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  • Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

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    Mike Etienne and D’Johé Kouadio in Dao by Alain Gomis. © 2026 – Les Films du Worso – Srab Films – Yennenga Productions – Nafi Films – Telecine Bissau Produções – Canal+ Afrique

    Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.

    Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.

    It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.

    Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.

    The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.

    Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.

    DAO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Alain Gomis
    Written by: Alain Gomis
    Starring: Katy Correa, D’Johé Kouadio, Samir Guesmi, Mike Etienne, Nicolas Gomis
    Running time: 185 min.

    There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.

    Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.

    However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.

    And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.

    Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.

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    Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • ‘Wolfram’ Review: Warwick Thornton Deftly Reframes Painful Indigenous Australian Experience Through the Lens of Classic Western Archetypes

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    An experienced cinematographer before he turned to directing, Warwick Thornton has a feel for the Central Australian desert and the craggy MacDonnell Ranges that’s both epic and intimate. His refined sense of composition is directly informed by the landscape around Alice Springs where he grew up and his subcutaneous connection to it imbues his films with soulful beauty. Wolfram is no exception. A four-chapter saga of escape, pursuit and survival, the film, for all its brutality, ultimately becomes less a lament for stolen lands and stolen children than a stirring account of endurance.

    Family and community are the thematic foundation of this sequel of sorts to Thornton’s 2017 drama Sweet Country, again co-written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter. It picks up a few years after the events of the earlier film in and around the same fictional Northern Territory town of Henry, though all but two of the principal characters here are different. That gives the two movies the feel of a shared ancestral map, marked by overlaps and diverging tangents.

    Wolfram

    The Bottom Line

    Not without flaws, but equal parts haunting and healing.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Deborah Mailman, Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M. Wright, Matt Nable, Pedrea Jackson, Eli Hart, Hazel May Jackson, Ferdinand Hoang, Jason Chong, Aiden Du Chiem, John Howard, Anni Finsterer, Luka May Glynn-Cole, Gibson John, Natassia Gorey-Furber
    Director: Warwick Thornton
    Screenwriters: Steven McGregor, David Tranter

    1 hour 42 minutes

    The nominal center this time is Pansy, played with an expressive gaze and few words by the invaluable Deborah Mailman, first seen clutching her newborn and hacking off locks of her hair with a rusty knife. With minimal preamble or exposition, Pansy and new partner Zhang (Jason Chong) set off on a horse and cart for Queensland, their last shot at finding her lost children. She beads the braids of hair with seeds, hanging them on shrubs to mark the way, like a trail of breadcrumbs.

    Meanwhile, Indigenous child laborers Max (Hazel May Jackson) and Kid (Eli Hart) chip away at the walls of a tight mine shaft, removing chunks of the ore used to make wolfram (now more commonly known as tungsten) for their ill-tempered boss Billy (Matt Nable).

    A separate thread follows the arrival in Henry of criminals Casey (Erroll Shand) and Frank (Joe Bird), all mean attitude and swagger as they look to stake a claim in the area and prospect for gold. Ignoring the advice of the local storekeeper (John Howard) to avoid the back trails where they are likely to encounter “wild Blackfellas,” they head off in that direction. When they come upon young Max, left behind to keep an eye on Billy’s camp, Casey and Frank rob the camp and forcibly take the child with them.

    Once Kid discovers his sibling is gone, he steals a donkey from the mining site and goes after him, his exit timing helped by a convenient snake bite.

    Further off the dusty track on a run-down cattle station, belligerent drunk Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) benefits from the virtual slave labor of his 18-year-old mixed-race son Philomac (Pedrea Jackson), the two main characters carried over from Sweet Country. (Philomac, then 14, was played by twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan.)

    When Casey and Frank roll up, they pretty much take over, claiming they found Max wandering alone. Kennedy is oddly deferential to the strangers as they start antagonizing Philomac, whose suspicions about them are confirmed when he talks to Max alone.

    Just as he did in Sweet Country, Thornton evokes the Old West-style lawlessness of the time and place, particularly as sneering villain Casey and cocky dope Frank go from vaguely menacing to outright ruthless. Their heartless treatment of Black petty thief Archie (Gibson John), another Sweet Country holdover, shocks Philomac into action as the movie shifts gears into a chase thriller. Blood is shed in killings both horrific and gratifying. In the latter case, Thornton reclaims the dignity of First Nations Australians with a rousing image of strength.

    Much of the story comes from oral history passed down by his great-grandfather to Tranter, whose family roots on both sides — Indigenous and Chinese — come into play. That said, the narrative feels a tad shapeless at times and the plot turns — one surprise revelation in Part Four aside — often familiar.

    The number of significant characters and story strands makes it a challenge for the director and writers to settle on a focus and maintain it until the threads are stitched together. But even when it ambles along rather than races, the movie’s heart and integrity keep Wolfram engrossing, buoyed by sterling work from the entire cast.

    Pedrea Jackson, sporting an excellent mustache, is a standout as Philomac, contemplative, observant, simmering with indignation and longing to be with his people; Shand makes Casey chillingly contemptible, treating the Aboriginal characters like animals; despite her role being largely symbolic, Mailman is enormously touching, her grace and quiet fortitude standing in for countless mothers whose children were taken from them; and the young actors playing Max and Kid are terrific.

    Two Chinese gold prospectors introduced toward the end, Shi (Ferdinand Hoang) and Jimmi (Aiden Du Chiem), indicate the sense of solidarity among victims of discrimination. They become a key part of an affecting conclusion, which maybe ties up the story too neatly, but few will be unmoved by seeing people so dehumanized by colonial rule show their resilience.

    Thornton once again serves as his own DP, drawing texture from the rich palette of reds, oranges, golds and browns in the sun-blasted landscape. The movie has no original score as such but makes distinctively atmospheric use of Charlie Barker’s saw playing. The director has still not surpassed the poetic simplicity of his lauded 2009 debut, Samson & Delilah. But Wolfram represents a very solid entry in his impressive body of work and a return to form after his more uneven last feature, The New Boy.

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    David Rooney

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  • Spanish Streamer Filmin and Belgium’s Boucan Board ‘Robbery, Beating & Death’ from ‘This is Not Sweden’ Producer Funicular Films (EXCLUSIVE)

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    Spanish streaming platform Filmin and Belgium’s Boucan Film Production have boarded the series “Robbery, Beating & Death” (“El pitjor atracament de la historia”) from “This is Not Sweden” producers, Funicular Films.

    Upscale SVOD service Filmin also produces original shows and holds a vast catalog of classic films. It also hosts dedicated country channels, like that of Costa Rica.

    Founded by producers Boris Van Gils and Michaël Goldberg, Boucan describes itself as a company that makes audience-driven auteur films with mainstream appeal. It has offices in Brussels, Abidjan and Paris. Among their notable credits are Stephan Streker’s “Noces,” nominated for a Best Foreign Film César award in 2018 and Belgian box office hit “Les Rayures du Zèbra.”

    Participating in the Berlinale Co-Pro Series event, the series turns on two lifelong friends who are hired to create a television series centered on a bank heist. Eager for the acclaim they’ve always been denied, they cling to the bold, extreme philosophy of a mysterious artist they admire. Determined to prove themselves, they push their project beyond fiction—choosing not to film the story, but to carry out a real bank robbery instead.

    Said Funicular’s Marta Baldó: “Framed as a playful guide to pulling off the greatest heist in the world, ‘Robbery, beating and death’ uses comedy to explore universal themes: friendship, family, loyalty, work, art, capitalism and the contradictions of our industry.”

    “Like science fiction or dystopia, its meta layer lets us talk about the present human condition with political and philosophical bite,” she noted.

    Marcel Borràs and Nao Albet have written and directed the series, in which they will also star. The rest of the cast has yet to be confirmed.

    “Robbery, Beating & Death” received vital support from Catalan cultural agency, ICEC, a pillar of Catalonia’s robust audiovisual production landscape.

    ICEC’s High-End TV Production Fund, launched in 2022, allots up to €1.5 million ($1.8 million) for Catalan-language series with a minimum budget of €4 million ($4.7 million).

    “This Is Not Sweden,” first presented at Series Mania 2024, picked up the Best Performance award for Aina Clotet at Canneseries 2024. It also won the Prix Europa for Best European TV Fiction Series. Clotet has directed her first feature film, the love triangle drama “Oh Nora!” based on a screenplay she co-wrote with Valentina Viso. It is co-produced by Funicular and Ikiru Films and is currently in post.  

    Bowing in Spain on Catalonia’s 3Cat and national pubcaster RTVE, “This is Not Sweden” follows a young couple, Mariana and Samuel who resettle, along with other yuppies, to a chic, leafy community perched on the western hills overlooking Barcelona, determined to create the best possible life for their young children.

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    Anna Marie de la Fuente

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  • ‘Lost Embrace’ Creator Daniel Burman on ‘So Far, So Good,’ Male Crisis, Butterflies and What We Leave Behind 

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    Even Pope Francis has a hardback copy of his graphic novel. He has a loving relationship with his glamorous wife, who travels the world. As a globally renown cartoonist, he can afford a carer for his parents. 

    On face value, Ariel has it all. In fact, the protagonist of Daniel Burman’s “So Far, So Good,” Ariel has a bit too much: Five children from three marriages, two cats and two ageing parents.   

    “Has anybody seen my charger?” Ariel asks at breakfast in early Episode 1 of “So Far, So Good,” the latest from Oficina Burman, part of The Mediapro Studio which market premieres at this week’s Berlinale Series Market.

    “Has anybody seen my small padlock?” Ariel (Benjamin Vicuña) also enquires.  Though all his family is home, nobody answers. Emerging from his bedroom, he advances down a corridor towards the door, dodging children while a son makes an infernal racket playing the piano, the camera following crazily, as if shooting a scene in a war zone.  

    Turning 50, at the gym for the first time in 10 years to get into shape to accept an Vatican award for his work, Ariel starts lifting weights and has a hernia. The muscles on his left side, his doctor tells him not very encouragingly, looks like “Kobe meat about to disintegrate.”

    Launching Oficina Burman in 2014, Burman has created notable series, such a “Iosi, the Regretful Spy,” an infiltrator thriller reckoned the best TV work at Berlin in 2022. 

    Over the course of 30 years, Burman, a leading light of the New Argentine Cinema, has built a career teasing with upbeat humor the neuroses, complications and ironies of life. Created by Burman, and co-directed with Daniel Hendler who won a Berlin best actor Silver Bear for his performance in Burman’s “Lost Embrace,” “So Far, So Good” is no exception. 

    It’s also one of Burman’s most autobiographical works, he confesses. Fittingly and adding a sense of authenticity to “So Far, So Good” Burman is 10 minutes late for an interview with Variety because he’s at a doctor’s having a dodgy knee tended in an oxygen chamber before he travels to Berlin to present “So Far, So Good,” one of 20 titles at Berlinale Series Market Selects.  

    Ariel’s hernia, his reduced mobility, weighs in as part of a larger picture, his lack of empowerment in mid-age crisis.

    “It is made flesh,” says Burman. But what weighs on Ariel is more “emotional” than “physical,” he goes on to say. 

    “Over the last years, there’s been a very necessary movement of films and series about women with women characters. That’s very important. It’s as if this has happened, however, in detriment of portraits of male reality when in reality the two realities co-exist,” Burman reflects.

    Sold by The Mediapro Studio Distribution, “So Far, So Good” has a male protagonist whose conflict, Burman says, is “not violence nor with femininity but more existential, the moment when he begins to be father of his parents, as if he’s going to stop being a son, and nobody is going to look after him, and that doesn’t make sense.”

    Ariel is, however, in constant demand. When a Papal prelate urges him to write his acceptance speech over the upcoming weekend, Ariel explains to him that his weekends are not his own: “My son’s performing at a comedy show, the daughter I have to drive everywhere, the other son plays the piano all day, I have two babies, plus two cats, and surely one of my wife’s friends will host a barbecue an hour from home. And I was thinking of visiting my folks, checking that they’re still alive.”

    Yet, the series bears no sense of victimization, Burman insists. Ariel is fruit of his own decisions and circumstances. “It was unimaginable just 10 years ago to make a series whose male protagonist needs attention. Now it’s a interesting take: the invisibility of a man of a certain age who needs affection and attention.”

    Burman calls “So Far, So Good” an “andropause comedy told with a lot of humor and emotion.”  

    That emotion looks to lift off in later episodes. For Burman, “There’s an beautiful anecdote told in the series about groups of butterflies which are called kaleidoscopes, because it’s an optical illusion that they’re together, they’re not a family, just moving closely together. Many times families are an optical illusion as well.”  

    “Ariel realizes he’ll have to bear the weight of his parents’ decline and he can’t ask anybody else to do that. A butterfly leaves behind a cocoon and then flies. One changes every day, leaving things behind. Children leave and leave a toy. All these things left behind along one’s life journey is not a source of conflict but identity. We’re what’s left behind when there’s nothing left to share out or lose and can reconcile ourselves with the idea that we’re a left-behind,” Burman concludes.

    “So Far, So Good” is produced by Argentina’s Oficina Burman and Uruguay H.Q.-ed Cimarrón. Both The Mediapro Studio companies, they produce the six-part series for Flow, the Argentine cable TV, internet and SVOD operator. Flow has acquired distribution rights for Latin America and The Mediapro Studio Distribution for the rest of the world.

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    John Hopewell

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  • ‘Rosebush Pruning’ Review: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning Serve up Shallowness With Style in Mixed-Bag Satire

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    The Pet Shop Boys’ synth-pop banger “Paninaro” is a tongue-in-cheek anthem to hedonistic Italian youth culture of the 1980s, its label-whore obsessions and its blithe superficiality. Fittingly, the song’s thumping beat is heard twice, real loud, in Rosebush Pruning, Karim Aїnouz’s high-gloss, pitch-dark satire about an American family described by one of its scions as mediocre, vapid egotists, who will never have to work thanks to a large inheritance. Fashion and techno music are the chief interests of the surviving members, one of whom dreams of Bottega Veneta loafers floating in the sky.

    The Taylor family left New York for the Catalonia coast six years earlier and have never quite managed to fit in, which is not surprising given the insular bubble of circle-jerk flattery that have built.

    Rosebush Pruning

    The Bottom Line

    Tart and amusing at times but leaves a sour taste.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
    Cast: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya, Tracy Letts, Elle Fanning, Pamela Anderson
    Director: Karim Aїnouz
    Screenwriter: Efthimis Filippou, inspired by the film Fists in the Pocket, by Marco Bellocchio

    1 hour 35 minutes

    Their late mother (Pamela Anderson) was drawn to the region by her passion for the architecture of Antonio Gaudí, while her widower (Tracy Letts) and their four adult children, Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell) and Robert (Lukas Gage), revere it as the birthplace of Cristóbal Balenciaga. The fact that the Spanish designer was actually from a town in the Basque Country on the opposite coast is likely part of the joke.

    Loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket, the scathing takedown of the bourgeoisie that put the Italian director on the map, Rosebush Pruning was penned by Efthimis Filippou. It has a close kinship with the deadpan absurdism of the Greek screenwriter’s collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos on The Lobster and especially Dogtooth.

    The peculiar energy, creepy sexual vibes and deliberate acid reflux of Aїnouz’s movie will make it an acquired taste. Or not. What it takes from Bellocchio is primarily the outline of a dysfunctional family of four siblings with a blind parent — in this case the father, not the mother — a young man prone to epileptic seizures and a multiple-murder plot that includes a fatal clifftop fall.

    The objective of the killings, in both cases, is to free the adored eldest brother to break away from the family’s incestuous grip and live with the woman he loves. In the new iteration that would be Jack and his girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning), whose introduction to the Taylors is one of many scenes played out with squirming discomfort.

    Given that he can’t see, the pervy father (neither parent is named) asks Anna to describe Martha for him, starting with her handbag — “Is it Bottega, or not?” he demands to know — and continuing with her breasts. Bristling with jealousy, Anna calls them “average, at best,” then proceeds to break down her outfit, judging the dress to be from a premium fast-fashion brand like Zara or Cos, and correctly identifying the luxury items of the handbag and a Cartier ring as gifts from Jack. No one mentions the term “gold-digger,” but they are all thinking it.

    Not even Ed’s bizarre “welcome to the family” spiel causes Martha to bolt. Hilariously, he reassures her that sadness and disappointment are only temporary by recounting his search for an impossible-to-find Comme des Garçons bag, which turned up online and was gone before he could iron out a credit card glitch. He wept for an entire day, but then scored an even better bag from Raf Simons, made of more luxurious leather. Turner manages to put across this supreme shallowness with total sincerity.

    (As a supremely shallow person who spends an inordinate amount of time and money scrolling through sites like Mr. Porter, SSENCE and Editorialist for luxury menswear markdowns, I have to confess I found this funny. Others might not.)

    One reason Martha isn’t put off is possibly that she’s not much different. While chafing at Jack’s hesitance to commit, she nods to the massive chunk of real estate porn with glorious sea views that they have just toured with the broker. “I’m sick of having to beg for basic things!” she huffs.

    Maybe this material — and certainly this knockout ensemble — could have delivered a movie with a less rarefied tone, if indeed the filmmakers were interested in that. But Rosebush Pruning is not funny enough to get away with its abrasiveness or make its unsympathetic characters palatable. The heady sensuality of Aїnouz’s best films (Invisible Life, Madame Satã) is somewhat smothered by the cold cerebral mischief of Filippou’s writing. It makes the movie seem counterfeit — way more Yorgos than Karim, but second-rate Yorgos.

    That’s not to say the film is ever dull. Ed likes to invent proverbs and sayings, and the title pertains to one of the more coherent of them — “People love roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.” The vicious means by which that pruning happens and the underlying abusive motivations for it provide intrigue. If you’re wondering why Mrs. Taylor’s teeth are so unnaturally white, don’t worry, a sicko explanation will be forthcoming, as will the nasty particulars of Mr. Taylor’s nightly tooth-brushing ritual.

    It’s a kick to watch Keough’s Anna in baby blue go-go boots get high on the sexual frisson between her and pretty much the entire family. She’s funny flirting with the politely distanced local butcher and complaining afterwards to Jack that he was hitting on her. Gage’s Robert is also no slouch in the come-on department, gushing over Jack’s appearance and enticing him by wearing women’s lingerie and doing you don’t want to know what else. (Marco Bellocchio certainly never had anyone chewing on his brother’s cumsock.)

    Bell and Turner expertly convey the charisma of Jack and Ed while also revealing that there’s something a little unsavory about them both. Ed is seen at intervals on a mic, practicing his imitation of Jack’s voice by repeating the words likely to be engraved on his tombstone: “Edward Taylor, 1991 to 2025.” Almost every bit of weird shit that happens foreshadows a later development. That includes the family’s monthly offering of a sheep carcass in the forest to keep the wolves that supposedly tore Mrs. Taylor apart from killing some other poor unfortunate.

    That’s one of many visually striking sequences shot by talented French cinematographer Hélène Louvart, its lush darkness contrasting with the dazzling color and light that fill the widescreen frame elsewhere. Matthew Herbert’s score is highly effective, notably in the first wolf scene, where it builds to a molto agitato orchestral hysteria. And Bina Daigeler’s costumes are a hoot, ostentatiously fashionable and expensive and sexy. (Gage scores the best fuckboy mesh shirt since Franz Rogowski in Passages.)

    The outcome of the family’s skulduggery, revealed over the end credits, should be a lip-smacking wicked delight. But there are too few grounding remnants of humanity in the characters to make us share in the shamelessly cynical pleasures of ruthless victory. There’s no shortage of stylish craft here and much to enjoy in the performances, but ultimately, Rosebush Pruning is too glib to work, leaving only an acrid aftertaste.

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    David Rooney

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  • As Hollywood Shoots Like ‘The Odyssey’ Sail to Morocco, Local Films Venture Into International Waters: ‘We Are a Country of Stories’

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    Moroccan talent will step into the spotlight at this year’s EFM, crowning a generational growth spurt for the country’s film industry.

    Long prized for its stability, infrastructure and natural locations, Morocco’s production sector shifted into a new gear in 2018 with the introduction of a tax credit, now capped at 30%. That same year, the Marrakech Film Festival launched the Atlas Workshops, an industry platform designed to connect emerging regional filmmakers with sales agents and co-production partners on home turf.

    Atlas’ remit has expanded exponentially since, supporting more than 150 projects and helping launch filmmakers such as Asmae El Moudir, whose 2023 hybrid documentary “The Mother of All Lies” became one of the most internationally acclaimed Moroccan films to date. At the same time, foreign productions have surged, with titles like Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” transforming Morocco’s landscapes into immersive big screen worlds. In 2025 alone, the Moroccan Cinematographic Center (CCM) backed 23 foreign features through the incentive scheme, generating more than $165 million in local investment.

    Domestic production has risen in parallel, with the industry delivering 54 films last year — a dramatic leap from the turn of the millennium, when output had dipped to just four features.

    Now firmly established as both a premier service destination and a rising industry hub, Morocco is looking outward, fielding major delegations at platforms such as Venice Production Bridge and this year’s EFM to connect a new generation of filmmakers directly to the global market.

    Films like “The Odyssey” and “Sirāt” have taken advantage of Moroccan locations — and a 30% tax rebate.

    “We are a country of stories,” says CCM director Mohammed Reda Benjelloun. “But the challenge today is scale. It’s no longer enough for one, two, or three films a year to travel internationally; we need five or 10. Developing a project is one thing; pitching it on the international stage is another. A strong narrative and a solid dossier are essential, but convincing European producers and international funding bodies to invest is real work. That’s why it’s so important for our filmmakers to be here, confronting the market and understanding how it truly operates.”

    Reflecting those ambitions, the CCM will bring 10 producers — chosen from more than 75 applicants and vetted for gender parity and international potential — to this year’s Berlin market. The EFM will also host a promo screening of Laila Marrakchi’s “Strawberries,” fresh off its top post-production prize at the Atlas Workshops and poised to become one of the year’s most high-profile Moroccan features.

    At home, a parallel push is underway, with film schools and professional training programs expanding, alongside renewed efforts to engage the Moroccan diaspora. As Benjelloun puts it, the goal is to “internationalize the production process, but not the stories.”

    “K-1”

    Selected for the Berlinale Series Market, the police procedural “K-1” offers one example. Showrunner Khadija Alami designed the project to meet international standards — introducing the showrunner model itself — while handing off episodic duties to acclaimed feature directors Yasmine Benkiran, Nour-Eddine Lakhmari and Hicham Ayouch to lend each episode genuine cinematic heft.

    “It’s a new way of working in Morocco, and I think it’s going to spark something,” says Alami, who runs production services outfit K-Films and has long served as a bridge to Hollywood.

    After a century of foreign shoots in the country, few ever stopped to ask what Moroccan directors might bring to the table. “K-1” was her answer. “We already have the skills, the crews, the vision. Now we’re proving it — on our own terms, and at the same level as British, French or American creators.”

    “We can’t just make small, insular projects for ourselves,” adds producer Lamia Chraibi. “We often talk about American soft power, but today every filmmaker in our region feels that if we don’t tell our own stories, Orientalist narratives will persist. We need to work carefully and with skill to challenge global audiences and get our stories out as widely as possible.”

    Indeed, Alami and Chraibi are part of a wave repositioning Morocco’s film industry as an international creative partner, not merely a service provider. Not coincidentally, both are among the 10 producers heading to Berlin for the Moroccan Producers Spotlight.

    “There’s a big difference between a producer who simply manages funds and a creative producer who shapes the story, the script, and the strategy for financing and distribution,” Chraibi explains. “Until recently, that role barely existed in Morocco, yet this global understanding is essential in a country where budgets are limited.”

    While developing co-productions through her Casablanca-based outfit LaProd — which helped launch Laxe with his 2016 Cannes Critics’ Week grand-prize-winning “Mimosas” — Chraibi has made an even broader impact as co-founder of the Tamayouz Foundation. Established in that pivotal year of 2018, the non-profit provides entry-level training for women in directing, screenwriting, production, and post-production, alongside financial support and mentorship.

    Over the past five years, roughly 100 filmmakers have passed through the foundation’s residencies, training programs, and professional workshops, supporting emerging talent looking to make the leap into features.

    Among its alumni is producer Oumayma Zekri Ajarrai, who produced last year’s Cannes Critics’ Week short-film winner “L’mina,” and will also attend the Moroccan Producers Spotlight to help launch her Tamayouz-supported feature project “Road to Limbo,” directed by Ayoub Lahnoud.

    “We focus on nurturing careers,” Chraibi says. “We maintain a community-based approach, supporting alumni over the long term — whether they need legal advice or strategic guidance. With the active support of the CCM, our goal is to push the system forward: to renew it, open it up, and make room for an industry that is already transforming.”

    Filmmaker Alaa Eddine Aljem — another of the 10 producers selected for Berlin — embodies that generational shift. Two decades ago, Aljem was among the first graduates of Marrakech’s ESAV film school, co-founded by Martin Scorsese. Today, he runs that same institution, welcoming roughly 40 new students each year into bachelor’s and master’s programs offering specialized tracks in cinematography, sound, editing, directing and screenwriting.

    The growth of Morocco’s film sector has not only created more opportunities locally but has also attracted an increasing number of international applicants — a trend reflected directly in Aljem’s own projects.

    Alongside his academic duties, he continues to work steadily as a producer and director, diligently integrating ESAV alumni into key technical roles on films such as “Out of School” — a feature documentary directed by Hot Docs winner Hind Bensari, which recently claimed two prizes at Final Cut in Venice — and his upcoming feature “El Dorado,” slated to shoot later this year.

    Looking ahead, Aljem wants to expand ESAV’s graphic design, VFX and animation facilities — echoing the CCM’s goal of turning Morocco into a full-service production and post-production hub. “Today, ESAV is operating at roughly half its potential,” he explains. “There’s still room to grow, both in scale and scope. Over the next five years, the goal is steady development, aligned with what festivals, the CCM, and other institutions are doing. We’re living through a pivotal period for Moroccan cinema; the sector is changing as the industry takes greater structure.”

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • Basque Cinema Gets Its Goyas Moment

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    Ask any Spaniard you know, and they’ll tell you the same thing: The country has its own version of the Oscars, and they’re called the Goya Awards.

    Consider some of Hollywood’s favorite Spanish-speaking talent — Pedro Almodóvar, Guillermo del Toro, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas — all of them have earned at least one Goya (in Bardem’s case, the most acting Goyas ever), taken to the stage, and spoken proudly about what it means to be recognized by Spain‘s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences in front of their peers.

    The 40th Goya Awards, set for a star-studded ceremony with Susan Sarandon — this year’s international Goya Award honoree — on Feb. 28 at the Auditori Fòrum in Barcelona, will spotlight an area of the country like never before. As the Basque Country continues to leave its mark on global cinema thanks to unparalleled film and TV investment in the region, its talent is arriving at the 2026 event with a record 45 nominations, up from 25 nods the previous year.

    Don’t be fooled — this hasn’t just happened. It is the product of years of hard work from creatives all over the region, including the Basque government’s culture department, its public broadcaster, ETB, as well as those behind Spain’s biggest film festival in San Sebastian, who continue to champion local cinema and burgeoning talent.

    “There’s a very healthy combination of institutional support, a strong professional ecosystem, and a generation of creators with very clear, distinctive voices,” says Goya Award-nominated producer Iván Miñambres about the Basque cinema boom over the last 10 years. “Internationally, the Basque Country is increasingly seen as a strong place to produce films and to develop high-quality projects rooted in the territory.”

    It helps, of course, that the region boasts a 60 percent rebate that industry professionals can claim on their productions, which increases to 70 percent if shot in the Basque language, Euskera. This not only incentivizes Basque talent to shoot at home, but international stars are being lured from all over: Catherine Zeta-Jones’ revenge thriller Hey Jackie and Nanni Moretti’s next movie It Will Happen Tonight are among the more intriguing projects to have recently shot in northern Spain.

    And it’s not just A-listers reaping the rewards of the Basque Country’s investments in the sector. Miñambres, for example, has scored a nod in the best animated feature film category for his work on the black comedy-drama Decorado, and tells The Hollywood Reporter that animation is a valued craft in the region. “Animation is recognized as a strategic discipline, backed by both the Basque Government and public television,” he says.

    ‘Decorado’

    Courtesy of PÖFF

    “It’s not seen solely as a cultural expression, but also as an industry, since these are long-term projects involving a large number of technicians and artists — mostly young professionals with a high level of training and expertise.” Grants are available for development, production and internationalisation, he adds, as well as a support network that accompanies projects long-term. “All of this makes it possible to take creative risks and to bring ambitious projects to life that would otherwise be very difficult to realize.”

    It’s this kind of creative freedom that has remained the driving force for Mar Izquierdo at Zineuskadi. Her business works strategically to promote the Basque audiovisual sector, partnering with every production output in the region and working with the Basque government to help facilitate co-productions, distribution and sales deals, as well as getting films a coveted slot at major fests such as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice.

    “People can do bigger films, and they’re losing the fear of doing the film that they thought they were supposed to be making, because years before, they were adjusting the film to the budget they had, and now they can dream and actually do the movie that they wrote,” Izquierdo tells THR about the strides taken for Basque cinema and its mighty film output in 2025.

    One of the buzzier films heading into the Goyas this year is Alauda Ruiz De Azúa’s Sundays (Los Domingos), which nabbed San Sebastian’s Golden Shell. Ruiz de Azúa’s Basque-language feature, following a 17-year-old who announces to her family she wants to become a cloistered nun, has racked up 13 Goya Award nominations — more than any other film, including those that aren’t Basque productions.

    Sundays is up for best picture and Ruiz de Azúa for best director. She tells THR that the history-making record is particularly meaningful when it’s awarded to you by your colleagues: “It’s given by someone who knows how hard it is to build a movie, to defend a movie, to promote a movie, you know?”

    When asked what it is that sets Basque storytelling apart, Ruiz de Azúa is full of praise for her fellow nominees, such as Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi, whose drama Maspalomas will also compete for best picture. “It’s beautiful,” she begins, “because it’s very diverse, but also with a lot of soul. We are not so extroverted with our feelings when we make movies,” she says about the Basque people. “We really love to explore the emotional intimacy.” Miñambres concurs with that sentiment: “It’s a kind of filmmaking that doesn’t usually aim for spectacle, but rather for deep emotion,” he says to THR. “That allows itself to be personal, bold and sometimes uncomfortable, [and] that approach leads to very singular stories, films that truly connect with audiences and stay with them over time.”

    The region has been full to the brim with talent for as long as Ruiz de Azúa can remember, though investment in studios, tech, and expanding crew numbers has really bolstered Basque cinema’s strength. What she does think has made an impact recently, however, is the work being put in to showcase their films around the world: “Basque cinema [has] began to travel more,” she says, referencing her 2022 directorial debut Lullaby premiering at the Berlinale and Maspalomas‘ screenings at film fests in Palm Springs, Dublin, London, São Paulo, and Greece. “We are the first generation [to] travel abroad with our cinema.”

    Alauda Ruiz De Azúa accepts her Golden Shell at the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival.

    Getty

    Producer Ander Sagardoy, whose films Maspalomas, Gaua and La Misteriosa Mirada Del Flamenco have accrued nearly a third (13) of the total Goya nominations for Basque film, calls 2025 “an exceptional year” for his fellow industry members. “It doesn’t happen every year,” he says. “So we are really happy.”

    Such is the wealth of production in the north of Spain that Sagardoy deems it important to differentiate between Basque productions and Basque-language films or shows. “A lot of production companies [are coming] from foreign countries,” he explains, “but also the rest of Spain are coming to the Basque Country to produce films that they could be shooting in any other place.” Despite the crowdedness and unending need for even more investment, the health of the Basque audiovisual industry, according to the producer, “is really good.”

    Sagardoy admits to often feeling like a cynic about the film industry, but even he can’t deny Basque cinema’s strength at the upcoming Goya Awards. “We always try to think that our films are not defined by nominations or by prizes,” he tells THR. “But the reality is that the industry works like this… It’s important to continue believing in ourselves, but also convincing to the rest [of the world] that it is worth it to invest in these types of movies,” he adds, saying all three of his nominated projects — one following a closeted elderly man (Maspalomas), the other a witch-hunting fantasy (Gaua), and the third a 1982-set drama about an AIDS-like epidemic in a Chilean mining town (La Misteriosa Mirada Del Flamenco) — are “quite radical movies.”

    And while Ruiz de Azúa is more than pleased with her box office tally for Sundays in Spain (a healthy $4.6 million), she also admits a Goya Award nomination is, as they might say in Euskera, tartaren gaineko gerezia (the icing on the cake). “It’s our Spanish Oscars!” she grins. “Susan Sarandon is coming.”

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    Lily Ford

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  • ‘Lali’ Is a Proudly Pakistani and Colorful Film at Berlin, But Dissects a Universal Institution, Marriage

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    For those gray, dreary Berlin February days, the Berlinale this year is offering a colorful fever dream of a cinematic antidote courtesy of Pakistan. After all, writer-director Sarmad Sultan Khoosat, known for Circus of Life and Joyland, both of which were Pakistan’s official Oscar submissions, with the latter winning the jury prize at Cannes, is bringing his new movie, Lali, to the German capital.

    The story about a woman, who is considered a cursed bride, and her husband, who pretends to be possessed in an attempt to control her, is the first all-Pakistani feature at the Berlin International Film Festival, which has in the past featured Pakistani co-productions. And the fact that the fest will roll out the red carpet for Lali‘s world premiere in Berlin’s Panorama section on Saturday, Feb. 14, is only fitting, given that red plays a key role in the movie.

    Mamya Shajaffar, Channan Hanif, Rasti Farooq, Farazeh Syed, and Mehr Bano star in the exploration of marriage, repression, and trauma, focused on a couple whose relationship covers a whole range of emotions, from fear, shame and tenderness to desire, violence and superstition.

    Shajaffar plays Zeba, who is newly married to man-child Sajawal (Hanif) after having three suitors who ended up dying. She seeks refuge in two women, her feisty mother-in-law and a quiet, wise neighbor. Meanwhile, Sajawal is haunted by paranoia.

    Produced by Khoosat Films in collaboration with Enso Films, Lali promises to “release the suppressed forces that continue to suffocate many unions.” Featuring cinematography by Khizer Idrees (Manto, Circus of Life), the movie was edited by Joyland editor Saim Sadiq.

    Khoosat, who also made the feature Kamli, talked to THR about his interests, what inspired Lali, and where the film’s musical groove comes from.

    The story and inspiration for the film came to the director from an unexpected place, an actress he had worked with in the past. “It was a short story written by an old ‘aunt’ who happened to be an actor on my first-ever TV project,” he tells THR. “I worked with her, and I grew really, really fond of her. She played my mom on this sitcom series that I wrote. And then one day she just told me that she writes short stories. And she told me the very psychological stories they talk about. I’m a huge fan of Jung and Freud, and she said these are really stories about human needs and basic libido and the like. And I was like, ‘Okay, bring it on’.”

    When he got a copy of the stories and read one with a title that translates as “Black Blanket,” he noticed a cinematic quality to her stories. “They were really sensory and talked about sensations like touching, smelling, tasting things. There was so much sensory stuff, which was also sensuous, talking about desire. And she had a very accurate and very personal eye on Punjabi culture. So I read this story, and it stayed with me.” Khoosat ended up buying the rights to her short story collection. “It became the seed for Lali,” he concludes.

    ‘Lali’

    The color shifted for the movie, though, as the color red is a key theme of Lali, which also explains the film’s title. “It’s not a black blanket in the film, it’s a red blanket,” Khoosat notes. “Lal means red, and if somebody’s blushing, you’ll say that they have lali on their cheeks. But there are two versions of it, one uses a different alphabet. So if you change that, Lali also means sun.”

    In the film, the male protagonist also has a red birthmark on his face, “and children in the neighborhood would tease the boy and call him Lali.” All in all, after first considering a different title, “I let Lali be the Rosebud,” the filmmaker concludes.

    It also makes sense that red is all over the movie for another reason. “The film is based around weddings, and, for marriage and the festivities around a wedding in Pakistani or other subcontinental households, red is the color,” explains Khoosat. “I’ve never used red in my films before, because I’m very scared of the color red. My cinematographer would tell me, and my colorist would tell me that red bleeds so badly. Red is tough to color correct. Red is tough to handle. And so I’d never been fond of red.”The themes explored in Lali include social constructs and relationships, including marriage. “I am fascinated by the idea of how marriages are constructed into the social fabric,” he says. “My parents married multiple times. So, I saw how marriage is really like the antidote and the solution to so many things.”

    How did the director approach casting? “What happens in Pakistan is that our TV is huge in terms of the amount of productions that are made every year, and so most of the actors do come from either television or theater,” he tells THR. “Mamya is the only one who has done a little bit of TV, and she has done a bit of theater also. But very oddly, what really stayed with me was a little fashion film she had done for a boutique, a designer. There was something about this video in which she’s just dancing with abandon, just carefree, completely in control of her body, but not aware of her own body and what she was doing with it.”

    Khoosat continues: “Her audition was just stunning. There’s something about her. The first thing I noticed is that she’s not using the standard TV toolkit. She doesn’t have those pre-decided pauses and stresses and that fake articulation. The alchemy of casting is such a mystery.”

    For her co-lead Hanif, “this is pretty much his cinema debut,” the director tells THR. “Something about this boy, the way he behaves, and the way he looks, very much convinced me.”

    ‘Lali’

    Music by Punjabi hip-hop artist Star Shah adds additional groove to Lali. “We have this thing here in Pakistan sponsored by Coca-Cola. It’s called Coke Studio, a platform where a lot of young singers are brought forward, and they are given an opportunity to collaborate with other people,” Khoosat explains. “Star Shah did a song on there, and again, something about him and the way he spoke Punjabi, the way he sang connected with me. It’s very musical, meaning melodious, rap. He auditioned for a friend’s part first, and I felt this guy was really good. So I asked him to write his own song.”

    In the end, the director asked the musician to compose music to texts from his favorite poet, Shiv Batalvi. “So, all of them are original compositions, except for the wedding song that’s this famous, almost folklorish, wedding song,” and another tune,” he tells THR.

    Lali feels like it could travel around the globe, but its creator isn’t getting ahead of himself. “I do believe that cinema should have the potential to transcend language and cultures,” says Khoosat. “But I’m a huge believer that wherever it originates from, it must serve its primary purpose.”

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    Georg Szalai

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  • Black Mandala, Red Owl Set Eight Genre Titles for EFM (EXCLUSIVE)

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    Black Mandala Films and Red Owl Films are loading up for Berlin’s European Film Market with eight genre titles spanning Lovecraftian horror, queer mockumentary and an award-winning Ecuadorian fantasy.

    The slate includes several market premieres alongside recent acquisitions and festival selections.

    Black Mandala’s lineup includes “The Behemoth,” a supernatural horror film from director Kai E. Bogatzki that draws on Lovecraftian mythology and employs practical effects. The film builds tension before transforming into what the company describes as an unhinged, blood-soaked cosmic nightmare.

    “Blood Covenant” is a horror anthology featuring Maika Monroe (“It Follows”), Aria Bedmar (“Hermana Muerte”) and Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”). Framed by a meta-narrative exploring the price of artistic creation, the film unfolds through multiple standalone stories linked by a demonic pact.

    “Lily’s Ritual,” directed by Manu Herrera, follows four young women who retreat to a remote forest setting. The film stars Maggie García, Patricia Peñalver, Eve Ryan and Elena Gallardo, blending occult mythology with psychological tension.

    “Tabula Rasa” is a psychological thriller led by Spanish actor Macarena Gómez, known for her award-nominated role in “Musarañas.” The film merges family drama with atmospheric suspense.

    Under the Red Owl Films banner, “Ex” from director Nicanor Loreti merges cosmic horror with relationship-driven drama, unfolding across one surreal night. “No Blood in My Hands” is a psychological thriller set within Berlin’s underground art scene, following a hallucinatory descent into paranoia.

    “Fishgirl,” written, directed, shot and edited by Javier Cutrona, was filmed entirely in Ecuador and won a prize at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. The surreal fantasy drama explores themes of identity, memory and psychological transformation.

    “The Rebrand,” directed by Montreal-based filmmaker Kaye Adelaide, is a queer horror mockumentary featuring an all-queer cast and crew. The found-footage style film has received multiple festival awards.

    Auckland-based Black Mandala, founded by Michael Kraetzer and Nicolas Onetti in 2017, handles more than 150 titles and specializes in independent horror and genre distribution.

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    Naman Ramachandran

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  • ‘Only Rebels Win’ Review: Hiam Abbass Brings Her Trademark Elegance to a Familiar May-December Romance

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    For her latest drama Only Rebels Win, Lebanese-French writer-director Danielle Arbid (Simple Passion, Parisienne, A Lost Man) dusts off an old filmmaking technique, rear projection, in order to get around the fact that she couldn’t shoot in Beirut due to constant Israeli bombardment at the time of production. The workaround adds a subtle but striking artificiality to the proceedings, making this otherwise somewhat conventional story — about a 27-year-old South Sudanese-Chadian immigrant (Amine Benrachid) and a 63-year-old Palestinian woman (Hiam Abbass, best known Stateside for Succession but a near-ubiquitous presence in Middle Eastern cinema) falling in love — feel more experimental and edgier than it might have otherwise.

    Programmed to open Berlin’s Panorama section, this soft homage to local German hero Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, itself a homage to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, offers a workable blend of new and old, contemporary geopolitics and local socioeconomic tensions rubbing up against primordial, universal passions and follies. The mélange should play well for festival audiences but will have very modest theatrical prospects.

    Only Rebels Win

    The Bottom Line

    Convincing but conventional.

    Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
    Cast: Hiam Abbass, Amine Benrachid, Shaden Fakih, Charbel Kamel, Alexandre Paulikevitch
    Director/screenwriter: Danielle Arbid

    1 hour 38 minutes

    For all its virtues, there’s something a little undercooked about Arbid’s screenplay, which doesn’t endow Benrachid’s strapping but enigmatic love interest Ousmane with anything like the dimensionality of Abbass’ heroine Suzanne. Indeed, most of the Lebanese characters here are more finely grained, even the minor ones who are meant to be bigoted straw men brought on to contrast with Suzanne’s natural generosity of spirit. Meanwhile, some of the more significant supporting players, such as Shaden Fakih as Suzanne’s permanently disgruntled daughter Sana and Alexandre Paulikevitch as complicated queer sex worker Layal, enrich the sense of texture with richly conceived characters that also upstage the less defined Ousmane.

    It all starts when Suzanne sees Ousmane being beaten up in the streets by men, he later tells her, who refused to pay him wages he was owed for manual labor or give him back his confiscated passport. A widow who lives alone in a spacious Beirut apartment block, Suzanne brings Ousmane back to her place to treat his wounds, and the two get to talking. She opens up about how she didn’t much love her late husband; he shares some details about his arduous journey from South Sudan.

    There’s clearly a spark there, and before long they’re dancing together, waving their arms about like a couple of 1960s hippies at a happening in the living room to a classic panty-loosener, Julio Iglesias’ ballad “Un jour tu ris, un jour tu pleures (No Soy De Aqui).” The transition to lovers is effortless.

    Given that Suzanne is embodied by Abbass, one of the most elegant actors of her generation and still a looker in her mid-60s, it’s entirely plausible that Ousmane is sincere when he praises her beauty. What a shame that Arbid undermines that by the last reels as Ousmane undergoes a substantial change in disposition, taking up drink — despite having first presented himself as a good abstemious Muslim — and generally turning to crime and licentious behavior. Presumably we are to infer that the stress of the societal disapproval he and Suzanne face as a couple once their relationship becomes known is to blame for his moral decay, but the motivations remain murky.

    The script is better on the bitchy, suffocating but often amusing world of neighborhood gossip as Suzanne gingerly makes her way around the racism of her friends and neighbors. Her two colleagues at the fabric store where she works, Lamia (Cynthia El Khazen) and Arsinee (Paula Sehnaoui), snipe and bitch about everyone like a couple of fishwives, so you can imagine the opprobrium that comes out when they learn Suzanne is seeing an African man.

    Arbid is persuasive about the casual racism and snobbery that’s marbled through Beirut culture for all its seeming sophistication, with Lebanese Arabs looking down on Palestinian immigrants, and most everyone prejudiced against darker-skinned newcomers. Sana, her brutish husband Toni (Ziad Jallad) and son Simon (Samir Hassoun) are just as bad. There’s a little oasis of tolerance at the local café run by Akram (George Sawaya), but even there snakes lurk in the tall grass. And the local priest, seemingly unfazed when Suzanne tells him she would like him to marry her to Ousmane, declines to help.

    The footage of Beirut streets, homes and cafes, shot specifically for this film, adds a distinct sense of place even as the obviousness of the rear projection creates a mood of heightened theatricality. The whole device makes this feel like a fable or passion play, a story as old as ancient tragedy and yet ineluctably contemporary.

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    Leslie Felperin

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  • ‘Rosebush Pruning’ Producer Gold Rush Pictures Opens German Office, Taps Feo Aladag as Director (Exclusive)

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    International independent production company and financier Gold Rush Pictures (GRP) is ramping up its European presence with the opening of a new office in Germany, and has appointed award-winning producer-writer-director Feo Aladag director.

    The company is preparing for a raft of activity at the 76th Berlinale, including the premiere of Mubi competition title Rosebush Pruning, directed by Karim Aïnouz and starring Pamela Anderson, Elle Fanning, Callum Turner, Tracy Letts and Riley Keough.

    Based in Berlin, Aladag will work across development and production on both GRP-produced and co-produced projects, while continuing to lead her own existing production company, Independent Artists.

    In the new role, she will “contribute to shaping GRP’s European strategy, creative slate and production partnerships, with a particular focus on high-end, auteur-driven projects with international reach.”

    Gold Rush Pictures also currently has a deal with X Filme Creative Pool in Germany to participate in financing and co-produce three projects written and directed and/or produced by Tom Tykwer, following the two companies’ initial collaboration on Tykwer’s The Light, which opened the 2025 Berlinale.

    Aladag said GRP founder Vladimir Zemtsov is “building Gold Rush Pictures as a creative lighthouse and a place of clarity and commitment at a time when stories that truly matter feel more urgent than ever. His dedication to championing European auteur cinema and his uncompromising vision for bold filmmaking is truly inspiring, and I feel honoured to help build this next chapter for Gold Rush,” she added.

    Her credits include producing and directing 2010’s When We Leave and 2014 drama Inbetween Worlds.

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    Lily Ford

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  • Queer Southeast Asian Ballroom Doc ’10s Across the Borders’ Boarded by Germany’s Rise and Shine (EXCLUSIVE)

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    German sales agent and distributor Rise and Shine has picked up international sales rights and German-speaking territories’ distribution rights to “10s Across the Borders,” a documentary from first-time filmmaker Chan Sze-Wei, it was revealed at Berlin’s European Film Market.

    The documentary chronicles queer communities across Southeast Asia through a blend of observational footage, stylized dance sequences and a dynamic soundtrack. Filmed over seven years, the project tracks three community leaders in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines as they draw from New York’s underground Ballroom culture to create spaces of empowerment for youth confronting transphobia, homophobia, HIV-stigma, sex work, colorism and poverty.

    “10s Across the Borders” premiered in the documentary program at the Busan International Film Festival after receiving the festival’s Asian Cinema Fund. The film earned a nomination for best documentary at the 2025 Asia Pacific Screen Awards and served as the gala screening for the awards ceremony.

    “I’m really looking forward to working with Rise and Shine, whose network and expertise with documentary will help ’10s Across the Borders’ to touch more audiences around the world,” Chan said.

    The company has built a reputation for handling quality creative documentaries from emerging filmmakers with distinctive narratives. Its slate includes Christian Frei’s Swiss documentary “BLAME (Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance)” and Weronika Mliczewska’s “Child of Dust,” a Poland-Vietnam-Sweden-Czech Republic-Qatar co-production.

    Aurora Sun LaBeija, one of the film’s subjects and an associate producer on the project, noted the German ballroom community’s anticipation for the release. “I visit the German ballroom scene every year. Many friends are very excited and ask me how they can watch our film. I’m happy that they will get a chance to see it when ’10s Across the Borders’ screens across Germany,” she said.

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    Naman Ramachandran

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  • MetFilm Boards Sundance Awards Winner ‘To Hold a Mountain’ for International Sales (EXCLUSIVE)

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    MetFilm Sales has acquired international sales rights to Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić’s feature documentary “To Hold a Mountain,” which recently received its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize.

    MFS will present the title to international buyers for the first time at the EFM in Berlin, and co-reps the title alongside Submarine Entertainment.

    Set in the remote highlands of Montenegro, the film tells the story of a shepherd mother and her daughter who proudly defend their ancestral mountain from the threat of becoming a NATO military training ground, stirring memories of past violence that once shattered their family.

    In his Variety review, Murtada Elfadl wrote, “Reveals itself as an emotionally shattering meditation on grief and perseverance. Gorgeously shot with a quiet, deliberate rhythm, it’s the kind of film that entrances its audience without them noticing. Only at the end does the audience fully grasp the magnitude of the story it chronicles and the natural beauty of the images they have been witnessing all along.”

    The director of photography is Eva Kraljević and the editor is George Cragg, with additional editing by Catherine Rascon. The original score is by Draško Adzić.

    The producers are Tutorov, Glomazić, Quentin Laurent and Rok Biček. It is executive produced by Megan Gelstein, Andrea Meditch, Bianca Oana, Jean Tsien and Petra Costa. The executive producers for Points North Institute are Sean Flynn, Ben Fowlie and Lucila Moctezuma, and Chandra Jessee and Rebecca Lichtenfeld for InMaat. The executive producers for Doc Society are Megha Agrawal Sood and Shanida Scotland. Meadow Fund also exec produces.

    “To Hold a Mountain” is a Wake Up Films Production in co-production with Les Films de l’Oeil Sauvage, Ardor Films and Cvinger Film.

    MFS’s current slate includes Ross McElwee’s “Remake,” which won the Golden Globe Impact Prize for Documentary at the Venice Film Festival, and Brydie O’Connor’s “Barbara Forever,” which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Prize.

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • Sebastian Brameshuber’s ‘London’ Boarded by Square Eyes Ahead of World Premiere at Berlin Film Festival (EXCLUSIVE)

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    Vienna-based sales agency Square Eyes has secured international rights to Sebastian Brameshuber’s “London,” which will have its world premiere in the Panorama strand of the Berlin Film Festival, taking place Feb. 12-22.

    The film follows Bobby, who is always in his car, driving back and forth on the highway that links Vienna and Salzburg. Other people travel that same route; he picks them up to save money on petrol and talks to them along the way: the soldier questioning what it means to fight; the supermarket trainee heading to see family; the academic looking at the history of the highway; and the queer woman about to get married. Different paths, different accents, different stories, most of them true.

    Bobby listens, but also speaks about himself, about his youth, about aging, about his friend in a coma in Salzburg, who’s the reason for all these trips.

    Mountains and forests rush by outside, broken up by junctions, barriers and bridges, the quality of light shifts along with the seasons.

    Neither a documentary, nor entirely fiction, “London” is a “quietly political portrait of today’s Europe via its in-between spaces and those passing through them,” according to a statement. “Even in these strange times, anonymity and kindness can still go hand in hand.”

    Brameshuber said, “With ‘London,’ I wanted to capture raw presence while using cinema to defy its gravity, creating a film that oscillates between the real and what lies beyond.”

    He added, “The main action of the film takes place on the Westautobahn, or A1, a seemingly functional highway connecting Vienna and Salzburg before ending at the German border. People from across Europe make use of it for a variety of personal reasons, unaware of the historical abyss along its edges, for this road follows a line that was first drawn almost 90 years ago, at a time of great unrest.

    “The A1 flows like a river, its banks accumulating stories and history like sediments—past and present, private and political, trivial and profound.

    “Though strangers, the long stretch of time Bobby and his much younger passengers share in a confined space draws them closer. At times, they become something like a mirror, reflecting back to him the lives he could have lived. Their conversations may skim the surface, only to plunge into deeper waters, as the immediacy of their everyday lives intertwines with history at every bend in the river.”

    Wouter Jansen, CEO of Square Eyes, said, “With minimal means and mostly dialogues, Sebastian takes the audience on a very engaging and at moments emotional ride.

    “Set almost entirely on a single stretch of highway, the film draws a quiet, yet resonant portrait of contemporary Europe through fleeting encounters with strangers. We have been eagerly awaiting this film and are happy to be presenting it to the world starting in Berlin.”

    “London” is produced by David Bohun and Lixi Frank for Panama Film in Austria.

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • Berlinale Unveils New Selection Committee

    Berlinale Unveils New Selection Committee

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    The revamped Berlin International Film Festival continues to take shape, with new festival director Tricia Tuttle on Thursday unveiling a new four-member selection committee and expanding the festival’s network of advisors and delegates.

    The new selection committee consists of industry veterans, including festival programmer and producer Mathilde Henrot; film critic and programmer Jessica Kiang; festival and cultural consultant Jacqueline Nsiah; and Elad Samorzik, the former artistic director of the Jerusalem Film Festival.

    They join Michael Stütz and Jacqueline Lyanga, appointed in June as the new co-directors of film programming ahead of the 75th anniversary Berlinale next year. This committee will work alongside Tuttle to pick films for the Competition, Berlinale Special, and the new Perspectives section.

    To broaden its expertise, the Berlinale has also brought on board several advisors, including Jin Park for genre films; Rowan Woods for television and series programming; Ana David, Kate Taylor, Rabih El-Khoury, and Toby Ashraf for general preselection; and Jenni Zylka for German cinema programming, with a special focus on German new talent and film schools. Ashraf brings specialist experience in German and LGBTQIA+ programming. El-Khoury brings years of experience curating Arab cinema.

    Tuttle has also appointed international delegates to scout for films and act as ambassadors in various regions, including Latin America, South Asia, the United States, and East Asia.

    Tuttle, the former head of the London Film Festival, took over from Berlinale co-directors Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek and will kick off her reign with next year’s event, which runs Feb. 13-23.

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    Scott Roxborough

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  • Filmotor Nabs World Sales for Berlinale Title ‘Shahid’ Ahead of Visions du Réel Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)

    Filmotor Nabs World Sales for Berlinale Title ‘Shahid’ Ahead of Visions du Réel Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)

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    Berlinale Forum entry “Shahid,” the debut feature of Iranian-German filmmaker Narges Kalhor, has been picked up by Prague-based doc specialist Filmotor ahead of its premiere at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, where it is competing in the more experimental Burning Lights section.

    Described by Kalhor as a collective work between herself and other artists, including a costume artist and a painter from Iran, a German music composer and a choreographer from Berlin, “Shahid” shifts playfully between genres, challenging conventional filmmaking rules.

    Set in present-day Germany, where Kalhor emigrated as a political refugee in 2009, the film focuses on her desire to officially remove the first part of her surname, “Shahid,” which means “martyr” in Farsi and was inherited from her great-grandfather, in an act of feminist resistance to patriarchal structures.

    During this process, the actor who plays Kalhor travels back in time and meets her great-grandfather, but she also uncovers the true origins behind the name, which, it turns out, was chosen by her great-grandmother when her husband was killed.

    As Kalhor realizes – on screen, during one of several scenes where she deliberately breaks down the third wall between filmmaker and viewer – that she is making the wrong film, she also comes to the conclusion that she knows nothing about this great-grandmother.

    “That’s the end of the dramaturgy,” Kalhor tells Variety. “In this movie, we have no space for the great-grandmother – she tells me this through AI animation. She says: ‘All you talk about in this movie are the men and your great-grandfather, but let me just explain my story,’” says Kalhor, referring to a scene where the animated figure of her great-grandmother addresses her directly.

    “But we don’t know anything about her – just that she was Kurdish and changed her last name: I can’t make a movie about her because history is written by men about men,” adds Kalhor.

    While never taking itself too seriously, the film successfully addresses a myriad of questions on patriarchy, diversity and narratives shaped by male perspectives. Asked whether her intention was to make a feminist movie, she replies: “I hope so. I really believe that the kind of cinema we learn is from men.

    “I was a student of Abbas Kiarostami; here [in Germany] I learnt from Michael Haneke, I have learnt from perfect filmmakers, all of them men. With ‘Shahid,’ I want to write a new kind of feminist movie that breaks the rules. It’s not just about her [my great-grandmother] but about all of us. We all have a surname, and it has a history. But I, as a woman, want to change it, to rewrite it.”

    Kalhor says she has never returned to Iran since leaving in 2009, when she applied for asylum while visiting the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival with her film school short “Die Egge.”

    The daughter of a senior cultural advisor of the then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, her case attracted international media attention as she was granted asylum after just a few months, whereas other refugees, including the actors who play herself and her great-grandfather in the film, had to wait several years.

    Kalhor addresses what she describes as Germany’s “refugee hierarchy” in the film, in another scene where the actors are supposedly recorded criticizing her behind her back between scenes, calling her a Tehran “rich kid.”

    “I was granted asylum in just three months because of my last name. The other Iranian guys – the real victims of the Iranian regime – stayed for years without papers, that’s the difference between us,” she tells Variety.

    “And for me, it was important to reflect this in my movie, because if I don’t criticize myself, it is not fair: There are VIPs like me, others have to wait for years, and others still are sent back to their countries.”

    While “Shahid” is her debut feature, it does not mark Kalhor’s first visit to Visions du Réel, where she already presented her shorts “In the Name of Scheherazade” in 2019 and “Sensitive Content” last year.

    The film has its international premiere in Nyon on April 14.

    The festival runs until April 21.

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • In Berlinale Film ‘Paradises of Diane,’ a Woman Abandons Her Baby but Finds Herself: ‘We Don’t Want to Judge Her’

    In Berlinale Film ‘Paradises of Diane,’ a Woman Abandons Her Baby but Finds Herself: ‘We Don’t Want to Judge Her’

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    “Paradises of Diane,” which premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, came out of an exploration of the “dark side of maternity” and the role of the mother in society, director Carmen Jaquier tells Variety.

    The film, which was directed with Jan Gassmann, starts with Diane abandoning her new-born baby at a maternity clinic in Zurich, and heading to the seedy Spanish seaside resort Benidorm, without telling anyone. Here she befriends an elderly woman, Rose, and the two of them form a tentative bond.

    Jaquier says the idea for the film came from a conversation with a friend, who confessed that she had become very depressed after the birth of her daughter. The woman hadn’t spoken about this to her friends or family. After Jaquier had written the first draft of the script, Gassmann joined the project and the two of them started to talk to women about their experiences of giving birth and motherhood.

    When writing the script Jaquier says they were “super connected” to Diane and her experience, but when she and Gassmann started to pitch the project to film funders and received feedback about the subject of a mother abandoning her baby they “realized how violent it could be for other people and that they couldn’t have any empathy for her.”

    After that they understood that there would be some people who wouldn’t be able to accept Diane’s decision. “We had to rethink and rebuild from that moment but for us it was super important to be straight with this character,” Jaquier says.

    Gassmann adds: “The decision to leave a child poses questions to yourself such as: Would we be able to do it? What happened to the father? Is he all alone? So, we try to work with these questions, but at the same time not to have a moral view on it. The starting point was that she does that, she’s leaving and she’s in this situation, and we don’t want to judge that.”

    They told Dorothée De Koon, the actor who plays Diane, that it is a “very courageous decision on her part to protect the others from how she is at the moment, and try to go home whenever she is ready,” Gassmann says.

    “Paradises of Diane”
    Courtesy of 2:1 Film

    In the film, landscapes can be both external and internal, Gassmann says, referring to a line from Agnès Varda in “The Beaches of Agnès,” when Varda says: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” So, we see Diane exploring her feelings, sexuality and identity, and this is reflected in the landscapes she travels through. On the journey across Europe by bus Diane starts to feel anonymous, and is able to “disappear” into the crowds in Benidorm, “a place where she seeks to rebuild herself,” Gassmann says. Opposite Rose’s apartment, which overlooks the sea, is an island, which mirrors Diane’s feelings of isolation and loneliness.

    Diane begins to recognize that there is something of herself in Rose. “Sometimes in life you have this special meeting with someone who could be a part of you or you in a few years or in the past,” Jaquier says.

    “Paradises of Diane”
    Courtesy of 2:1 Film

    Through her relationship with Rose, Diane sees that despite her decision to leave her baby there is still a nurturing side to her character. “It was very important to us that Diane is still capable of love, still capable of taking care of someone. So, with Rose there is this possibility for her to maybe understand something, but it’s not enough and she has to move on, to take a decision at the end. But just for a few weeks with this old woman, who has experienced something quite similar to her, there was like this question of superposition in life: That you are all the people you were during your life. We are much more than the person we are in the moment. There is some connection between you now and you in the past and future, even if you don’t know that in the present moment.”
     
     
     
     
     

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    Leo Barraclough

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  • ‘No Other Land’ Review: A Frank, Devastating Protest Against Israel’s West Bank Occupation

    ‘No Other Land’ Review: A Frank, Devastating Protest Against Israel’s West Bank Occupation

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    It is any parent’s hope that their children won’t inherit their battles, or at the very least, that they can pass the generational baton with some ground gained. For young Palestinian lawyer and activist Basel Adra, a West Bank native who grew up watching his activist parents fight to protect their land from Israeli occupiers, there has been no such progress: Time has stood dispiritingly still as he has aged into his elders’ shoes. Adra is a resident of Masafer Yatta, a network of Palestinian villages in the southern Hebron Hills, recently subject to an aggressive campaign of demolition and forced transfer by the Israeli army. As his community is literally bulldozed before his eyes, Adra has little scope to do anything but keep his camera on: “I have nothing else, only my phone,” he despairs. That, thankfully, is not nothing. In the shattering documentary “No Other Land,” Adra’s witnessing becomes ours.

    Premiering at the Berlinale not four months after Hamas’ October 7 operation into Israel was followed by Israel’s large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip — an assault that has killed over 28,000 Palestinians — “No Other Land” might be called timely. But through its years-spanning depiction of both the mortal danger and mental strain of living under occupation, the film underlines that the situation has been at crisis point for a long time, whether or not it’s been grabbing international headlines. The project began in 2019, when Adra met Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Jerusalem-based journalists reporting on Israeli evictions of local residents, and offered his first-hand perspective on events.

    Together with Hamdan Ballal, another Masafer Yatta activist, they formed a filmmaking collective that, despite its Palestinian-Israeli makeup, has little interest in both-sides-ism. The doc benefits from Abraham and Szor’s journalistic nous (with Szor gaining often remarkable access as its chief DP) and freedom of movement, but the Palestinian experience and point of view is centered throughout. The chasm between Adra’s and Abraham’s respective acquaintances with the conflict is pointedly underlined, too. At one point, as Abraham bemoans the lack of online engagement with his latest report, Adra chides him for his self-serving exasperation: “You want to end the occupation in ten days — it requires patience.”

    Beginning in the summer of 2019, the film divides itself into season-based chapters that illustrate both the relentlessness of the Israeli army’s offensive on Masafer Yatta — consistently thwarting villagers’ attempts to build back what has been destroyed — and its erosive effect on Adra’s spirit, not to mention that of his community as a whole. Looking on as bulldozers pile into homes, livestock pens and even pigeon coops, making way for a proposed Israeli tank training base, the five-years-younger Adra expresses hope that residents’ on-the-ground resistance will capture the attention of major world powers, and pressure Israel into desisting.

    This naive optimism does not hold as we fast-forward to the winter of 2020, and are immediately faced with similar acts of demolition. When one villager, Harun Abu Aran, confronts the soldiers confiscating his generator, they shoot him in the chest, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. “No Other Land” presents such horrifying footage with candid sangfroid, contributing little commentary where the images speak for themselves. The filmmakers track Abu Aran’s deteriorating condition over the next two years, as he and his stricken mother find makeshift refuge in a cave, while she wearies of the international reporters who visit to document their tragedy, while yielding nothing in the way of change or relief.

    As the film moves through the years toward a late-2023 postscript, a terrible holding pattern is established, as sudden demolitions — even, in one dreadful instance, of a schoolhouse in session, cuing a panicked evacuation — become routine. Community rebuilding efforts ensue, mostly by night, and are met with bulldozers once more. Protests repeatedly run into hostile police opposition, Adra often throwing himself into the thick of conflict and clouds of teargas. Slowly, the people of Masafer Yatta begin to concede defeat, with many packing up their lives and moving to cramped apartments in the city.

    A brief official visit from Tony Blair, in his capacity as a special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, ensures a reprieve for one village slated for Israeli demolition, but Adra is unimpressed. “This is a story about power,” he says — and the people living permanently with this crisis don’t have any. Relations even fray between the quartet of directors, or so the film’s construction would have us believe: Ballal wonders aloud how he can so much as maintain a friendship with any Israeli under these circumstances. Abraham declares his allyship, insisting he wants the occupation to end. “How does that help me?” Ballal spits back.

    Given the conditions of its production, “No Other Land” would be vital even in a more ragged form. But the filmmaking here is tight and considered, with nimble editing (by the directors themselves) that captures the sense of time at once passing and looping back on itself. The intense, jolting impact of the film’s intense sequences of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation — often shot on phone cameras, to the consternation of army officials, and violent enough to shock many complacent fence-sitters on the issue into angry awareness — is balanced with more composed, observational scenes of Adra, his family and his neighbors trying to live an everyday life on ground that keeps getting pulled out from under them. Hope is fading that the next generation might retain their ancestral land; if they do, they’ll likely inherit Adra’s activism with it.

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    Guy Lodge

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  • Isabelle Huppert On The “Unique Experience” Of Working Without A Script On Hong Sangsoo Berlin Title ‘A Traveler’s Needs’

    Isabelle Huppert On The “Unique Experience” Of Working Without A Script On Hong Sangsoo Berlin Title ‘A Traveler’s Needs’

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    “This might sound very irresponsible, but I don’t know what I’m doing,” South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo told a Berlinale presser this afternoon when quizzed on his unique directing style. 

    The prolific filmmaker is back at Berlin with A Traveler’s Needs, his seventh film in three years. The film stars French screen veteran Isabelle Huppert and Sangsoo has six credits on the film, including director, screenplay, cinematography, editing, and music and he is also listed as the film’s producer. 

    “I start with some objectives and then I have a recognized working method that I have developed. And I believe in a certain happening between people,” he continued. 

    A Traveler’s Needs is Huppert’s third collaboration with Sangsoo, and she told the Berlinale presser that the Korean filmmaker provides a creative environment like no other filmmaker she has worked with. She said this is largely thanks to his process of working without a script. 

    “It’s very difficult to project yourself into the story or role because there is no role or story. There is just the way he captures the present moment and the state of a person confronting a certain world,” Huppert said of Sangsoo.

    “And this is why I like working with Hong. You really cannot go to work with him the same way you go with another director. It’s really a unique experience.”

    The pic also stars Sangsoo regulars Lee Hyeyoung and Kwon Haehyo. The vague official synopsis reads: This woman who came from who knows where says she came from France. She was sitting on a bench in a neighborhood park, diligently playing a child’s recorder. With no money or means of supporting herself, she was advised to teach French. In that way she became a teacher to two Korean women. She likes to walk barefoot on the ground and lie down on rocks. And when she is up to it, she tries to see each instant in a non-verbal way, and to live her life as factually as possible. But life remains as hard as ever. She relies on Makkeolli every day for a small bit of comfort.

    Finecut is handling international sales on the pic. A Traveler’s Needs debuts this evening in competition in Berlin. 

    The Berlinale runs until February 25.

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    Zac Ntim

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  • Emeraude Toubia’s Horror Film ‘Rosario’ Sells to Key World Markets (Exclusive)

    Emeraude Toubia’s Horror Film ‘Rosario’ Sells to Key World Markets (Exclusive)

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    Highland Film Group has sold the horror film Rosario to a slew of international territories as the Berlin Film Festival and its market kicked into gear.

    Felipe Vargas’ directorial debut from a script by Alan Trezza, which recently wrapped production, stars Emeraude Toubia, Oppenheimer actor David Dastmalchian, Jose Zuniga, Emilia Faucher and Paul Ben-Victor.

    Highland Film Group on the weekend unveiled rights deals with Splendid Film for Germany and the Benelux, Galapagos Films for Poland, Spentzos Film for Greece, MovieCloud for Taiwan and Vietnam and MVP for Malaysia. There are also sales to Silverline Multimedia for the Philippines,  PT Prima Cinema Multimedia for Indonesia, PictureWorks for India and Falcon Films for the Middle East.

    Rosario stars Toubia in the titular role as a successful Wall Street stockbroker forced to spend the night with the body of her estranged grandmother Griselda after she abruptly dies. While waiting for the ambulance and her father Oscar, played by Zuniga, twisted and menacing supernatural forces possessing Griselda’s corpse begin their assault on Rosario as she becomes the target of a deadly family curse that spans generations.

    Rosario is produced by Silk Mass’ Jon Silk and Mucho Mas’ Javier Chapa and Phillip Braun. The film is executive produced by Highland Film Group’s Arianne Fraser and Delphine Perrier, as well as Toubia, Bruce Barshop, Vincent Cordero, Simon Wise and Kristopher Wynne.

    Mucho Mas Media financed and produced the film, which began production in Bogota, Colombia and included additional camera work in New York City.

    “With the help of our terrific international partners, we look forward to introducing this smart and chilling film to audiences around the world,” said Highland Film Group COO Delphine Perrier.

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    Etan Vlessing

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