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Feature film projects from The Blue Caftan filmmaker Maryam Touzani and Four Daughters director Kaouther Ben Hania are among 24 titles that have received a combined €6.78m in the latest session of Council of Europe co-production fund Eurimages.

The 24 feature films backed by Eurimages include four documentaries and one animation. 16 are to be directed or co-directed by women, representing over 75% of the total funding awarded.

Morrocan filmmaker Maryam Touzani’s Spanish language Calle Malaga was awarded €500,000. It’s the story of a 74-year old woman who belongs to the Spanish community of Tangier who has to leave her home but unexpectedly...

Goodbye, First Love: Atef Explores Pangs of Passion Amidst Detached Reunification

For her sixth feature film, Germany’s Emily Atef returns to themes of circumstance keeping lovers (and loved ones) apart with the languorously titled Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen). Set on an idyllic farm located on the recently evaporated border between East and West Germany in 1990, a teen girl comes of age through a tempestuous affair with an older man, an experience akin to the passionate whirlwinds from the classic literature she reads.

Although her situation is unique, including Atef revisiting the invisible thaw in Germany which created more economic and personal upheavals, Atef’s script, co-written by Daniela Krien is beautifully bucolic but a surprisingly flat plateau.…...

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Jennifer Lopez will be touring this summer after all. And while that’s certainly a crime against Pride Month if not humanity itself, it at least frees up some extra time–and money–to watch some movies. And while 2024 looks to be a rather tepid year for blockbusters, there are still plenty of Don’t-Miss Indies out there ready to crawl into your eyes and ears.

Someday We’LL Tell Each Other Everything

When You Can Watch: June 7

Where You Can Watch: Theaters

Director: Emily Atef

Cast: Marlene Burow, Felix Kramer, Cedric Eich

Why We’re Excited: After directing multiple episodes of the hit BBC America series Killing Eve, filmmaker Emily Atef returns to the big screen with a May-December romance, set in the muggy summer of 1990 in the East German countryside of Thuringia just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on Daniela Krien’s 2011 novel,...

Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof is set to attend the Cannes premiere of his latest feature, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, after receiving an eight-year prison sentence from Iranian authorities and fleeing his home country.

Speculation had been rife that the dissident director would attend the festival when the film receives its world premiere in Competition on Friday (May 24), having found asylum in Germany, but Cannes’ general delegate Thierry Fremaux has now confirmed his attendance.

“We are particularly touched to welcome [Rasoulof] here as a filmmaker,” Fremaux said in a statement to Agence France-Presse (Afp).

Our joy will be that of...

International filmmakers are calling for solidarity with Mohammad Rasoulof and persecuted filmmakers in Iran in an open letter, shared with Variety.

Rasoulof – about to screen his latest film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Cannes’ main competition – was sentenced to imprisonment and torture by the Islamic Republic of Iran. He fled the country.

“We condemn the inhumane treatment of Rasoulof and numerous other independent artists in Iran, who are being severely punished, criminalized and silenced for exercising their artistic freedom,” it was stated in the letter, already signed by “Holy Spider” star Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Fatih Akin, Atom Egoyan, Ildiko Enyedi, Andrew Haigh, Agnieszka Holland, Laura Poitras, Sandra Hüller, Sean Baker, Payal Kapadia and Ariane Labed.

“We stand in full solidarity with Rasoulof’s demands and call upon the international film community to raise our voices against an Islamist dictatorship that systematically oppresses every aspect of their society’s lives.

Canadian actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan will be joined on this year’s Un Certain Regard Jury by French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir, German-Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps, and American film critic and writer Todd McCarthy.

The jury will be in charge of awarding prizes for the Un Certain Regard sidebar. This year, 18 films have been selected, including eight first features. The 2023 Un Certain Regard top prize went to director Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature How to Have Sex. When the light breaks by Rúnar Rúnarsson will open the Un Certain Regard section on May 15.

A self-taught filmmaker, Dolan made his feature directorial debut at 19 with I Killed My Mother, an adaptation of his own short story, which was chosen to represent Canada at the Academy Awards. He followed up that film with the 2010 romantic drama Heartbeats, which brought him into the Un Certain Regard section...

David Thion, the French producer of Justine Triet’s best picture contender “Anatomy of a Fall,” is preparing a raft of projects helmed by daring female directors including Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet (“Anais in Love”) and Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”).

Speaking to Variety ahead of the Oscars, Thion said he and Marie-Ange Luciani, who also produced “Anatomy of a Fall,” have also signed Triet for her next movie, the topic of which hasn’t been decided yet.

“Justine has devoted herself fully to the awards campaign for ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ and she hasn’t had time to decide what her next film will be, but she has a few ideas,” Thion said. He added that Triet’s next film will likely be “mainly shot in French, but could have an Anglo-Saxon actress as the lead.”

Bourgeois-Tacquet, who made her feature debut with “Anais in Love,” which premiered at Cannes’ Critics Week,...

French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s Mercy received €450,000, the biggest slice of funding

Six projects by women filmmakers including Emily Atef, Hafsia Herzi and Lucile Hadzhihalović have received support from the German-French Funding Commission’s Minitraité co-production fund.

The largest single amount of production funding - €450,000 - was awarded to French-Iranian director Emily Atef’s English-language Mercy, an adaptation of Lara Santoro’s eponymous novel. Set in 1997, it is the story of a friendship between a US correspondent in Kenya and a local woman from the slums joining forces to combat the AIDS crisis in the country.

Earlier this year, Atef...

The annual 16 Days 16 Films short movie festival is running: more details and this year’s finalists all here.

Finalists are now being revealed for this year’s 16 Days 16 Films festival, an annual competition that’s attracted entrants from around the world.

To qualify, films are directed by a filmmaker who identifies as female, with their films 25 minutes or under. This year’s selection all, in the words of the festival, ‘explore, emote, or educate on a form of violence against women.’

Partners for the festival include Un Women, The Geena Davis Institute and the BFI. Previous finalists have included How To Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker, and Girl director Adura Onashile.

This year’s finalists – and we’ll be adding the films as they become available over the 16 day period – are…

Esperanza (Mexico) – Mayra Veliz

A Very Nice Guy (Mexico) – Minerva R. Bolaños Rodrigo Fierro

After Fred (UK) – Rachel Meyrick...

Seven young directors will discuss their latest films with producers, industry experts and audiences.

Nordic Film Days’ industry programme Lübeck Meetings is running a new initiative, Future North, at next month’s event targeted at young directors underrepresented areas of Northern Europe.

Future North has invited seven young directors to discuss the status of their latest films with producers, industry experts and audiences.

The seven directors come from the Baltic countries, Greenland, Sápmi, the Faroe Islands and Schleswig-Holstein.

The directors taking part are: Armands Začs (Latvia), Gailė Garnelytė (Lithuania), Helen Takkin (Estonia), Inuk Jörgensen (Greenland), Johannes Vang (Sàmi), Pola Rader...

Exclusive: Shooting has wrapped on Went Up the Hill, the psychological ghost story starring Cannes award winner Vicky Krieps and Stranger Things actor Dacre Montgomery.

Above is a first look at the Samuel Van Grinsven flick, which is headed for next week’s AFM via Bankside Films. Buyers in LA will be presented with a promo reel, with Bankside repping international sales and co-repping North American rights with CAA Media Finance.

The film was shot on location in New Zealand and was the latest collaboration between London-based Bankside and Causeway Films following their partnership on Danny & Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, which is nearing $100M at the global box office. We first told you about it last year.

Went Up the Hill stars Montgomery as Jack and Krieps as Jill. Abandoned as a child, Jack ventures to remote New Zealand to attend the funeral of his estranged mother and there meets her grieving widow,...

A wacky film based on a stage show by comedians Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp, Dicks: The Musical – a riff on The Parent Trap with two adult men as the starring twins — opens in seven theaters in NY, LA and San Francisco on a crowded specialty weekend as theatrical releases of fall film festival titles accelerates.

Dicks, from A24, developed by Chernin Entertainment, is, according to press notes, a first “adult musical comedy” for both. (It’s Chernin’s second musical after hit The Greatest Showman.) Directed by Larry Charles, it stars the two creators Jackson and Sharp as self-obsessed businessmen who discover they’re long-lost identical twins and come together to plot the reunion of their eccentric divorced parents. They’re joined by an A-list roster of Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, Bowen Yang and Megan Thee Stallion.

A SAG-AFTRA interim agreement allowed the talent to promote the film at TIFF,...

When the Body Speaks: Krieps & Ulliel Fight for the Right Balance in Atef’s Final Voyage Drama

A too young to die portrait that sees a neutralized Vicky Krieps travel northwards to find her pathway…inwards, Emily Atef’s latest is a non-postcard, straight-forward account of reconnecting with self — not at the most opportune moment, but when it matters most. Made more noteworthy due to it being Gaspard Ulliel’s final screen performance – he fastens his supportive boyfriend character with various degrees of cerebral rage displaying a splintered soul being asked to let go in more ways than one. A melodrama without deep chills, Plus que jamais (More Than Ever) sees Atef make some bolder narrative moves in the film’s second half, ultimately once the film steps foot in Scandi-territory we get some unexpected turns, punches, nips, tucks and forward momentum that makes this a worthy essay on a...

Hélène Mouchet (Vicky Krieps) is probably dying. She has been diagnosed with an idiopathic fibrosis of the lungs, meaning none of her doctors really has much idea of how to treat her condition. They do know that it will eventually result in suffocation, unless she is able to undergo a lung transplant — which is far from certain to work. In “More Than Ever,” a thoughtful, well-acted drama from writer-director Emily Atef (changing the pace from her work on TV’s “Killing Eve”), this setup is the basis for an exploration, through the lens of one woman’s experience, of how serious disease might be faced, both medically and socially. Strand Releasing is bringing the film to U.S. audiences more than a year after its Un Certain Regard premiere in Cannes.

Hélène finds the awkward response of her social circle unendurable; people mean well, but are terrified of saying the wrong thing.

German regional fund Medenboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) has made its latest funding decisions.

Films directed by Wes Anderson, Agnieszka Holland, Emily Atef, Pablo Larrain and Karim Ainouz are among 14 projects to receive more than €5.2m in total production support from the German regional fund Medenboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Mbb) in its latest funding decision.

The largest single amount of €1.5m went to an as-yet untitled project by Wes Anderson which will see the US director continuing his long-standing collaboration with Studio Babelsberg with whom he has partnered on five previous films including The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.

The...

Australian Film Television and Radio School

Australia’s leading screen arts and broadcast school benefits from a beautiful Sydney campus and a deep pool of industry lecturers and close ties with the Australian film community. Notable alumni include multi-Oscar nominee Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Phillip Noyce (The Quiet American) and Black Widow filmmaker Cate Shortland, plus a slew of esteemed craftspeople like Margaret Sixel (editing on Mad Max: Fury Road), David White (sound editing for Mad Max: Fury Road), Andrew Lesnie (cinematography for The Lord of the Rings) and Tony McNamara (best original screenplay Oscar nominee for The Favourite).

Beijing Film Academy

The USC of the world’s second-largest film industry, China’s most prestigious film school offers its graduates a wealth of industry ties to some of the country’s most prominent working actors and directors. Bfa also now has an undergraduate film program taught in English.

UK-France-Germany co-production depicts the AIDS pandemic at the end of 1990s.

Germany-based sales firm Global Screen has boarded world sales on Mercy, the new film from More Than Ever director Emily Atef.

French-Iranian director Atef is in Cannes sourcing partners for the film, which will be her English-language film debut and is aiming for a 2024 shoot entirely in Kenya.

Atef has written the adaptation of Lara Santoro’s novel of the same name, about a friendship between a US correspondent in Kenya and a local woman from the slums, who pair up to combat the AIDS crisis in the country...

Ragna Nordhus joins as producer and co-owner, and Gary Cranner as executive producer and advisor.

Elisa Fernanda Pirir’s new Norwegian production company Staer, which launched in January, is already expanding with two new hires.

Both are producers who Pirir formerly worked with at Mer Film. Ragna Nordhus, who had been head of production at Mer Film, is joining Staer as producer and co-owner. Nordhus also co-produced Cannes 2022 Un Certain Regard feature More Than Ever by Emily Atef.

Gary Cranner, a former Screen Future Leaders producer, who also recently worked at Mer and previously ran his own company Chezville, joins Staer as executive producer.

Ragna Nordhus joins as producer and co-owner, and Gary Cranner as executive producer and advisor.

Elisa Fernanda Pirir’s new Norwegian outfit Staer has hired Ragna Nordhus, as producer and co-owner, and Gary Cranner, a former Screen Future Leaders producer, as executive producer and advisor.

Nordhus was head of production at Mer Film and co-produced Emily Atef’s More Than Ever, while Cranner also worked at Mer and ran his own company Chezville. He continue to develop projects through Mantra Film, the company he started with Oda Kruse.

Tromso-based Staer will next shoot Arru, a musical drama showcasing Sami traditional joiks,...

Exclusive: Anonymous Content has hired longtime literary agent and former UTA partner Bec Smith as a partner and manager in their Los Angeles-based lit team. We revealed Smith’s impending exit from UTA last month.

The respected veteran has amassed a client roster including directors and writers such as Coline Abert, Levan Akin, Jane Anderson, Benedict Andrews, Emily Atef, Anthony Chen, Eva Husson, Ellen Kuras, Katrin Gebbe, Sebastian Junger, Julia Leigh, Phillip Noyce, Joshua Oppenheimer, Jennifer Peedom, Maria Schrader, Tali Shalom-Ezer, Dawn Shadforth, Kirsten Sheridan, Goran Stolevski, Warwick Thornton and Max Werner.

Related Story Shocker! Anonymous Content CEO Dawn Olmstead & COO Heather McCauley Resign; Protesting Settlement To Former Top Producer Keith Redmon? Related Story UTA Partner & Top Talent Agent Brian Swardstrom Leaving Agency For New Ventures; Will Produce With 'Nomadland's Peter Spears To Start Related Story UTA Signs Cecillia Aldarondo, Filmmaker Behind SXSW-Premiering Documentary 'You Were My First Boyfriend...

Strand Releasing has bought all North American rights to Emily Atef’s last two movies, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” which competed at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as her Cannes entry “More Than Ever.” Both films are represented in international markets by The Match Factory.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“More Than Ever,” meanwhile, premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard. It stars Vicky Krieps and late French actor Gaspard Ulliel as a couple whose bond is tested when one...

‘Riceboy Sleeps’ Scoops Top Canadian Film Award

Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps has won Canada’s biggest film award, the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award. The prize, decided by the Toronto Film Critics Association (Tfca), comes with a Can$100,000 cash prize. Riceboy Sleeps beat nominees Clement Virgo’s Brother and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The semi-autobiographical film explores the challenges of living between two cultures through the tale of a Korean immigrant single mother raising her son in Canada. Shot in the Greater Vancouver area and Korea, the feature world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, winning its Platform Prize, and then played in Busan and a raft of other festivals. The win comes as Toronto-based distributor Game Theory Films gears up for the title’s Canadian release on March 17. The feature will also be released in Korea, Singapore and the US in the coming months.

At certain times in Emily Atef’s eponymous adaptation of Daniela Krien’s novel “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” all one can hear is the irregular breathing of Maria (Marlene Burow). The molecules of oxygen leave the sprawling fields of rural Germany and hastily make their way through the young girl’s lungs, the surge of adrenaline in her bloodstream directly increasing the frequency of respiration.

Continue reading ‘Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’ Review: Emily Atef’s Latest is a Sensual Yet Exhausting Misfire [Berlin] at The Playlist.

German cinema looks set for a major boom this year with a strong lineup of diverse works that span historical dramas, coming-of-age tales, high-octane nostalgia, animation and sci-fi fun.

The Berlin Film Festival is bowing a muscular selection of local titles, among them “Afire,” by Berlinale mainstay Christian Petzold (“Undine”), screening in competition. The films centers on a group of young people staying at a holiday house near the Baltic Sea during a hot, dry summer, exploring volatile emotions that start to sizzle when a wildfire spreads through the surrounding forest.

Likewise vying for the Golden Bear is Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic “Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey Into the Desert,” starring Vicky Krieps (“Corsage”) as the radical Austrian author. The film examines her relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch and her 1964 journey of self-discovery through the Egyptian desert.

“Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” by Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”) and...

’Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything’, ’The Survival Of Kindness’ and ’BlackBerry’ land with middling scores.

Emily Atef’s Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, Rolf de Heer’s The Survival Of Kindness and Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry are the first titles to land on Screen’s Berlin 2023 Competition jury grid.

De Heer’s film leads with an average of 2.4, followed closely by the other two titles on 2.3.

Click top left to expand

Seven critics are taking part in this year’s jury grid and will mark all 19 films playing in competition.

The Survival Of Kindness received four three-star ratings...

Roughly three quarters of the way into Superpower, the documentary about the war in Ukraine directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman, the Oscar-winning actor displays a fixed-blade knife while traveling by car through the embattled country. He jokes to the camera, “All of Ukraine should feel safe now that I’m armed.” He adds, holding up fists clenched like a boxer’s, “Plus, I’ve got these.”

Related Story Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy Delivers Impassioned Speech At Berlin Opening Night; Sean Penn Says Will Of The People Is “Just Getting Stronger” Related Story Berlin Review: Emily Atef's 'Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything' Related Story Riz Ahmed & Lily James To Star In David Mackenzie Thriller 'Relay' For Thunder Road, Sigma & Black Bear: EFM Hot Package

It’s a rare moment of levity in a film that otherwise unfolds with deadly seriousness, for appropriate reasons: for...

Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks. That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.

Indeed, what’s most interesting about German-born filmmaker Atef’s return to her home turf — after a directing stint on TV’s “Killing Eve” and last year’s predominantly French romance “More Than Ever,” with Vicky Krieps and the...

Emily Atef, who is presenting her latest film, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, just moved to Paris to direct “La Maison,” a series depicting a fictional family-owned French luxury fashion empire.

While discussing “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” ahead of its world premiere, Atef told Variety that “La Maison” will be filled with a lot of drama and tragicomedy. “It’s very Shakespearean. There’s so much beauty and luxury with old mansions in Brittany, Parisian ‘hotel particuliers,’ and then behind all that there’s so much human poverty, and you see them ripping each other appart for power,” said Atef, who will direct the pilot and three more episodes.

The series was created and penned by Jose Caltagirone (“Les Combattantes”) and Valentine Milville (“The Bureau”), and will star a high-profile French ensemble cast, including Lambert Wilson (“Benedetta”), Carole Bouquet (“En Therapie...

Emily Atef’s latest feature is something of a curate’s egg, a well-made foray into high-end romantic lit that’s saddled with some off-putting baggage about the reunification of Germany post-1989. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry is clearly personal to the novel’s writer, Daniela Krien, who was born, mid-’70s into the former Gdr, and it does offer a layer of quirky detail, such as an unnerving car crash involving what looks to be Trabant. But for a film that shows a lot of naked flesh and spends a lot of time documenting a young woman’s complicated sexual awakening, the political table-talk can be distracting and even wearying, notably on the occasion when a whole (recently reunited) family bursts into “The Song of The Peat Bog Soldiers.“

The year is 1990, and the young woman in question is 18-year-old Maria (Marlene Burow), who has moved away from...

Emily Atef’s drama, following a dreamy teenager into an affair with a middle-aged man, addresses difficult material with a driving narrative force

More Than Ever director Emily Atef’s new film is a tale of erotic obsession and despair in the farmlands of Thuringia on the eastern side of Germany’s now vanished internal border: it is the summer of 1990, the last historic moments of the Gdr. This is a movie to raise the possibility that Germany has still not perhaps made a full reckoning with the euphoric trauma of the Berlin Wall coming down. Atef finds something mythic, tragic and romantic in the great healing rupture. Something comic, too. There is a bizarre, and unexpectedly funny scene when a Trabant – that well-known symbol of communist Germany’s cultural cringe to the west – veers chaotically off the road, turning over like a biscuit box on wheels; the driver stoically...

Germany’s reunification as a backdrop for two attractive bodies uniting over and over again is one way to sum up Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, which director Emily Atef (3 Days in Quiberon) adapted from Daniela Krien’s popular 2011 novel.

The problem with this handsomely made, well-acted and overwrought rural drama is precisely that: What’s interesting is not the doomed love affair between a beautiful 19-year-old girl and a strapping farmer more than twice her age, in a story that’s plays out like Lady Chatterley’s Lover meets Fifty Shades of Gray in the former Ddr. It’s whatever the film has to say about the struggling family and farming community that serves as its setting, during a period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unfortunately, Atef gives short shrift to the latter in favor of the former, in a movie that starts off rather promisingly...

Emily Atef, the outspoken French-German filmmaker, may have stepped into a minefield with her latest movie, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” which looks to be one of the Berlinale’s most divisive movies in competition. With such a cute title, one might expect a flowery romance drama, but the movie goes far to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality.

Based on Daniela Krien’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

“Making this film would have been like a suicide if I was a man. I would have been lynched,” Atef tells Variety ahead of...

Row Pictures is the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything.

Karsten Stöter’s Germany-based Row Pictures, the producer of Emily Atef’s Berlin competition title Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything, has unveiled a slate of features from Natja Brunckhorst, Markus Schleinzer and Eliza Petkova.

Brunckhorst’s second feature, Zwei zu Eins, is set to go into production this summer at locations in Central Germany and North Rhine-Westphalia. It will be co-produced by the Lübeck-based arm of zischlermann filmproduktion with backing from broadcasters Zdf and Arte as well as Mdm, the Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw and Bkm.

Exclusive: UTA partner Bec Smith, a company vet of 16 years, is leaving the agency, we can reveal.

Working in the Motion Picture Literary department, the respected Australian native has built a strong internationally-oriented client list (some of whom she has worked with since their first short films) including Garth Davis, Maria Schrader, Goran Stolevski, Oliver Hermanus, Joshua Oppenheimer, Warwick Thornton, Na Hong-Jin, Eva Husson, Emily Atef, Agnieszka Holland, Phillip Noyce, Ellen Kuras, Benedict Andrews, James Ponsoldt, Anthony Chen, Levan Akin, Katrin Gebbe and Andor director Ariel Kleiman.

We hear Smith is likely to segue to management — there has been interest from multiple companies over the years — where she will be able to flex her producorial instincts. Most of her clients are expected to follow.

The timeline for her departure from UTA is understood to be in the 4-6 week range.

Smith’s exit from UTA coincides with a layer of layoffs at the agency.

Kirsten Stewart looked confident, and downright snazzy, as she strode to the platform for her first press conference as jury president of the 2023 Berlin International Festival.

But, stylishly-attired in a tweed Chanel pantsuit with wide trousers and jacket and no shirt underneath, the Twilight and Spencer star confessed that she was nervous of the task ahead.

“Full transparency, I’m kind of shaking,” she said. “I feel, not buckling under [the weight], but I can’t wait who we all ahead at the end of this experience. I’m just ready to be changed by all the films and by all the people around us.”

Stewart said it wasn’t her decision to come to Berlin. “I was shocked they called me,” she said. “[But] it is an enormous opportunity to highlight beautiful things at a time when that is hard to hold.”

Fellow Berlinale juror, actress Golshifteh Farahani, said, so much political upheaval in the world,...

Cologne-based sales company The Match Factory has expanded and restructured its acquisition and development team.

Former head of sales, Thania Dimitrakopoulou, has been promoted to vice president of acquisitions and sales. Claudia Solano comes on board as senior manager of acquisitions, and Cécile Tollu-Polonowski, a long-time partner with the company, has been appointed as head of development.

Dimitrakopoulou, who joined The Match Factory in 2007, will now be heading up all acquisitions activities and manage the sales team, reporting to Michael Weber, managing director.

Solano joins The Match Factory from the distributor Koch Media in Italy where she worked as sales and acquisitions manager. Solano has held various positions in acquisitions in companies such as Videa and Good Films. During her career, she has introduced several high profile directors to the Italian market, including Xavier Dolan and Yorgos Lanthimos.

The Match Factory has appointed long-standing partner Tollu-Polonowski to lead the development team for the company.

"He can have her one more time." The Match Factory has also unveiled a festival promo trailer for another new German film premiering soon at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival kicking off this week. Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything is the latest film from filmmaker Emily Atef, following her Cannes 2022 feature More Than Ever. Set in a warm summer in 1990 in former East Germany, it follows a young woman who begins a passionate sexual relationship with a charismatic farmer who is twice her age. That's pretty much the entire story here, as it plays itself out. The film stars Marlene Burow, Felix Kramer, Cedric Eich, Silke Bodenbender, and Florian Panzner. The fest adds: "Rarely has an adaptation of a vibrant literary text been able to create such energy, and even more rarely has it been able to revitalise virtues (in the truest sense of the word) which some might find old-fashioned.

The trailer for “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” French-Iranian filmmaker Emily Atef’s tale of forbidden love, which premieres in Berlinale Competition, has debuted (below). The Match Factory is looking after the film’s international sales, and Pandora Film is handling German distribution.

The film, based on Daniela Krien’s novel, is set in the summer of 1990 in the countryside around Thuringia, in former East Germany.

Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend Johannes on his parents’ farm and would rather lose herself in books than focus on graduating. There is a sense of a new era dawning with the reunification of Germany.

When she bumps into Henner, the farmer living next door, one touch is all it takes to ignite an all-consuming passion between Maria and the headstrong, charismatic man twice her age. In an atmosphere buzzing with possibilities, love is born: a secret passion...

The Berlin Film Festival, held every year in February, the cruelest month of the German winter, has never been able to match the Mediterranean flair of Cannes or Venice, or the laid-back indie cool of Sundance. But when it comes to serious movies, few festivals, big or small, can match the Berlinale.

In place of the big blockbuster movies, Berlin has doubled down on political dramas and documentaries that focus on the real troubles of the world. The war in Ukraine — launched by Russia’s invasion a year ago — will be on screens everywhere this Berlinale. Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufmann’s documentary Superpower, shot just before and after Russia’s invasion, and featuring several interviews with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, will have its world premiere in Berlin’s Special Screening section and there are three more Ukraine documentaries — Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies, Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko’s doc Eastern Front,...

2023 truly begins taking shape with next month’s Berlinale, which will run from February 16 to February 26 and feature more than a few of our most-anticipated films this year. Among them are Christian Petzold’s Afire (Roter Himmel), starring new muse Paula Beer; Hong Sangsoo’s In Water, which will appear in the Encounters section; and Philippe Garrel’s The Plough, once known as La lune crevée starring his three children Louis, Esther, and Lena, and (judging from the still) his first color feature since 2011’s A Burning Hot Summer. Meanwhile: Angela Schanelec will return with Music, and––six years after the wonderful Person to Person––it’s nice spotting a new feature from Dustin Guy Defa, The Adults.

Find the lineup below and head back next month for our coverage of the festival headed by Kristen Stewart’s jury.

Competition

20,000 Species of Bees (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren)

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang...

The German sales company’s slate also includes titles by Margarethe von Trotta, Emily Atef, Tatiana Huezo.

The Match Factory has finalised a seven-strong slate of titles playing at the 2023 Berlinale, on which it represents world sales rights.

The company’s lineup includes four titles in Berlin Competition, including German director Christian Petzold’s latest film Afire, about a group of friends in a holiday home by the Baltic Sea where emotions run high as the parched forest around them catches fire.

The film stars Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt and is produced by...

18 titles selected for competition, including films by Christian Petzold, Emily Atef, Margarethe Von Trotta and Philippe Garrel.

The 18-strong Competition line-up for the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival has been announced by festival heads Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek.

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New films from Christian Petzold, Margarethe Von Trotte, Emily Atef and Lila Avilés are among those selected. Some 15 of the 18 titles are world premieres, with international premieres for Celine Song’s Past Lives after debuting to strong reviews at Sundance; Makoto Shinkai’s animation Suzume, released in Japan last November; and Australia’s The Survival Of Kindness by Rolf de Heer,...

The Berlin Film Festival on Monday unveiled the titles selected for its official competition as well as its sidebar Encounters competitive section.

A total of 18 films have been selected for the international competition with highlights including Christian Petzold’s latest film Roter Himmel (Afire), Margarethe von Trotta directing Phantom Thread star Vicky Krieps in Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey Into the Desert, and Philippe Garrel returns with a new feature titled The Plough.

Scroll down for the full lineup.

This morning the festival also revealed an extra special screening: Actor and filmmaker Sean Penn will debut a documentary titled Superpower, a film shot in Ukraine last year at the outbreak of Russia’s invasion and follows president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Berlin Film Festival takes place February 16-26.

Organizers have already announced more than 100 titles across sidebars spanning Panorama, Forum, and Berlinale Special. The festival had initially done a good job of increasing...

Sean Penn, Jesse Eisenberg, Canadian actor-director Matt Johnson, South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo, and Korean-Canadian director Celine Song are headed to the upcoming Berlin Film Festival.

Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeck on Monday unveiled the main Competition and Encounters selections for the fest’s 73rd edition, which will feature a rich mix of known names and newcomers, as well as a strong political emphasis.

Penn will be in Berlin with “Superpower,” the doc he co-directed with Aaron Kaufman that depicts the struggle between Volodymyr Zelensky, the actor and comedian who became president of Ukraine, and Russian president Vladimir Putin, as Russia deploys a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Penn was in Kiev shooting a film with Zelensky when the war in Ukraine burst,” Chatrian said at a press conference in Berlin. “Reality made the film change into something less comfortable and more meaningful,” he added. “We...

Gaspard Ulliel and Vicky Krieps in More Than Ever Photo: Courtesy of London Film Festival

Never in her wildest imaginings could director Emily Atef have predicted her film More Than Ever (Plus Que Jamais in French) would have such a close connection with the end of life.

One of her two lead actors, Gaspard Ulliel (who plays Matthieu) died in a skiing accident, aged 37, last January, in the mountains of the Savoie in France - just as she was working on the post-production with her editor Sandie Bonnard in Berlin where she lives.

Emily Atef Photo: Peter Harwig

“The news came as such a shock,” said Atef, who had been watching scenes with Ulliel and co-star Vicky Krieps and knew their every facial movement and expression. The film was shot during Covid in Norway which took a long time to open up again. “I was only allowed to take seven of the technical team,...

Also out this weekend: ’Holy Spider’, ’Alice, Darling’ and ’Dreaming Walls’.

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is the widest new release at the UK-Ireland box office this weekend, playing at 631 sites for Paramount, and hoping to make a dent on Avatar: The Way Of Water’s box office dominance, after five weeks atop the chart for Disney.

It is Chazelle’s widest release in the territory – beating his Oscar-winning musical La La Land, which opened at 606 sites in 2017 for Lionsgate, and took £5.6m at the box office in its opening weekend, plus £943,751 in previews.

Chazelle’s latest paints a hedonistic portrait of 1920s and 1930s Hollywood,...

Director Emily Atef and producer Xénia Maingot paid tribute to late French actor Gaspard Ulliel on the first of anniversary of his death at a screening in London of his last feature More Than Ever on Thursday evening.

The title was the last feature film production Ulliel worked on before he died in a skiing accident in the French Alps on January 19, 2022 at the age of 37 years old.

The drama stars Vicky Krieps as a woman who retreats to the Norwegian fjords as she comes to terms with a life-threatening respiratory illness. Ulliel co-starred as her devoted husband who struggles to come to terms with her decision to strike off on her own.

“Today is a special screening. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been able to do this event in France today because Gaspard was so immensely loved in France,” Atef told the audience at the French Institute’s Lumière Cinema.

Krieps and the late Gaspard Ulliel bring great conviction and intelligence to this unlikely tale of a woman’s last adventure

Here is a painful, intimate, impeccably acted if not entirely plausible drama of terminal illness with an extra-textual layer of sadness and irony. The estimable Vicky Krieps plays Hélène, who is dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (a rare lung disease) and her partner is becoming her carer: this is Matthieu, played by Gaspard Ulliel – who died in a skiing accident shortly after this film was completed. Director Emily Atef dedicates the movie to him in the closing credits.

The agonising, debilitating nature of the disease takes its toll on the couple and their friends and family who have no way of talking about it or coming to terms with it. Hélène is also oppressed by the way she is supposed to be joyful and grateful at being on a...

Studio executives, renowned directors, and a crop of rising young talent huddled below crystal chandeliers in Paris’ Palais Royal on Thursday, turning out to fête “Benedetta” star Virginie Efira as she received the Unifrance French Cinema Award – a prize honoring those who carry the banner for Gallic cinema across the globe – in the presence of Unifrance president Serge Toubiana and the country’s Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak.

Organized as part of the Unifrance Rendez-Vous in Paris, the ceremony drew a fittingly international crowd, with filmmakers Emily Atef, Juho Kuosmanen, Sergei Loznitsa and Albert Serra joining “Athena” star Dali Benssalah, “Forever Young” lead Nadia Tereszkiewicz, “Mother and Son” breakout Annabelle Lengronne and “Everybody Loves Jeanne” director Céline Devaux for an intimate reception held in opulent surroundings.

Abdul Malak kicked off the Efira tribute with a victory lap of sorts, boasting about local theatrical attendance rates – which, with only 29 lost...

Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen

Quickly after her Cannes Un Certain Regard premiere of More Than Ever, Emily Atef moved onto her next project – the German language Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen (aka Some Day We Will Tell Each Other Everything). Production took place in June with newcomer Marlene Burow and Felix Kramer. The French-Iranian filmmaker looks at a romance that from today’s perspective might not pass. Rohfilm Factory’s Karsten Stöter (3 Days In Quiberon) reteams with Atef as the film’s producer. It takes place in the backdrop of the first summer after the Berlin wall comes down.…...