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German actress Hanna Schygulla delivered a powerful criticism of nationalism and far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) at the Berlinale today.

“We have to get away from this nationalistic thing,” said Schygulla, speaking at the press conference for Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Competition title Yunan. “It has only brought tears, wars, people being abused. All this shouldn’t be at stake anymore.

“Now we have the worst people in charge of the world. I feel quite impotent,” continued Schygulla, in a speech that lasted around eight minutes. “Everything in life is in movement, so maybe they will move out at some time – I hope.

Paris-based Pulsar Content has boarded “The Velazquez Mystery,” narrated by Cannes and Venice best actor winner Vincent Lindon, which also marks the directorial debut of renowned French producer Stéphane Sorlat.

The third part of a doc feature trilogy — following José Luis López Linares’ “Bosch: The Garden of Dreams” and his “Goya, Carriere and the Ghost of Buñuel” — “The Velazquez Mystery” explores multiple questions raised by the painter.

One is how Velázquez could be so admired by great painters — “the only great painter in history,” said Salvador Dalí — but remain so often on the margins of collective memory.

Quoting Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Dalí, “The Velazquez Mystery” plumbs his genius. “Velázquez was a double genius, from a technical point of view, but also how he changed the rules, putting himself inside the paintings and creating labyrinths of meaning,” Sorlat told Variety.

“Guided by the symbolic thread of water, a metaphor for movement and reflection,...

Tsai Ming Liang Guide: As the 20th century drew to a close, cinema, like other art forms, was undergoing a metamorphosis. Hollywood, in a desperate attempt to keep audiences engaged, embraced new technological advancements, such as improved visual effects. It sought to captivate the masses by blurring the lines between reality and imagination, producing sci-fi blockbusters like “Terminator 2” (1991), “Jurassic Park” (1993), and “Armageddon” (1998). However, thousands of miles away from sunny Los Angeles, another group of filmmakers across Europe and Asia consciously took cinema in a different direction. Rather than helping audiences forget the fourth wall, they aimed to reinforce it, creating films that were acutely aware of their own impact, intentionally distancing viewers from the on-screen events by withholding the cut.

In contemporary film theory, this shift is referred to as ‘Slow Cinema.’ To an avid cinephile, it is now a fairly common term. Maestros like Béla Tarr, Pedro Costa,...

When he introduced the world premiere of “The Return” at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday night, director Uberto Pasolini pointed out that nobody has made a film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” since 1955, when Italian director Mario Camerini made a version with Kirk Douglas as Odysseus. He skipped over a couple of other versions as well as works by Theo Angelopoulos and the Coen brothers that borrowed elements from Homer’s tale, but the point remains: One of the first great works of Western literature is not marketable IP these days.

But it’s still a hell of a tale, as “The Return” proves. The film leaves out the first two-thirds of the book, the part that includes the cyclops and the Sirens and the six-headed sea monster and lots of meddling by the gods. Instead, it sticks with the final section in which Odysseus returns...

Sofia Exarchou’s Animal won seven prizes at the Hellenic Film Academy’s Iris Awards, including best film, director, screenplay, actress and supporting actress.

The Greek-Austrian-Romanian-Bulgarian co-production about a group of young entertainers working in a Greek resort hotel was nominated in 14 categories. Animal world premiered at Locarno 2023, winning the best actress award for Dimitra Vlagopoulou.

The producers are Maria Drandaki and Maria Kontogianni from Homemade Films with support from the Greek Film Centre, Ekome and Ert Public TV.

Scroll down for list of winners

An emotional Willem Dafoe went up to the stage to receive the best actor award for psychological suspense thriller Inside,...

US research suggests that 92 minutes is the optimum length for a film. But I have sat through long films that felt short and short films that felt buttock-annihilatingly long

I can still remember sitting down to Theo Angelopoulos’s legendary epic film The Travelling Players and noting that it was 222 minutes long and thinking … sure, cool, two hours and twenty-two minutes, tiny bit on the long side, Ok, nothing I can’t handle. The truth hit me just as the house lights were starting to dim and that spasm of unease came back into my mind reading about the new US research survey that suggests that 92 minutes is the “perfect” length for a film.

The “perfect” length? What does that even mean? Larry David fans will remember his magnificent resentment in Curb Your Enthusiasm when someone tries to think of something nice to say about his hugely unsuccessful feature film...

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Theo Angelopoulos, Lynne Ramsay, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lee Chang-dong, Terence Davies, Shōhei Imamura, Bi Gan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villleneuve, Céline Sciamma, Guillermo del Toro, Kelly Reichardt. Those are just a few of the filmmakers introduced to New York audiences at New Directors/New Films over the last half-century across over 1,100 premieres.

Now returning for its 53rd edition at Film at Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art from April 3-14, this year’s lineup features 35 new films, presenting prizewinners from Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, and Sundance film festivals. Ahead of the festival kicking off next week, we’ve gathered fourteen films to see, and one can explore the full lineup and schedule here.

All, or Nothing at All (Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang)

In All, or Nothing at all, director Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang employs an experimental...

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Zois, who’s set to bow his sophomore feature, “Arcadia,” in the competitive Encounters strand of the Berlin Film Festival Feb. 18, is developing his first TV series.

“Play” follows a lone cinephile who joins a mysterious group of strangers that reenact scenes from movies in real life. The eight-part mystery-drama series tells the story of ordinary individuals who gradually lose themselves in the hazy realm between reality and fiction.

Zois says the show, which is produced by Athens-based Foss Prods. and repped internationally by Beta Cinema, is his personal attempt to “bridge the gap between cinema and series.”

“I really like exploring new territories,” he tells Variety, noting that he first conceived of “Play” as a feature film. Eventually, however, the director decided that an episodic series would allow him to “experiment” while pushing against the boundaries of a new form.

Zois’ latest feature, “Arcadia,” is a similar,...

by Vedant Srinivas

Epic in both length and scope, “Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell”, Vietnamese writer-director Thien An Pham's debut feature, and the winner of this year's Camera d'Or prize at Cannes, offers a striking meditation on faith, love, and the beguiling nature of earthly existence.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is screening at Qcinema

The very first scene in “Yellow Cocoon”' sets up the encounter between spiritual and corporeal existence: sandwiched between a believer and an atheist, Thien voices his agnostic thoughts about the existence of a higher power (“I want to believe but I can't”). As if on cue, a sudden gust of wind blows across, and their discussion is interrupted by the sound of a motorcycle collision. Later, it will turn out that the person who died in the freak accident was none other than Thien's sister-in-law Hanh, while his five-old nephew, Dhao, remained miraculously unharmed.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan likes to take his time. The Turkish director is one of the greatest living practitioners of slow cinema. The filmmaking ethos — pioneered by Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky and taken up by the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Albert Serra, Béla Tarr, Kelly Reichardt and Lav Diaz — eschews the rapid editing and relentless nonstop forward-driving plots of the Hollywood blockbuster (looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) for a more contemplative, metaphysical approach.

The characters in a Ceylan movie don’t do much. There’s little action or traditional suspense, and the storylines are fairly basic. In 2002’s Distant, a rural factory worker visits his cousin in Istanbul. Homicide police unearth the body of a murder victim and take a long drive back to the city for the autopsy in 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. An old actor, his wife and his sister sit...

All of life, including death, is in the lengthy, unbroken shot that opens Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” We begin on the sidelines of a local soccer match in Saigon’s city center, observing the play from a cool distance before following a shuffling mascot, dressed in a wolf suit, to the adjoining bar. There, crowds watch a 2018 World Cup fixture while a group of young men, turned from the TV, drink and discuss matters of faith, existence and ennui. Thien (Le Phong Vu) is quiet and morose, only half-invested in a conversation already beset with distractions: the sales pitch of a bubbly beer rep, the burst of a sudden summer thunderstorm, a metallic screech and grim thump as the camera again drifts serenely over to reveal the aftermath of a fatal motorcycle crash. In the ensuing rhubarb of bystander concern, Thien stays put.

Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion (1985).The opening shot of Shinji Sômai’s Lost Chapter of Snow: Passion (1985) is 14 minutes long, probing an oneiric palace of artifice. The camera surveys a miniaturized series of homes that represent different stages in the life of an orphan, marching from storybook mistreatment meted out by her foster family, to a questionable attachment to an unorthodox—though caring—father figure, who relieves the toil foisted upon her. The snow globe ambiance provides a sandbox for Sômai’s storied formalism, the camera and the set engaged in a symbiotic give-and-take, filling in blanks when one or the other is totally spent. Events occur at an unsteady clip; years are skipped over with little more than a panning motion. But then, this climate of impressionistic memory is ruptured: a smash cut reintroduces Iori (Yuki Saito), now a perilously carefree teenager, suspended over the all-too-real pavement as she...

Marty is headed to the French Riviera! The Cannes Film Festival, reports Deadline, has confirmed that Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of The Flower Moon’ will get its world premiere on the Croisette on Saturday, May 20, in the Grand Theatre Lumiere.

One of this year’s most anticipated movies, the Apple charge has been long considered a likely Cannes contender, reports Deadline.

The film will play in Official Selection, but it’s not clear yet whether it will be in Competition — that will become clear at the festival’s press conference in mid-April. Treading the red carpet will be Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion and Tantoo Cardinal.

As per Deadline, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, which is based on David Grann’s best-selling book and written for the screen by Eric Roth and Scorsese, is set in 1920s Oklahoma...

Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the upcoming feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, will officially premiere at the 76th Festival de Cannes.

The May 20 debut of the Apple Original Film, which will premiere in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, will mark the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s return to to the festival after nearly 40 years, when he screening “After Hours” in 1986. Beyond Cannes, “Killers of the Flower Moon” will open in select cities on Oct. 6 before expanding nationwide on Oct. 20 ahead of a release on Apple TV+.

Paramount will be a distribution partner on the film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone and tells the story of the murders of multiple Osage people in Oklahoma in the 1920s after oil was discovered on tribal land. DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, nephew of the murderous cattle tycoon William Hale, who is played by Robert De Niro. The feature...

The Cannes Film Festival has this morning confirmed that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon will get its world premiere on the Croisette on Saturday, May 20 in the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

One of this year’s most anticipated movies, the Apple charge has been long considered a likely Cannes contender. The pic will play in Official Selection but it’s not clear yet whether it will play in Competition — that will become clear at the festival’s press conference in mid-April.

Treading the red carpet will be Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Tantoo Cardinal, and more.

Based on David Grann’s best-selling book and written for the screen by Eric Roth and Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon...

Film will screen on Saturday, May 20 in the Grand Théâtre Lumière.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon has been confirmed to world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 16-27.

The festival will roll out its famous red carpet on May 20 (the first Saturday of the event) to welcome Scorsese and the Apple Original Film’s star-studded cast including Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion and Tantoo Cardinal among others.

The film will screen in the Palais’ Grand Théâtre Lumière...

Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978).“The Levites shall then proclaim in a loud voice to all the people of Israel: Cursed be anyone who makes a sculptured or molten image, abhorred by the Eternal, a craftsman’s handiwork, and sets it up in secret.”My grandfather would have found an entry point in an observation about my height. “If only I’d been as tall as you,” he might have said from the head of the table while I helped my grandmother clear a plate. “Then I coulda had it easier.” That was a common refrain of his, one that, as my siblings and cousins and I grew older and bigger, allowed him to list with increasing starkness the atrocities he suffered but could’ve avoided—if he had not been so tiny. I probably learned about my family’s annihilation on one of these Friday nights, after the sun went down...

Berlinale competition film “Music” opens with gray clouds racing across the face of a Greek mountain as a storm prepares to break. It is a suitably dramatic prelude to the tumultuous events that will unfold, albeit rendered in an understated manner by German director Angela Schanelec, who won the Berlinale best director award in 2019 for “I Was at Home, But.”

As the storm lifts, an abandoned baby boy is rescued a paramedic, who names him Jon. Years later, Jon, now a young man, kills another man, accidentally, and ends up in prison. Here, he is tended to by a female guard, Iro, as his eyesight begins to deteriorate. When he is released, the two get married and have a child. But several years later, his wife discovers a terrible secret.

In the film, the myth of Oedipus is reworked freely. The action mainly takes place in Greece, starting in the 1980s,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSKristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper (2016).The next film directed by Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead) will star Kristen Stewart as…Susan Sontag. Based on Ben Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Sontag: Her Life, the project will have some hybrid-doc elements, as we might expect from Johnson: according to Screen Daily, Johnson will film an interview with the actress about her preparation for the role at the Berlinale, where Stewart is jury president.Richard Ayoade will direct and star in an adaptation of George Saunders’s The Semplica Girl Diaries, with casting currently underway.New Spanish Cinema luminary Carlos Saura died last week aged 91. His best-known films depicted and critiqued life under the Franco dictatorship, like La Caza...

After last month kicked off with Sight and Sound unveiling of their once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll, detailing the 100 films that made the cut that were led by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, they’ve now unveiled the full critics’ top 250. While the discourse up until now has featured many wondering why certain directors were totally absent and why other films that previously made the top 100 were left out, more clarity has arrived with this update.

Check out some highlights we clocked below, the full list here, and return on March 2 when all ballots and comments will be unveiled.

The films closest to making the top 100 were Rio Bravo, The House Is Black, and Vagabond, which tied for #103. Four directors absent in the top 100––Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jacques Demy––have two films each in the top 250: The Tree of Life...

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: Landscapes of TimeFourteen films will be showing from October 13 to December 18, 2022 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood with free tickets and free parking thanks to an anonymous donor to the Hammer Museum. Sponsored by UCLA’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles, the kickoff film, ‘Landscapes in the Mist’ played to a full house.

How did all these people know Theodoros Angelopoulos? I thought he was my own private guilty pleasure, my own discovery from the days when I would spend the last day of every film festival where I was working to see a film I wanted to see, knowing I would never be able to convince my company to buy it. It was at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 1991 when I first saw an Angelopoulis film, The Suspended Step of the Stork starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. I had never seen such a film with the story only revealing its impact at the end. I had seen slow films of Antonioni (not knowing his screenwriter was the same who wrote Angelopoulos’s films), but this film was so unlike any film I had ever seen before. I barely understood what was happening until the end when story revealed the inner core of its truth. At that moment, I knew that the film had changed my life and my perceptions. This was the first in Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders.

‘Suspended Step of the Stork’

As of this writing, two films have screened thus far: Landscape in the Mist (European Film Award for Best Film), the last of his Trilogy of Silence. It was followed the next week by Eternity and a Day (Palme d’Or at the 51st edition of the Cannes Film Festival), the last of his Trilogy of Borders. Having seen these two, so many questions arose for me that I knew I needed to find out more about Angelopoulos himself.

Why these trilogies? Does he always work in threes, making trilogies and why?

Why were both Eternity and a Day and Landscape in the Mist about a little boy Alexander who has no parents, and most particularly no father? Is Alexander in all his films?

What’s with the troupe of actors which keeps showing up in Landscape in the Mist and is central to The Traveling Players his Trilogy of History?

Why are there always three yellow jacketed bicycle riders in the two films I have so far seen?

Why is there always a wedding — sometimes happy, sometimes not so?

Critic Andrew Horton calls Angelopoulos’ films, “Cinema of Contemplation” which does give the context within which one derives the full impact of his stories, more through contemplation than through following a plot line which nevertheless exists. Angelopoulos believed cinema was creating a new form of universal communication. He also saw his own life as a continuation of Greek history from the beginning of time, a theme he reiterates in his films. To absorb such a large picture, one must be in a contemplative state of mind. The films provide a framework for meditation. And his end shot is more than once a line of yellow jacketed repair workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon or riding bicycles to beyond the frame of what we see. I must see the rest of the films to know what these repairmen are doing to extend travel and communication beyond borders.

Angelopoulos views the world through the eyes of a child named Alexander who in Landscape in the Mist is about five and is traveling across Greece to Germany with his ten year old sister Voula to find the father they have never known. They recognize they are part of a story with no end. The only adult words describing their odyssey are in the bedtime story Voula tells Alexander; in the introduction to a staged play that the friend they find on the road, named Orestes, describes to them; and in the first words spoken by a singing actor as the traveling theater troupe is about to start performing the play. But, as in the bedtime story and in Orestes’ description, the play, seemingly interrupted by other events, never finishes. The story starts, “in the beginning is darkness, then comes light, then the sea and sky, then the plants and trees.” When his sister feels fear for what lies ahead, Alexander comforts her with his promise to continue telling the story that never finishes. Through the mist, they find the tree, so vaguely described by Orestes as he shows them blank frames of a 35mm piece of film he picks up and so materially there in front of them when they cross the last border to Germany. They hug its trunk in relief and renewed trust in the will of some higher order that they have arrived safely.

Landscape in the Mist is the last of the Trilogy of Silence, haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness, myth, and memory. Landscape in the Mist represents the “silence of God”. The other two parts are the “silence of history” in Voyage to Cythera (1984) and the “silence of love” in The Beekeeper [1986).

In Eternity and a Day, the child in himself, Alexander (Bruno Ganz), has become a great writer and poet who is now facing his final days of a fatal illness. Putting his affairs in order and bidding farewell to family and friends before admitting himself into the hospital where he will await death, he asks “How long is tomorrow?” and is told, it is “eternity and a day.” He finds himself paired on his last day with a child, an Albanian illegal of Greek origin who fears the future with no adult to guide him into an unknown land across the sea. The poet himself lacks to words to finish his own work let alone help the child with his fears and his own journey, but his redemption comes from a literal exchange of words through the child which allows him to transcend his life and his emotional distance.

The three words Alexander receives from the Albanian boy are korfulamu, a delicate word for the heart of a flower, a literal ‘word of comfort’ for his physical suffering. The second is xenitis, the feeling of being a stranger everywhere, including with his own beautiful wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). and daughter. The third is argathini, meaning ‘very late at night’, a metaphor for the ‘twilight’ of his existence.

The story that never finishes is the human odyssey of migrations and crossing borders, both in lands and in our minds as we face unknown futures in landscapes we do not recognize as our own. Angelopoulos’ reality unfolds through the prism of his memories. And he counts himself lucky to have lived consciously within the context of history. His memories are a continuation of the long history of Greece. He was born in 1935 the year before King George II of Greece returned to Rome with his Prime Minister Metaxas who, with the agreement of the king, suspended the parliament and established the quasi-fascist Metaxas regime. He lived through World War II, the subsequent Civil War, and the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.

He sees his films not as psychological studies of characters but as characters’ personal lives within a historical context, of “finding one’s own history within the history of a place.” He considers his political films quite different from those of Costa Gavras’ whose he calls bourgeois.

Starting with The Iliad, The Odyssey, and later the concluding Aeneid, continuing with the classic tretralogies, cycles of three plays by the great playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Angelopoulis likewise writes in trilogies, three tragedies intended to be seen in one sitting, but way too long for most of us modern westerners. The trilogies of Angelopoulos would have greater impact if we could see them sequentially, even if not in one sitting. But the programmers did not see it that way and so we must see each film (which stands on its own) interspersed in what seems to be a random order. Even so, the themes intertwine seamlessly creating a textile of modern Greek myth, thought and insight.

Angelopoulos created Days of ’36 in 1972. It is the first film of what would become his self-described Trilogy of History that also includes The Traveling Players (1975) and Alexander the Great (1980) with an epilogue of The Hunters (1977). (The Greek plays also had epilogues.) That he made the first two films in Greece during the dictatorship required an “imposed silence” and indeed, that is the prevalent element in Days of ’36, the story of the country’s ruling leisure class suppressing the fight of leftist labor. The film begins with the assassination of a labor organizer and ends with a mafiosa-type last word of the ruling class which needs stability at any cost.

In The Traveling Players, Senses of Cinema writes:

It is interesting to note that Angelopoulos uses members of an otherwise anonymous cast of marginalized traveling players as conveyers of contemporary Greek history …: Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) traces his immigration from Asia Minor to Greece (a reminder of the country’s historically borderless, ethnically diverse population that can be traced back to the Ottoman Empire), Electra (Eva Kotamanidou) chronicles the start of the Civil War after the defeat of the Germans in 1944, and Pylades (Kiriakos Katrivanos) provides a personal account of the torture of political prisoners. In essence, by using the testament of people who are literally transient and homeless (and without identity), Angelopoulos creates a powerful analogy for all Greek people as displaced exiles within their own country.

Again, from Senses of Cinema:

Angelopoulos returned to the theme of the nation’s historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to examine the the refugee’s resigned sentiment, “We’ve crossed the border and we’re still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?”, carries through to the makeshift, outdoor cinema in Angelopoulos’ next film, Ulysses’ Gaze, as A arrives for an unauthorized screening of his film. Like the adrift Spyros in The Beekeeper, A’s devastating emotional odyssey through his ancestral homeland is also a personal journey to reconnect with his cultural past, striving to recapture the purity of human vision that has been tainted by romantic loss, artistic controversy, familial estrangement, ideological disillusionment, and the ravages of war.

Regarding the written words of the scripts, Angelopoulos consistently worked with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who also frequently collaborated with such celebrated directors as Federico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni (he wrote all of his movies’ scripts) and Francesco Rossi. Guerra consulted on The Dust of Time, cowrote The Weeping Meadow, Eternity and a Day, Ulysses’ Gaze, and wrote The Suspended Step of the Stork, Landscape in the Mist, The Beekeeper and Voyage to Cythera.

Angelopoulos also collaborated regularly with the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis and the composer Eleni Karaindrou, both of whom are essential to his works’ impact.

One of the recurring themes of his work is immigration, the flight from homeland and the return, as well as the history of 20th century Greece. Angelopoulos was considered by British film critics Derek Malcolm and David Thomson to be one of the world’s greatest directors.

Angelopoulos died late 24 January 2012, several hours after being involved in an crash while shooting the last film of his latest trilogy on modern Greece, The Other Sea in Athens. On that evening, the filmmaker had been with his crew in the area of Drapetsona, near Piraeus when he was hit by a motorcycle ridden by an off-duty police officer. The crash occurred when Angelopoulos, 76, attempted to cross a busy road. The first two films were The Weeping Meadow (2004)) and The Dust of Time (2008).

As his legacy lives on, it reminds those of us who contemplate time and space that our Western Civilization began when Greece’s voice was raised to express our most primal emotions in its tragedies. Angelopouos’ work, along with the oldest epic cycle and the Greek tragedies, all deal with the aftermath of world shaking wars which are the results of revenge and murder, sex and power wielded by those more powerful than even the king despots of the age, but by the gods themselves (whoever she is).

When audiences return for the 63rd edition of the Thessaloniki Intl. Film Festival, which runs Nov. 3-13, many hoping to discover the new wave of up-and-coming local talent might be searching for the next “Magnetic Fields,” the feature debut of graphic artist-turned-director Yorgos Goussis. After riding the success of its 2021 Thessaloniki premiere to sweep the country’s local Academy Awards, the film is representing Greece in the international feature film Oscar race.

Since its modest origins as Greek Cinema Week among movie-lovers in this handsome seaside city, the Thessaloniki event has offered a launching pad for emerging Greek talents ranging from Goussis to Theo Angelopoulos, the towering figure of 20th-century Greek cinema, who premiered his first feature, “Reconstruction,” at the fest in 1970.

Half a century later, Greece is enjoying its brightest big-screen moment since the likes of Academy Award nominee Yorgos Lanthimos ushered in the Greek Weird Wave in the late ’00s.

Berlin-based sales company M-Appeal has boarded Gentian Koçi’s Albanian drama “A Cup of Coffee and New Shoes On,” which will world premiere in Tallinn Film Festival’s Main Competition and is Albania’s official submission for the Academy Awards.

Set in urban Tirana, the film follows the emotional story and close bond of two identical twin brothers in their thirties. They are deaf, which doesn’t get in the way of their everyday life, but after visiting a doctor they find out that they will also lose their sight.

In preparation for the film, the three lead actors and producer Blerina Hankollari spent six months learning Albanian sign language with the Albania National Assn. of the Deaf (Anad). Representatives from the association were also present on the film set every day, coaching the actors and making sure the sign language was interpreted correctly.

Maren Kroymann, M-Appeal’s managing director,...

Orestis Andreadakis, director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, has a lot on his mind when he sits down with Deadline via Zoom from his office in Athens. Climate change, women’s rights, and the war in Ukraine are all topics he discussed, and he believes film festivals, including his own, must find a way to address and interrogate wider social issues.

“For us, it’s not only about films with big names or premieres,” Andreadakis tells Deadline. “We want to say something. We want to leave a trace in our hearts, soul, and mind.”

As such, this year, Thessaloniki’s lineup is littered with socially-minded films like British filmmaker Georgia Oakley’s debut feature Blue Jean, a soulful drama about homophobia in Thatcherite Britain, and Wolf and Dog by Cláudia Varejão, an astute film about gender roles and human interactions.

Overall, 199 full-length films will screen across Thessaloniki’s various sections.

The films of legendary Greek writer-director Theo Angelopoulos – whose “Eternity and a Day” won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1998 – are being screened at a two-month tribute in the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater near the UCLA campus in Westwood. The career retrospective opened on October 14 and will continue through December 18.

Called Landscapes of Time: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, the tribute includes all the director’s feature films and a selection of shorts.

Angelopoulos was a major force in the Greek film industry from the mid-1970s until his death in 2012. Drawing on his own experiences with the tumultuous events taking place in Greece, his films often center on characters whose personal journeys become intertwined with the tides of history.

While many moviegoers have found Angelopoulos’ films uncompromising and challenging, they are ultimately rewarded by his work’s unique storytelling, epic scale and stunning imagery – all factors...

M-Appeal has closed more deals on “The Man With the Answers,” Stelios Kammitsis’ gay road trip dramedy about a spontaneous summer journey that unexpectedly turns into something more.

The company announced sales to Poland (Tongariro Releasing), Hong Kong (Edko Films), and Taiwan (Joint Entertainment Int.) during the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the film played in the Meet the Neighbors competition. Previously inked deals include North America (Artsploitation Films), U.K. and Ireland (Peccadillo Pictures), France (Optimale), German-speaking territories (Salzgeber & Co.), and Benelux (Arti Film).

Kammitsis’ sophomore feature is the story of a former diving champion (Vasilis Magouliotis) whose life gets turned upside-down after the death of his grandmother. Setting off on a road trip to Germany, he meets a fellow traveler (Anton Weil) whose free-spirited personality soon prompts him to reveal the real reasons behind his trip. When their journey finally comes to an end, they’re confronted with the...

Chances are, if you’ve seen many of the late films of Theodoros Angelopoulos, Michelangelo Antonioni (everything since L’avventura), Marco Bellocchio, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini (almost everything since Amarcord), Mario Monicelli, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia), the Taviani brothers, and/or Luchino Visconti, and paid much attention to their script credits, you know who Tonino Guerra (1920–2012) was and is—a ubiquitous presence in modernist European cinema, especially its Italian branches. Petri was his first cinematic employer, after Guerra started out as a schoolteacher and poet whose parents were illiterate; later on, he became a visual artist as well as a screenwriter with over a hundred credits.Even after one acknowledges the exceptionally collaborative role played by multiple writers on Italian films, it seems that no one else was considered quite as essential by so many important directors. In Nicola Tranquillino’s documentary about Tonino (visible on YouTube...

Turkey’s Academy Award Entry for Best Foreign Language Film: ‘The Wild Pear Tree’‘The Wild Pear Tree’ by Nuri Bilge CeylanThe guilty pleasure of Cannes is seeing a 3 hour and 8 minute film that takes you into an unknown place and leads you toward a perfect ending. In this category Nuri Bilge Ceylan joins Andrei Tarkovsky and Theodoros Angelopoulos.

The Wild Pear Tree is about Sinan, a young man returning from college who is passionate about literature and has always wanted to be a writer. Returning to the village where he was born, he pours his heart and soul into scraping together the money he needs to be published, but his father’s debts catch up with him…

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan, Murat Cemcir, Tamer Levent, Hazar Ergüçlü, and Dogu Demirkol in Cannes

Going on long walks, Sinan joins the town’s iman and his college...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.News We are devastated to learn that the late Theodoros Angelopoulos' home, which housed the director's archives, has burnt down amidst the Attica wildfires in Greece. It is currently unclear what has been lost in the fire. This is the house that housed the whole archives of late director Theo Angelopoulos. Everything has been burnt. A massive loss to not only modern Greek culture but world culture. pic.twitter.com/DM60QxWP6a— Konn1e (@ntina79) July 25, 2018Recommended Viewing The ever-elegant "Mandopop diva" Faye Wong reprises her cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams"—best known for its appearance in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express—in the first episode of Phantacity, a Chinese variety show that creates "music video-worthy performances." The full episode can be viewed here. Lucrecia Martel has directed a music video for Argentine...

The guilty pleasure of Cannes is seeing a 3 hour and 8 minute film that takes you into an unknown place and leads you toward a perfect ending. In this category Nuri Bilge Ceylan joins Andrei Tarkovsky and Theodoros Angelopoulos.

The Wild Pear Tree is about Sinan, a young man returning from college who is passionate about literature and has always wanted to be a writer. Returning to the village where he was born, he pours his heart and soul into scraping together the money he needs to be published, but his father’s debts catch up with him…

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Zeynep Ozbatur Atakan, Murat Cemcir, Tamer Levent, Hazar Ergüçlü, and Dogu Demirkol in Cannes

Going on long walks, Sinan joins the town’s iman and his college mate and they carry on a long discussion about morality, each one offering a different viewpoint, one more liberal, one more...

Jeanne Moreau, a legend of French cinema and one of the French New Wave's leading actresses with roles in Jules & Jim and Elevator to the Gallows, died this weekend at the age of 89.

French authorities confirmed that the actress died at her Paris home; no cause of death was revealed, the BBC reports.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted of Moreau, "A legend of cinema and theater … an actress engaged in the whirlwind of life with an absolute freedom."

Pierre Lescure, president of the Cannes Film Festival, said in a statement,...

The great French actress, who starred in films by Jacques Becker, Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Orson Welles in her early career and by Theodoros Angelopoulos, Agnès Varda, Tsai Ming-liang and Manoel de Oliveira in her late career, has died at the age of 89. She consecrated the great modernist development of arthouse cinema with an unforgettable and unique poise, interiority and gravity.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1995) is showing April 27 - May 27 and Landscape in the Mist (1988) is showing April 28 - May 28, 2017 in the United States.Landscape in the Mist“We Greeks are dying people. We've completed our appointed cycle. Three thousand years among broken stones and statues, and now we are dying.”—Taxi driver, Ulysses’ GazeIt seems that no essay on the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos can neglect to mention that, despite being recognized as one of cinema’s masters in Europe, he has repeatedly failed to cross over to the United States. A retrospective at the Museum of the Modern Art in 1990, a Grand Prix at Cannes Ulysses’ Gaze in 1995, a Palme d’Or for Eternity and a Day in 1998, and, most recently, a complete 35mm retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image and Harvard Film Archive...

Following the Persian New Year of Nowruz * arrive the eight days of the festival where the last works of great filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda, Cristian Mongiu, Dardenne brothers, Denis Tanovic, Francois Ozon, Sion Sono, Agnieszka Holland, Aki Kaurismaki, Terrence Malick, Ken Loach and three Iranian Masters of Cinema will screen along with several special sidebars.

For the first time in Fajr International Film Festival, Shadow of Horror Midnight Screenings will host six horror films screening, every night at 11:30 pm in a program designed to entice an unaccustomed Iranian audience’s attention to this genre. Five of the features are from South Korea, Japan, Russia, Poland and Mexico. The sixth, an Iranian feature will have its International Premiere.

At least 68 students from 32 countries as well as 52 students from Iran are to take part in the inspiring, educational film making workshops of the 2017 Fajr. The program is called “Darol Fonoun...

One of the year’s most affecting, humanistic films, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s After the Storm, will arrive in the U.S. this week (our rave review from Cannes), so for the occasion, we’re looking at the director’s favorite films. Submitted by the Japanese director for the latest Sight & Sound poll, it’s perhaps the most varied list we’ve seen thus far — at least next to Mia Hansen-Løve‘s favorites.

Although the filmmaker is often compared to Yasujiro Ozu (none of his films are mentioned below), Hirokazu Kore-eda told The Guardian, “I of course take it as a compliment. I try to say thank you. But I think that my work is more like Mikio Naruse — and Ken Loach.” One will find his favorites from both of those directors on the list, as well as Jacques Demy‘s most-praised film, along with lesser-seen works from Hou Hsiao-hsien,...

The nineteenth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White (1967) from January 21 - February 20, 2017 in the United States.The long take—long in duration, rather than in the distance between the camera and the action—is contemporary art cinema’s greatest fetish. We commonly associate it with a static camera and empty, dead time—each moment grinding away as life evaporates—or with the steady, deliberately un-aesthetic, often lateral movements of camera and figures. However, in an earlier era, the era of Miklós Jancsó in 1960s Hungary and Theo Angelopoulos in 1970s Greece, the long take was a more supple tool, exploited for many uses, moods and effects. There is a lot happening in any, typical long take of Jancsó’s historical, political drama of the 1919 struggle between Hungarian Communists and Russian Cossacks,...

Hungarian action-comedy Kills On Wheels and Icelandic-Danish coming of age story Heartstone take top prizes at Greek festival.Scroll down for full list of winners

Hungarian director Attila Till’s Kills On Wheels (Tiszta Szivvel) has been named best film at the 57th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Nov 3-13) winning the “Theo Angelopoulos” Golden Alexander award.

The film beat out 16 first and second films screened in this year’s competition section.

Kills On Wheels’ three leading young actors, Zoltan Fenyvesi, SzaboIcs Thuroczy and Adam Fekete were jointly awarded the Best actor trophy.

The film, arriving from the Chicago film festival where it won the Roger Ebert award, deals with three wheelchair-using young adults who decide to offer their services to the mafia in an effort to overcome their daily routines. World sales are handled by the Hungarian Film Fund.

Icelandic-Danish co-production Heartstone (Hjartasteinn) by Icelandic director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson, was awarded the Special Jury Prize, Silver Alexander...

Hedi won best film, while Matt Johnson won best director for Operation Avalanche.

The Tunisian-French-Belgian co-production Hedi by Mohamed Ben Attia has won the best film award, the Golden Athena, at the 22nd Athens International Film Festival (September 22-October 2).

The film was co-produced by Tanit Films, Nomadis Images and the Dardenne brothers production outlet Les Films du Fleuve.

Majd Mastoura stars in the lead role as a young man who tries to break loose from his dominant mother and some of Tunisia’s more conservative social norms.

The film debuted at Berlin Film Festival 2016, winning the best first film award and a best actor prize for Mastoura.

The Aiff awards were decided by a five-member international jury presided over by the BFI programmes curator Nicola Gallani. The jury included German film critic Julia Teichmann (Film Dienst), French producer Sylvia Perel and her compatriot film critic Bernard Nave (Jeune Cinema).

Matt Johnson won the best director trophy for [link...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

The “Cassavetes/Rowlands” series ends on a real high note.

This Saturday, Dead Man plays with Jim Jarmusch and Chris Eyre in-person. It also screens on Sunday as part of “Native to America,” a series that brings the latter’s Smoke Signals on the same day.

Lucio Fulci‘s A Cat in the Brain screens on Saturday.

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

“Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” has a packed weekend with a slate that includes Alain Resnais‘ Je t’aime, je t’aime, Nicholas Ray‘s The Lusty Men, Jackie Brown, and, yes, Jackass 3D.

Baumbach & Paltrow‘s De Palma plays with a Jim McBride feature on Saturday and two De Palma shorts on Sunday.

Theodoros AngelopoulosSo consistent was the vision of Theodoros Angelopoulos that nearly any of his films could stand as a leading representative work. When viewing all 13 of his features within a condensed period of time—an extraordinary opportunity to be offered by New York's Museum of the Moving Image July 8 - 24—one sees just how exceptional Angelopoulos’ filmography is, and how each title is an emblematic entry in the late Greek director’s catalog of persistent themes, tonal frequencies, plot points, and, perhaps most indelibly, sheer visual boldness.Landscape in the Mist (1988)IMAGESIt is in this last regard that Angelopoulos instantly and emphatically impresses. His cinema is punctuated by a remarkable succession of single images that linger long after the film has concluded, often retaining in the viewer’s consciousness more than an overall story or specific characters. Silhouetted bodies on a fog-shrouded border fence in Eternity and a Day (1998); a...

Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos was one of the most widely acclaimed international art film directors of the 20th century, specializing in poetic, political films about contemporary Greece. Now, the Museum of Moving Image in New York will run a complete retrospective of Angelopoulos’ career, the first of its kind in the United States in 25 years. See the trailer for the series below.

Read More: NYC: Sidney Poitier Retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image Kicks Off This Weekend (April 9-17)

Chief Curator David Schwartz says that “as a new generation of Greek filmmakers, including Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, have reached international prominence, the time is ripe to see Angelopoulos anew, as cinema that reflects on the past while foretelling the turbulent world we are now living in.”

Some of the film in the series include his 1986 breakthrough work “Landscape in the Mist,” about two siblings traveling on their own...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSPhoto by Apichatpong WeerasethakulLast weekend came the news that the great experimental filmmaker of At Sea (2007) and Three Landscapes (2013), Peter Hutton, has passed away.Journalist and author Michael Herr has also died, at the age of 76. He is best known in the film world for co-writing Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and the narration to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.The first complete New York retrospective in 25 years of Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist) will be coming to the Museum of the Moving image in July.Word comes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Twitter account that the Palme d'Or-winning Thai director has begun work on his next film following the wonderful Cemetery of Splendour.Recommended VIEWINGThe latest of Radiohead's multimedia promotion of their album A Moon Shaped...

Last year, the three-part, six-hours-and-twenty-two minutes long epic Arabian Nights by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes rejected a slot in the Cannes Film Festival’s second-rung Un Certain Regard section, opting instead to be premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs ), taking place in the same French Riviera city at the same time. Why wasn’t Arabian Nights in Cannes’ official competition? Gomes’ previous film, Tabu, won two prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival, finished 2nd Sight & Sound’s and Cinema Scope’s polls of the best films of 2012, 10th in the Village Voice’s, and 11th in both Film Comment’s and Indiewire’s; he was exactly the kind of rising art-house star who should have been competing in the most prominent part of the official festival. But organizers balked at the idea of offering such a lengthy film a slot in competition where two or three others could be chosen,...

Long-time festival executive will leave his post in March but will continue in Tiff role.

The resignation this week of Dimitri Eipides from his post at the helm of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival has come as a surprise to the Greek film community and the international festival scene.

The departure of esteemed festival director Eipides is expected to mark a new chapter in the future of Thessaloniki - now in its 57th year - and the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, founded by Eipides in 1992.

Eipides will officially step down following the conclusion of the Documentary Festival in March.

“The new leadership at the Culture Ministry as well as recent changes in the cultural policy in the country make me feel my work is not necessary here anymore,” Eipides told Screen.

The festival veteran added that he intends to go on with his work as senior international programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival, a post he...

Icelandic feature Rams and Colombian rural drama Land and Shade take top prizes at Greek festival.Scroll down for full list of winners

Icelandic director Grimur Hakonarson’s Rams (Hrutar) has been named best film at the 56th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Nov 6-15) winning the Golden Alexander.

It beat competition from 13 other first and second films screened in this year’s particularly strong international competition section.

The film, awarded the Un Certain Regard top prize earlier this year in Cannes, deals with two brothers, who haven’t spoken to each other for over 40 years though living in neighbouring farms in a remote valley in Iceland raising sheep.

World sales are handled by Polish outfit New Europe Film Sales. It will be released in Greece by Ama Films.

Following a long tradition of Latin American productions sweeping the Thessaloniki awards, features from Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela shared the majority of the other official and side awards...

Soak up the Sun: Pialat’s Palme d’Or Winning Spiritual Anguish

As part of Cohen Media Group’s Maurice Pialat retrospective, perhaps the most significant title showcased in the lineup is his infamous 1987 title, Under the Sun of Satan. Instantly reviled after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (with a jury made up of such heavy-hitters as Elem Klimov, Jerzy Skolimowski, Theo Angelopoulos, and Norman Mailer), where Pialat was jeered by a disapproving crowd, the title quickly lapsed into obscurity following a continually tepid critical reception.

Perhaps Pialat’s austere and increasingly deliberate examination of mental and spiritual anguish told through the perspective of a bumbling priest whose blasphemous predicament proves only the presence of Satan rather than God was as simultaneously too old fashioned as it was inconveniently provocative. Based on a 1927 novel by French author Georges Bernanos, Pialat’s treatment does seem...

Exclusive: Gael Bernal Garcia and Marine Vacth are set to co-star in French Joan Chemla’s film noir If You See His Heart (Si Tu Voyais Son Coeur).

Bernal will play a gypsy, excluded from his community after the death of his best friend, who finds solace in the figure of Francine, played by Vacth.

The film is produced by Pierre Guyard at Paris-based Nord-Ouest, whose credits include Thomas Cailley’s Love at First Fight which swept the awards board at Directors’ Fortnight last year.

Guyard is also one of Screen’s Future Leaders this year.

Prolific Greek cinematographer and Theodoros Angelopoulos collaboratorYorgos Arvanitis is also attached to the production which is due to shoot early 2016.

“It a moving and hypnotic film noir in the vein of Takeshi Kitano or James Gray,” said Guyard, who is talking to potential distributors and co-producers in Cannes.

Chemla’s previous credits include the shorts Dr. Nazi, adapted...

The maxim goes something like there are only seven basic stories, we just find new ways of telling them. Surely one of the most told is Homer's "The Odyssey." Touching on pretty much every aspect of the arts, and retold and referenced by folks ranging from Theo Angelopoulos to the Coen Brothers to Margaret Atwood, even if you don't know the original text, you've heard a variation of the tale. And now you will again. Read More: 'Catching Fire' Director Francis Lawrence Will Also Helm Both 'Mockingjay' Films Deadline reports that "The Hunger Games" team of director Francis Lawerence, screenwriter Peter Craig, and producer Nina Jacobsen aim to make a new movie version. So what will this one do differently? Well, no details yet, but it seems whatever idea is in place everyone is happy with it. The plan is for this to be Lawrence's next film, and shoot in...

Mexico City-set dark comedy Chicuarotes revolves around teenagers living on the edge of a tourist lake.

Mexican actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal is hoping to shoot his second feature Chicuarotes early next year about a group of teenagers growing up by Xochimilco Lake in Mexico City.

Speaking to ScreenDaily, Bernal said: “The film will follow a group of kids - around 14, 15 years-old - who live by the lake. They’re economically poor but not miserable or unhappy, basically living in paradise.

“The narrative of the film follows their dreams of moving up economically and socially. They want to stop working and make lots of money. I can’t tell you now how they attempt to do this but it’s a comedy - a very dark comedy.”

Bernal spoke to Screen on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s inaugural Qumra meeting, aimed at nurturing projects by filmmakers in Qatar, across the Middle...