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.
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.
The European Film Market is off to a strong start, buoyed by post-strike optimism and a truly impressive lineup of projects on offer in Berlin this year, including available indie movies with the A-list draws of stars such as Margot Robbie, Dave Bautista, Scarlett Johansson, and Will Smith. Coming off a solid Sundance and improving box office figures, both in the U.S. and Europe, hope appears to be slowly returning to an indie film industry that seemed near the brink just six months ago.
But many EFM sellers still see a cloud over the horizon with the unresolved issue of the home entertainment market, particularly the all-important pay-one window. Ancillary revenues have always been the true driver of the indie market, but as streaming comes to dominate post-theatrical exploitation and the biggest platforms are pulling back on how much independent fare they buy, many are questioning how indie movies can make the numbers work.
“We’ve all become more and more beholden to the streamers for ancillary revenue, and those license fees have been dramatically reduced,” says one veteran seller. “If you’re building a finance model for an independent film, these days, your return on that pay-one window is probably going to be a third of what you would have expected just a few years ago. There’s just not enough revenue from at-home markets to cover production costs for most films.”
Headline-making deals, like Netflix’s $17 million acquisition of Greg Jardin’s horror thriller It’s What’s Inside, or Amazon’s $15 million buy of Megan Park’s comedy My Old Ass, both out of Sundance this year, are not, sellers say, making up for the broader loss of pay-one revenue as streamers overall buy fewer indie movies.
‘It’s What’s Inside’
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
It’s no surprise that most active independent buyers, the likes of A24 and Bleecker Street, have pay-one output deals in place (with Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global’s Showtime Networks, respectively) that guarantee ancillary monies for their entire slate.
“The future state of streaming platforms and their acquisition strategies are critical to the survival of independent film,” says J.J Caruth, president of domestic marketing and distribution at Highland Film Group’s U.S. distribution arm The Avenue. “Without having that pay-one window revenue, financing independent films becomes that much more challenging.”
Caruth also sees a divide between streamer demand for mainstream genre films —she points to The Avenue’s action thriller Land of Bad starring Liam and Luke Hemsworth alongside Russell Crowe, as “exactly the type of content streamers are looking for” —with the more “unique edgy indie fare” —think Celine Song’s Past Lives, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall or Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days — that are pulling in audiences in theaters “but might not necessarily work as well for the platforms.”
Genre films like The Avenue’s actioner ‘Land of Bad’ are still popular with streamers but harder to make work at the box office.
The Avenue
“Those kinds of generic action movies are great for Netflix and Amazon but they no longer have currency as a theatrical movie,” notes one European-based packager and seller, pointing to Liam Neeson’s Retribution, which earned just $7 million domestically for Roadside Attractions, or Millennium Media’s Expend4bles, which earned less than $17 million at the domestic box office for Lionsgate, the worst performance, by far, of the Expendables franchise.
But Joe Lewis, CEO of Amplify Pictures, sees new opportunities in the streaming market as platforms shift away from their walled-garden approach of global all-rights deals and begin to “enter into an age of non-exclusively with is super-exciting…You can put your stuff out on multiple VOD platforms now and you see that the numbers aren’t cannibalizing each other, in fact, they can be additive.”
Instead of a one-size-fits-all deal with a streamer, “essentially a cost plus deal, where you give up all global rights forever,” Lewis says indie producers can get creative with windowing rights, “putting together money from different sources” to allow “the value of a project to be better correlated with its success.”
Caruth agrees, noting that the recent strategic shift by the streamers, “where they are beginning to license and window content” and be more flexible with rights deals makes her “cautiously optimistic again.”
But, given the increasingly vital importance of streaming revenue to indie films, and the increasing dominance of a handful of vertically-integrated producer/distributor platforms, a long-term solution for the pay-one window problem is still out of sight.
“I’m going to say something which will probably ensure that I never get hired by one of these streamers, but without some form of regulation, as they have in Europe to require platforms to buy a certain amount from the independents, it’s going to be very hard for independent producers and independent films to survive,” says Caruth. “But for the streamers, regulation is a four-letter word.”
Bill Nighy (Living, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and Jojo Rabbit’s Roman Griffin Davis will star in road movie 500 Miles from director Morgan Matthews (X+Y, Williams), which Beta Cinema will start selling at the Berlin Film Festival’s European Film Market.
The Origin Pictures, Port Pictures and Minnow Films project is described as “a thrilling road movie full of heart, wit and wonder.”
“The story follows a broken family forced to come together when 16-year-old Finn (Davis) and his livewire younger brother Charlie run away from trouble at home in England to reach their estranged grandfather (Nighy) on Ireland’s stunning and wild West coast,” according to a plot description.
Matthews is set to direct from a script by Malcolm Campbell (What Richard Did, Herself, Ackley Bridge), based on the novel Charlie and Me by Mark Lowery.
Former head of BBC Film David Thompson (Billy Elliot, Notes on a Scandal, Woman in Gold, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom) is producing with Alex Gordon and Keren Misgav Ristvedt for Origin Pictures (Hope Gap, Sense of an Ending, A Brilliant Young Mind), Martina Niland (Once, Sing Street) from Dublin-based Port Pictures, and Minnow. The project is being prepped to shoot in Kerry, Ireland, later in 2024. Louise Kiely (Banshees of Inisherin, Normal People, The Green Knight) functions as casting director.
“The script takes us on an emotional, often hilariously funny, yet deeply moving journey through some of the most beautiful parts of the U.K. and Ireland,” said Tassilo Hallbauer, head of sales and acquisitions at Beta Cinema. “In Jojo Rabbit, Roman Griffin Davis demonstrated his brilliant talent for portraying deep character roles with a unique sense of humor. With Bill Nighy’s involvement, following his pivotal, Oscar-nominated performance in Living, Origin Pictures are assembling a dream cast; 500 Miles offers top-tier escapism and will resonate with international audiences of all ages.”
Added Thompson: “We are delighted to be launching this wonderful project with such a brilliant cast and director. 500 Miles is both hilarious and heart-wrenching and ultimately rather life-affirming. It has such an original take on the world and will be a truly unforgettable film.”
Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Fox
Roman Griffin Davis and Taika Waititi in JoJo Rabbit.
Tom Tykwer‘s return to the big screen is getting closer. After 7 years working in television, co-creating and co-directing, with Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries, four seasons of acclaimed period drama Babylon Berlin, the German director of Run Lola Run, The Internationaland Cloud Atlas will mark his movie comeback with the contemporary German-language drama The Light (Das Licht).
Tykwer’s production house X Filme Creative Pool, German distributor X Verleih and Beta Cinema, who have picked up international sales rights for the film, on Thursday unveiled the first look of The Light. The still, which almost resembles a Renaissance painting, features star Tala al Deen bathed in a radiant glow from a device on the table in front of her.
Al Deen plays Farrah, a mysterious Syrian woman who enters the lives of the Engels, a middle-class German family whose world is slowly unraveling. Nothing appears to be holding the Engels together but Farrah will put the family’s emotional world to an unexpectedly wild test.
Lars Eidinger, Nicolette Krebitz, Elke Biesendorfer, Julius Gause and Elyas Eldridge star as the Engels.
Beta is handling sales on The Light for all territories except German-speaking Europe, France and North America and will start pre-selling the film at Berlin’s European Film Market later this month.
“After quite a long time, which I spent with Babylon Berlin in the roaring 20s, I can finally turn my attention back to our present,” says Tom Tykwer on his new film. “In The Light, there is arguing, struggling and fighting, but there is also laughter, singing and dancing. The film aims to challenge the spectrum of emotions and the corresponding narrative possibilities. And the characters are very familiar to me. I want to try to reflect their inner turmoil and make their deep bond tangible for the audience.”
The Light is Tykwer’s first feature film since 2016’s A Hologram for the King starring Tom Hanks and his first German feature since 2010’s ménage à trois drama 3. A figure on the international film scene since his breakout hit Run Lola Run in 1998, Tykwer’s filmography includes The Princess and the Warrior (2000), Heaven (2002) and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006). He co-directed 2012 sci-fi epic Cloud Atlas with the Wachowskis siblings, with whom he also collaborated on the Netflix series Sense 8 and composed music for the score on Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections (2021). Babylon Berlin, which he co-created, is the most expensive German TV series of all time.
The Light, shot in Germany and Kenya, will roll out theatrically in Germany via X Verleih together with Warner Bros. Germany on Oct. 17. Uwe Schott produced the film through X Filme Creative Pool in co-production with ZDF, ARP Séléction, Gold Rush Pictures, Gretchenfilm and B.A. Filmproduktion with subsidy support from Germany’s DFFF film fund, federal film board the FFA and regional subsidies from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the Film and Medienstiftung NRW.
