समाचार

Berlin-based sales agency M-Appeal has boarded elevated genre title “Bury Your Dead,” which world premieres at the Sitges Film Festival in the competition section. The director is Brazilian filmmaker Marco Dutra.

Dutra’s previous feature “All the Dead Ones” premiered in Berlinale competition in 2020, while his gory werewolf tale “Good Manners,” co-directed with Juliana Rojas, won the Silver Leopard at Locarno in 2017. The directing duo’s debut horror film “Hard Labor” premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2011.

After the screening at Sitges next week, the film will play at BFI London Film Festival. Further fall festival selections will be announced shortly.

The film follows Edgar Wilson, a roadkill collector in rural Brazil, who dreams of escaping his small-town existence with Nete, the love of his life. When Nete decides to join her family in an apocalyptic cult, Edgar finds himself at a crossroads. With the world on the brink of destruction,...

A decade back, Clarissa Campolina burst on the filmmaking scene co-directing with Helvecio Marins Jr. “Swirl” (“Girimunho”), a portrait of an elderly faith healer on Brazil’s arid highlands and the beliefs, myths and habits of rural Brazil before they are swept aside by the passing of a generation.

Activated by producer Luana Melgaço, Campolina and fellow director Marilia Rocha so as to produce “Swirl,” Belo Horizonte-based Anavilhana has since then consolidated as one of Brazil’s most prominent regional production houses. It has spent seven years maturing Campolina’s third feature and first solo outing, “Faraway Song” (“Canção ao Longe”).

The film’s a different proposition to “Swirl,” a far more structured narrative, as coming of age stories have to be, more in line with Rocha’s own fiction feature debut, “Where I Grow Old,” a 2016 Rotterdam Festival competition player.

Written by Campolina and Caetano Gotardo, who co-directed Berlin...

Whether a viewer in 1896 or 2020, cinema has always been a dynamic and variable experience. Cinema as an event—as a manifestation of a meeting point between the art of moving images and an audience, big or small—has never fit any one definition, and this last year, so severely disrupted by a global pandemic, has deeply underscored the versatility and resilience of our great love.Our viewing this year, like that of so many, has been strange: compromised, confrontational, escapist, euphoric, painful, revelatory—encompassing all of the reactions one can have to film. How we encountered our favorite movies and most meaningful cinematic experiences of the year was hardly new: A by-now-normal mix of festivals, theatres, various subscription and transactional streaming services, as well as private screener links and gems buried on over-stuffed hard drives. But for most of the year, the communal experience shrunk to living rooms and glowing screens.

Portuguese event could be one of the first film festivals to take place physically in Europe as lockdowns ease.

Portuguese film festival IndieLisboa, which had to abandon its original April 30 to May 10 dates, is pushing on with plans to hold its 17th edition at the end of August, if an easing of the global Covid-19 health crisis allows.

The event took the usual step of unveiling most of its 2020 selection on April 30 to mark what would have been the opening day.

“We wanted to do something symbolic,” festival director Miguel Valverde told Screen. “In a normal year, we tie up...

If Brazil’s film industry faces unprecedented threats under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, let’s hope this kind of adventurous filmmaking–which ruminates on the country’s unaddressed injustices that shaped the country of today–isn’t in the populist administration’s sights. All the Dead Ones is an accomplished film by directing duo Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, rich in the nation’s poetry and music, daring in highlighting women’s voices while commenting on Brazil’s history of inequality of wealth, class, and race.

The film hinges on the white, middle-class Soares family in São Paulo at the turn of the twentieth century, a decade after Brazil banned slavery and when the nascent republic was lurching from coup to dictatorship. Before abolition, the Soares were wealthy coffee-plantation owners, but their diminished place in social strata has meant the women of the family shelter in relative obscurity in Brazil’s largest city.

‘All The Dead Ones’ lands mid-pack.

Christian Petzold’s Undine took the lead on Screen’s Competition jury grid on day three of the Berlinale, recording three top score fours (excellent).

Those top marks came from Helena Lindblad of Dagens Nyheter, Paolo Bertolin of Segnocinema, and Wang Muyan of The Paper. It also took three scores of three (good), with only a one (poor) from The Morning Star’s Rita Di Santo pulling its average down to 3.1.

Berlinale regular Petzold’s film sees him reunite Transit stars Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski for a modern-day retelling of a myth relating to the titular water nymph.

There are a host of important, even vital ideas behind “All the Dead Ones,” a hybrid period piece addressing Brazil’s unresolved legacy of slavery and the imprint it’s had on an all-too-often downplayed contemporary racism of malignant toxicity. Set largely in 1899, 11 years after the abolition of slavery but designed so modern São Paulo increasingly bleeds into the picture, : Having a character express her colonialist guilt by seeing the ghosts of dead slaves feels far too stale when presented with such Freudian hysteria. Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, collaborating as directors for the first time, channel the artificiality of late Manoel de Oliveira but without the enticing mystery, hampered by an understandable earnestness that yearns for a more subtle approach. International prospects are uncertain at best.

It doesn’t help that the character one instantly bonds with dies after the first few minutes. Josefina (Alaíde Costa) is an...

Sometimes, as a critic, you really love the film that the filmmakers were trying to make — even though they failed, perhaps even spectacularly, to actually make it. Brazilian Berlinale competition title All the Dead Ones (Todos os mortos) is one such film.

Directors Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra — the latter a co-director on the fascinating genre hybrid Good Manners that premiered in Locarno in 2017 — spin a story set in 1899 and 1900, a decade after slavery was abolished in Brazil. They mainly follow the women of the Soares family, whose men used to run a ...

Sometimes, as a critic, you really love the film that the filmmakers were trying to make — even though they failed, perhaps even spectacularly, to actually make it. Brazilian Berlinale competition title All the Dead Ones (Todos os mortos) is one such film.

Directors Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra — the latter a co-director on the fascinating genre hybrid Good Manners that premiered in Locarno in 2017 — spin a story set in 1899 and 1900, a decade after slavery was abolished in Brazil. They mainly follow the women of the Soares family, whose men used to run a ...

Philippe Garrel’s ‘The Salt Of Tears’ split opinion amongst our critics.

Kelly Reichardt has hit the front in the early stages of Screen’s Berlin 2020 Competition jury grid with her latest film First Cow.

It received consistent scores from all seven critics, with nothing lower than a two (average) and this year’s first score of four (excellent) from Screen’s own critic, culminating in a 2.7 average.

The film, which premiered at Telluride last year, centres on a cook who signs on to serve a party of fur trappers in the Pacific Northwest, forming a friendship with a Chinese immigrant.

Directed by Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, Brazilian Berlin competition entry “All the Dead Ones” kicks off in Belle Epoque 1899 São Paulo. Ana, the daughter of a plantation owner and her nun sister attempt persuade a reluctant Ina, a former slave, to perform an ancient African ritual to cure their mother. A time warp at the hour mark moves part of the drama to contemporary high-rise São Paulo, as Ana in 1899 becomes obsessed by ghosts of dead black slaves.

“‘All the Dead Ones’ talks about how Brazil is much richer than we maybe think. Although a period film, it talks in a very original way about something still happening today,” says Carlo Chatrian, Berlin artistic director. The directors talked to Variety about the film.

The film uses an arresting time warp to ask how much Brazil has really changed.

Gotardo: The way that Brazilian society was organized after the end...

In 2018, just 4% of funding applications for Brazil’s Fundo Sectorial do Audiovisual came from black filmmakers. This year, the two biggest Brazilian movies at Berlin, competition entry “All the Dead Ones” and Panorama player “Shine Your Eyes,” throw sharp focus on Brazil’s majority black community.

That’s no coincidence. Brazil has an extraordinary 13 features in major Berlinale sections, 19 films overall, an all-time record making it Berlin’s fourth-largest national presence following Germany, France and the U.S.

Explanations cut several ways. For Brazil, this year’s Berlinale presence marks a long-term revolution. Last century, Brazil remained largely turned in on itself, cut off from the rest of Latin America by its Portuguese language and own massive market.

Cinema was the same. “At the turn of the century, very few filmmakers — Caca Diegues, Walter Salles, Fernando Meirelles — looked to secure festival berths,” recalls André Sturm, who launched Brazilian export board...

Competition

“All the Dead Ones”

Caetano Godardo, Marco Dutra

Following up on their Locarno-prized “Good Manners,” genre auteur Dutra and Gotardo deliver a lushly turned-out family drama that converts ghostliness into political metaphor, conflating 1899 Sao Paulo with its high-rise present, asking if the uneasy relationship between Brazil’s white elite and black majority has essentially changed.

Sales: Indie Sales

Encounters

“Los Conductos”

Camilo Restrepo

Pinky, on the run from a sect, takes to squatting, making T-shirts for a living, taking drugs and spinning images of the Apocalypse, damnation, revenge. A spectral, crazed allegory of Colombian post-civil conflict reinsertion that won Mar del Plata’s 2019 Works in Progress.

Sales: Best Friend Forever

Panorama

“A Common Crime”

Francisco Márquez

Set in class-riven Argentina and packing, reportedly, a great finale and commanding performance from lead Elisa Carricajo as an Argentine university teacher who fails to help her maid’s son, with literally haunting consequences.

AMC Networks’ streaming service Shudder has acquired the genre thriller “Dead & Beautiful,” directed prominent Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek (“Full Contact”), for the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The film is represented in international territories by Indie Sales.

Verbeek’s seventh feature “Dead & Beautiful” follows a group of young and spoiled teenagers in an Asian megalopolis who turn into vampires after a night of partying. Bewildered at first, the group realizes they feel even stronger, more attractive and more invincible than ever before, but it quickly dawns on them that they can no longer trust each other. “Dead & Beautiful” was lensed by Jasper Wolf (“Monos”).

Verbeek’s credits include “R U There,” which played at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2010, and “Full Contact,” which competed at Toronto in the inaugural Platform Section in 2015. “Dead & Beautiful” was produced by Lemming Film.

“Shudder has been following David’s...

In the run up to Berlin’s European Film Market, Indie Sales has unveiled the trailer for Thor Klein’s “Adventures of a Mathematician” which had its world premiere in Palm Springs.

The film tells the inspiring true story of a Polish-Jewish mathematician who got a fellowship at Harvard and went on to join the prestigious Manhattan Project in New Mexico at the end of WW2.

“I think ‘Adventures of a Mathematician,’ which was based on Stanislaw Ulam’s autobiography, has some striking parallels to today’s world issues— refugees in a far land, family separations, threats of war, and of course the bomb,” said Claire Weiner, who is the daughter of Stan Ulam and has been supporting the movie. “Thor Klein has bravely woven the story of my father’s life into a real political morality play as well as a study of family relationships and the lure of the Southwest.

The new co-heads of the Berlin Film Festival have had an eventful build up to their first edition, which gets underway in two weeks. The festival program has been greeted with cautious optimism but there have also been bumps in the road, including last week’s suspension of the Alfred Bauer Silver Bear Prize and some questions over the choice of Jeremy Irons as jury head in light of comments the actor once made about women and same sex marriage.

We spoke to artistic director Carlo Chatrian (formerly of Locarno) and executive director Mariette Rissenbeek (formerly of German Films) about this year’s lineup, the festival’s direction and some of the noise being made away from the films. The duo declined to answer additional questions about the Alfred Bauer situation but we have covered that here.

Deadline: How are you feeling about this year’s festival?

Carlo Chatrian: We both feel very excited.