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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Drive My Car (2021)List-making season has fully started. Film Comment released both the top twenty films as well as the top twenty undistributed films of the year, and IndieWire published the results of a massive poll of 187 critics. Vulture's critics have each written about their top tens, and Drive My Car tops both Barack Obama and Screen Slate's annual list. Screen Slate has also included individual ballots from "contributors, friends, critics, and filmmakers," which gave Paul Schrader the opportunity to rank The Card Counter as his pick for the best film of the year. Due to a nationwide lockdown in the Netherlands, the International Film Festival Rotterdam will be taking place online, cancelling its previous plans for an in-person event. There are two weeks left to submit to the Sundance Film Festival's 2022 Native Lab,...

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen's Gritt is showing exclusively on Mubi in many countries starting December 22, 2021 in the series Debuts.The making of Gritt, or how to put stones in your shoes to prevent you from getting where you think you should be going, and instead bump into all that other stuff you can put into the pot, to brew some new reality.In 2009 I ran into Birgitte Larsen (a.k.a. Gritt) sitting on a blanket in a park in Oslo. She had acted in a film school exercise I did two years earlier, but although I was struck by her intense and unusual presence even then, we hadn’t stayed in touch. Nevertheless, we immediately felt that this was a crucial encounter. I was in a crisis with the film medium in terms of format and production method and was aching to experiment. Also, I had recently encountered the...

After a stellar year picking up awards at Berlin, South by Southwest, Edinburgh and Melbourne, “Ninjababy” continued its prize-winning streak at Norway’s top plaudits for national movies, the Amanda Awards. Their prize ceremony kicked off the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on Saturday night.

The second feature from TV-film director Yngvild Sve Flikke (“Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts”), the ebullient comedy-drama film won out in four major categories: director, actress (Kristine Kujath Thorp), supporting actor (Nader Khademi) and screenplay.

Flikke’s sophomore feature is based on the graphic novel by Sætre, The Art of Falling,” which itself won numerous youth literature awards in 2012 for the Norwegian illustrator. The film follows aspiring artist Rakel, 23, who unexpectedly discovers she is six months pregnant and that the father is not her boyfriend, The story then pursues a series of comedic, yet grounded, twists and turns.

“I’m a restless person,...

The ten-episode series is co-directed by Stian Kristiansen and Uri Barbash, and stars Andrea Berntzen, Anneke von der Lippe, Anders T Andersen and Shadi Mar’i. A new ten-part thriller series, entitled Abducted, is set to premiere on TV2 Norway and TV2 Sumo on 11 April. The project, co-directed by Stian Kristiansen (the TV series Witch Hunt and Home Ground) and Uri Barbash (Kapo in Jerusalem), is based on a script penned by Kyrre Holm Johannessen and Ronit Weiss-Berkowitz. Abducted’s lead actors are Andrea Berntzen (U – July 22), Anneke von der Lippe, Anders T Andersen and Shadi Mar’i. The story begins when a young Norwegian girl called Pia gets kidnapped in the Sinai desert with two Israelis. Her parents, Alex and Karl, are first deeply confused, and then shocked, as they...

The most fascinating element of Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s strong feature debut “Gritt” is the way the director presents a problematic character who polarizes viewers. For some, Gritt (Birgitte Larsen) will be seen as a passionately creative woman whose inability to break into the alternative performance community leads her to make some very bad choices — when her free-thinking approach is stifled, she’s denied an outlet and does some foolish things. Others however will have a different take: Gritt is a troubled woman who appropriates half-ideas she’s unable to fully process, and it’s her self-centered fixation on being an outsider that leads to a serious betrayal of those around her.

, and the way the film leaves open the possibility of interpretation makes it an ideal festival entry. Søimer Guttormsen and Larsen first began exploring this character in the 2016 short “Retrett,” which is likely why Gritt feels so fully-formed,...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s feature debut “Gritt,” which has its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival on Feb. 2, and then goes straight to Göteborg, where it plays in the Dragon competition. International sales are being handled by Mer Film, its production company. It is the first Norwegian film ever to play in competition at Rotterdam, and the first Norwegian film to play there in any section for 17 years.

The film follows Gry-Jeanette – played by Birgitte Larsen – who left Norway with the dream of becoming an actress, 17 years ago. Now, having failed to find either fame in Hollywood or notoriety in Berlin, she’s back, and calling herself Gritt. While her old friends from college have established successful careers on the Oslo theater circuit, Gritt is passionate about staging a “manifestation”: a radical collective ritual. But nobody seems to care.