncertainty over their upcoming events due to the ongoing pandemic.

Speaking on a virtual panel at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Reel (April 15-25), Sundance festival director Tabitha Jackson said there were challenges over both the planning of the January 2022 event and uncertainty over the films that will be ready, following a year of production disruption.

“We’re again in the position of needing to plan in the midst of uncertainty and, in a sense, it’s more...

Artistic directors Tabitha Jackson and Carlo Chatrian shared challenges of upcoming events.

The artistic directors of the Sundance and Berlin film festivals have revealed increased uncertainty over their upcoming events due to the ongoing pandemic.

Speaking on a virtual panel at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Reel (April 15-25), Sundance artistic director Tabitha Jackson said there were challenges over both the planning of the January 2022 event and uncertainty over the films that will be ready, following a year of production disruption.

“We’re again in the position of needing to plan in the midst of uncertainty and, in a sense,...

It’s trailer time, baby! We’ve rounded up a handful of trailers that may not be on your radar. These aren’t huge titles or big blockbusters, but smaller films or TV shows that still deserve some attention. Below check out trailers for the Netflix movie A Week Away, the documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in […]

The post Trailer Round-Up: ‘A Week Away’, ‘Who We Are’, ‘Vanquish’, ‘Sas: Red Notice’, ‘The Mosquito Coast’, and ‘Natural Light’ appeared first on /Film.

“Natural Light,” Dénes Nagy’s World War II-set drama which just won the Berlinale Silver Bear for best director, has been sold by Paris-based Luxbox to key markets including the U.K. with Curzon.

Rolling off the EFM, Luxbox has also unveiled deals on the critically acclaimed movie for Portugal (Alambique), Poland (Aurora), Czech Republic and Slovakia (Film Europe) and Turkey (Mars Film).

Set in occupied Soviet Union, the film tells the story of István Semetka, a simple Hungarian farmer who serves as a Caporal in a special unit scouting for partisan groups. On their way to a remote village, his company falls under enemy fire. As the commander is killed, Semetka has to overcome his fears and take command of the unit as he is dragged into a chaos that he cannot control.

Louisa Dent, Curzon’s managing director, described “Natural Light” as “an astonishing debut from Dénes Nagy.

It’s 1943. A particularly cruel winter has swept through the occupied Soviet Union. Its rural territories are an endless landscape of frosty forests, pocked with horse-swallowing sinkholes. Making do amid the bitter freeze, two hunters float down a misty river on a makeshift raft. With them they carry their latest prize: a hefty buck, provisions for a month or so in current conditions, one would think, well rationed. Understandably skittish, they spot a soldier at the edge of the river.

Continue reading ‘Natural Light’ Beautifully Explores How A Man Can Be Corrupted By The Horrors Of War [Berlin Review] at The Playlist.

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” a modern day satire from Romanian director Radu Jude, won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlinale, or the Berlin International Film Festival.

“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” tells the story of a school teacher who finds her reputation under threat after her personal sex tape is leaked onto the Internet, with her refusing to give into pressure from parents to step down. The film challenges the ideas of hypocrisy and prejudice in our society. The jury for the festival said it had the “rare and essential quality lasting art work.”

“It captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence,” the jury wrote. “It does so by provoking the spirit of our time, by slapping it, by challenging it to a duel.

The winners for the virtual 2021 Berlin International Film Festival have been revealed, and Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s satire “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” received the Golden Bear for best film. The competition jury celebrated the film as “a rare and essential quality of a lasting art work,” adding in a statement, “It captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence.”

This year’s Berlinale competition jury was made up of six former winners of the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear: “There is No Evil” director Mohammad Rasoulof, “Synonyms” filmmaker Nadav Lapid, “Touch Me Not” helmer Adina Pintilie, “On Body and Soul” director Ildiko Enyedi, “Fire at Sea” filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, and “Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams” director Jasmila Zbanic.

The Silver Bear...

Romanian director Radu Jude’s irreverent contemporary satire “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” has won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear for best film.

The jury said the film has that “rare and essential quality of a lasting art work. It captures on screen the very content and essence, the mind and body, the values and the raw flesh of our present moment in time. Of this very moment of human existence.”

Hungary’s Dénes Nagy won the Silver Bear for best director for World War II drama “Natural Light.” The jury said of the film: “Appalling and beautifully shot, mesmerising images, remarkable direction and a masterful control of every aspect of the craft of filmmaking, a narration that transcends its historical context. A portrait of war in which the observant gaze of the director reminds us again of the need to choose between passivity and taking individual responsibility.

Maren Eggert and Lilla Kizlinger win first ever gender-neutral acting awards.

The Golden Bear for best film at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival has been won by Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn.

Scroll down for full list of winners

The social satire was shot in Romania during the summer of 2020 during a lull in the pandemic, and stars Katia Pascariu as a school teacher who finds her career and reputation on the line after a personal sex tape is leaked onto the Internet. Heretic Outreach handles sales.

Romanian filmmaker Jude was last in competition at the...

For the first time ever, two Hungarian films are competing for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear: “Forest – I See You Everywhere,” a standalone sequel to the 2003 Berlinale hit “Forest,” from veteran auteur Bence Fliegauf, and “Natural Light” from feature debutant Dénes Nagy. Csaba Káel, chairman of the National Film Institute of Hungary (Nfi), says, “I believe it demonstrates the vitality and strength of the Hungarian industry flourishing despite the unprecedented circumstances caused by the pandemic worldwide.”

The two films represent opposite poles of current Hungarian filmmaking. Brimming with discourse, the independently funded “Forest” tells multiple complex, engaging stories of contemporary life in Hungary. And as he did in his Berlinale-winner “Just the Wind” (2012), Fliegauf creates deep empathy for his characters who deliver standout performances.

On the other hand, “Natural Light,” with its minimal dialogue, harks back to an older tradition in Hungarian cinema where stunning cinematography leads the other formal elements.

“Natural Light,” a portrait of the attrition and atrocity of war set at a benighted village in occupied Western Soviet Union in 1943, has clinched its first sales as Paris-based Luxbox rolls out the Berlin Competition player at the European Film Market.

Nour Films, whose past pickups include Berlin Golden Bear winner “Touch Me Not,” has closed rights to France.

Nour will open “Natural Light” “with great conviction and pleasure” on at least 60 prints in second half 2021, said Nour Films Patrick Sibourd.

Luxbox has also licensed “Natural Light” to Benelux (“Cherry Pickers”) and Greece (“One From the Heart”). Vertigo Media will release the feature in Hungary. Further licensing deals are in negotiation, said Luxbox founders Fiorella Moretti and Hédi Zardi.

Lead produced by Hungary’s Campfilm, and co-produced by Latvia’s Mistrus Media, France’s Lilith Films, Germany’s Propellerfilm, Belgium’s Novak Prod. and Hungary’s Proton Cinema, “Natural Light” follows a corporal,...

Both films scored a mixture of threes and fours.

Hong Sangsoo’s Introduction and Maria Speth’s Mr Bachmann And His Class share the lead on the latest Screen jury grid, as a further five titles take their spots.

Prolific Korean director Hong’s Introduction was the most consistent scorer to date, receiving five marks of three (good) plus two fours (excellent) from Sight & Sound’s Nick James and Mathieu Macheret of Le Monde/ Cahiers Du Cinéma. It has a 3.3 score with one mark still to come.

Hong’s fifth Berlinale Competition entry is told in three parts, showing a young man visiting his father,...

For his first narrative feature Natural Light, Hungarian filmmaker Dénes Nagy (who has worked in documentary since as far back as 2008) follows in the footsteps of a fellow countryman. In 2015, László Nemes debuted Son of Saul at the Cannes film festival. A deeply serious film, Saul sought to plunge viewers into the horrors of Auschwitz. Nagy’s film takes place a little earlier, and a good bit further to the East, following a squadron of Hungarian soldiers on the Eastern front. The men are there to serve on the side of the Nazis-––although hunger, mud, and sanity seem to be the more pressing concerns.

The nod to Nemes is less to do with having been born in the same part of the world, of course, as it is to do with subject and style––although the two are not necessarily unrelated. It’s also to do with a relatively...

In the Fog: No Light at the End of the War Tunnel in Nagy’s Grim Debut

Following in the well-grooved footsteps of many notable Euro auteurs, Hungarian director Dénes Nagy ambitiously turns to a literary adaptation of WWII horrors with his debut Natural Light. Loosely based on the epic 2014 novel from Pal Zavada, a 600+ page tome which follows a Slovak-populated village in Hungary both before and after the war, Nagy whittles away countless tangents to focus on the grim experiences of a farmer turned corporal forced into hunting partisans in the occupied Soviet Union.

If hangdog was a tonal register, Nagy’s creation formats this period as a mud-strewn slog of constant exhaustion.…...

Having imbibed the visual qualities of Andrei Tarkovsky and Sharunas Bartas, “Natural Light” director Dénes Nagy delivers exactly the sort of forest-bound World War II movie one might imagine from a first-time helmer smitten by such masters. Technically impeccable and rigorously cleaving to an aesthetic designed to keep the viewer at arm’s length, the film is so intent on privileging the soldier protagonist’s immovable face (when not focusing on the back of his helmet), so determined to keep him frozen and unknowable, that Nagy dispenses with that key ineffable quality: human emotion. , and certainly on a cerebral level there’s much to appreciate, yet “Natural Light” sheds no warmth and offers no insight into the horrors of the human condition during wartime.

During the Second World War, thousands of Hungarian soldiers, aligned with the Axis Powers, patrolled vast swathes of the occupied Soviet Union, keeping an eye on fractious partisans.

Hungary’s most recent contribution to the implacable flow of war films pouring out of Eastern Europe is a far cry from the Russian tank operas and spectacular disaster films like Battle of Leningrad. Denes Nagy’s sensitive first feature Natural Light (Termeszetes feny), bowing in Berlin competition, is the opposite of these: a slow starter high on atmosphere but low on action, whose horrific main event takes place discreetly off-screen.

The story salutes Elem Klimov’s 1985 anti-war masterpiece Come and See (reissued in the U.S. last year in a 2K restoration) and its stark, unflinching gaze at the Nazi invasion of Byelorussian villages. Nagy’s ...