Author: CWB News Department

France’s revamped Oscar committee has selected Jacques Audiard’s exhilarating redemption thriller “Emilia Perez” for the international feature film race. The movie won two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and earned rave reviews. https://youtu.be/t3HupHq8-eE?si=oZM0GHMmHNEn-Cuk “Emilia Perez” stars Karla Sofía Gascón as a fearsome drug lord who embraces her true self as a woman. The Spanish-language film earned one of Cannes’s longest standing ovations and went on to win the Jury Prize (in a jury presided over by Greta Gerwig), on top of a best actress prize for the ensemble cast, including Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. The movie was bought by…

French cinema has recently given us some sensationally good courtroom dramas, such as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, both of which put ideas as well as individuals on trial; race, gender and class. Now, Cédric Kahn has reconstructed – with some fictional licence – the 1976 trial of revolutionary leftist Pierre Goldman, who had previously been convicted of killing two pharmacists in the course of an armed robbery. After publishing his polemical autobiography Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France while in prison – which made him a cause célèbre among the fashionable Parisian classes…

The seventh edition of the AJB DOC Film Festival, which took place from 13-17 September in Sarajevo, wrapped last night with an awards ceremony in the Bosnian Cultural Centre. Georgian director Luka Beradze’s Smiling Georgia [+], which world-premiered at last year’s Karlovy Vary, picked up the Main Award in the 11-strong competition from the jury comprising Deborah London-Harrington, documentary filmmaker and head of Production Management at Dogwoof; Namik Kabil, Bosnian film director and writer; Mila Turajlić, Serbian documentary filmmaker; Francesco Montagner, Italian documentary filmmaker; and Myriam Francois, British journalist and documentary filmmaker. The jury’s statement reads: “This film deals with the subject of justice in an artistic, cinematic and poetic…

Just like Frida Kempff’s debut fiction feature, Knocking , which opened at Sundance in 2021, her new film The Swedish Torpedo [+] has now been launched on North American soil. The movie has world-premiered in the Centrepiece section of the Toronto International Film Festival, and in it, we get to see the Swedish director’s own artistic vision of a courageous swimming celebrity who may have been even braver on land. Cineuropa: The presence of water in your films almost looks like a conscious plan. But surely it isn’t? Frida Kempff: Honestly, no, it just comes to me. Personally, I feel very much at ease in the water,…

French screenwriter and director Simon Moutaïrou spent summers as a teenager in his father’s native country of Benin in West Africa. Etched on his memory from this time are the trips to its so-called slave coast and port city of Ouidah, through which more than one million Africans passed in the 18th and early 19th centuries ahead of being transported overseas for a life of slavery. “There is an enormous red brick arch commemorating these deportations, ‘The Door of No Return’,” says Moutaïrou. “I couldn’t get my head around this idea of such inequality between people, or human beings being treated like…

When the Marquis d’Urfé, a noble emissary of the King of France, is attacked and abandoned in the remote countryside, he finds refuge at an eerie, isolated manor. The resident family, reluctant to take him in, exhibits strange behaviour as they await the imminent return of their father, Gorcha. But what begins simply as strange quickly devolves into a full-fledged nightmare when Gorcha returns, seemingly no longer himself… Myths and legends surrounding undead figures of vampires have proven to be a successful source of literary and cinematic retelling for centuries. Chief among them is Bram Stoker’s 1897 work Dracula with numerous cinematic…

Cinema with a Cause, a groundbreaking initiative organized by the Center for Law and Social Justice, is set to unite the New York City community through a series of free film screenings that address critical social issues, with a strong focus on voting and civic engagement. Starting this September, the monthly screenings will be held at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, running through June 2025, from 6:00pm to 8:30pm. Photo: Supplied/CLSJ The mission for the initiative is clear: to create a dynamic space where compelling stories inspire meaningful action, spark conversations, and empower New Yorkers, particularly those of African descent aged 17-40, to actively…

At Toulouse’s Cartoon Forum (16-19 September), we caught up with Wouter Quartier, head of Digital, Transformation and Platforms at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). During our chat, we spoke about the organisation’s brand-new Co-Development Initiative, a collaboration opportunity that aims to secure the most exciting new content for young audiences in the highly competitive market of animation. Cineuropa: Could you please touch on the EBU Co-Development Initiative’s aims and the activities surrounding its launch? Wouter Quartier: The European Broadcasting Union, France Télévisions and Cartoon have joined forces to work on a new, collaborative model for animation. The effort is centred on the collective financing of a pilot project selected by EBU members…

Following last year’s Bones and Names , Fabian Stumm both directs and stars in his second feature, Sad Jokes [+], which is a Discovery title at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Stumm plays Joseph, a filmmaker trying to get his sophomore feature off the ground while co-parenting a toddler with a close female friend. Cineuropa caught up with Stumm just before the Toronto premiere and spoke about the translatability of humour, his working methods and how to keep the creative spark alive. Cineuropa: How do you relate to the English language in your work? Sad Jokes has many scenes in English, but maybe this was a result of…

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival as its 2024 edition wrapped with renewed celebrity heat but still in the shadow of Venice and Cannes. The Stephen King novella adaptation stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a genre-tripping film about embracing hope in the face of tragedy and had a world premiere in Toronto. Flanagan in a statement thanked TIFF for the top audience award prize: “I’m absolutely overwhelmed. We’re so grateful that The Life of Chuck connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.” The second…