Berlinale Selection ‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ Producer Potocol Reveals Diverse Slate (EXCLUSIVE)

Frank Doelger’s eco-thriller drama The Swarm has made a splash on German TV.

EXCLUSIVE: Paris-based Alpha Violet has posted fresh sales on Mexican director Lila Avilés’s family drama Tótem, which world premiered in competition at the Berlinale to acclaim in February.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Sony Pictures Classics has bought “The Teachers’ Lounge,” Ilker Çatak’s drama which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, for North America, Latin America and Eastern Europe (excluding Hungary). “The Teachers’ Lounge” marks the fourth feature from Çatak, who co-wrote the screenplay with Johannes Duncker. The movie played in the Panorama section and won the Europa Cinemas Label award for Best European film, as well as the CICAE Arthouse Cinema Award. Produced by Ingo Fliess and shot by award-winning cinematographer Judith Kaufmann (“Corsage”), “The Teachers’ Lounge” stars Leonine Benesch (“The Crown”), Michael Klammer, Rafael Stachowiak, and Eva Löbau.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor To director Mira Fornay, there are no three things more important in life than trees, water and children. And with “She-Hero,” playing as part of the Generation strand at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, the Slovakian filmmaker gathers all three in telling the story of Romy (Rozmarína Willems), a young girl who embarks on a grand forest adventure in search of her lost budgie, Mimi. Fornay, who won the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam Tiger Award in 2013 with her sophomore feature “My Dog Killer,” did not originally set out to make a children’s film, but was fascinated by the natural charisma of Willems. “I already knew Romy and she is immensely photogenic, but I didn’t know if she could act as well. So I tried working with her back when she was six, and she was just amazing. When COVID hit, I realized I had to shoot quickly otherwise she would grow. This is why I wrote a story for her.”

Berlinale Series and one of Disney+’s early big plays in Southern Europe, U.K.-Italian mafia series “The Good Mothers” walked off on Wednesday night with the Berlin Festival’s inaugural Berlinale Series Award.  A large virtue of the series is to come in at the mafia from a novel angle: a real story of women who dare to defy the Italian mob.  The title forms part of the first European slate by new Disney+ international streaming service Star. It tells how bosses at the the Calabrian mob were targeted by a female prosecutor – thanks to the collaboration of three women inside the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime clan. 

The Good Mothers, Disney+’s hard-hitting mafia drama series, has won the first ever Berlinale Series Award.

Hong Sang-soo’s latest film, “In Water,” has been bought by Cinema Guild for North American distribution on the heels of its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. The film played in the Encounters section and is expected to have its North American premiere at a festival later this year. Cinema Guild will be releasing “In Water” theatrically. Described by Cinema Guild as Hong’s “most overtly experimental work to date,” “In Water” follows Seongmo (Shin Seokho), a young man who recently gave up acting and has decided to make a film with his own money. He and his two friends venture to the rocky shores of a large island to shoot the movie together. His former classmate, Sangguk (Ha Seongguk), will operate the camera and Namhee (Kim Seungyun) will act in it. The only problem is that Seongmo hasn’t decided what to make. As he wanders in the rocks and wind, Seongmo searches inspiration but what he finds is a young woman picking up trash. And that’s all he needs.

Christopher Vourlias The crime noir genre gets a distinctly South African twist in the new series “Donkerbos,” which premiered its first episodes this week as part of the Berlinale Series Market Selects lineup at the European Film Market. The show begins when the bodies of six children are found in the forests of a provincial backwater town, and a local detective (Erica Wessels) is called in to investigate the shocking crimes. But as the series unfolds, she’s forced to wrestle with her dark past, her family and a distrustful community to catch the killer before another child is taken. Written and directed by Nico Scheepers, “Donkerbos” is produced by Nagvlug Films and sold globally by MultiChoice, which bowed the show last year on its SVOD platform Showmax.

American distribution following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Cinema Guild will release the film in theaters following its North American festival premiere later this year. The film tells the story of a a pair of wayward young people who abandon theirnewborn child on a stormy night in the mountains of Greece. Taken in by a family of farmers, Jon grows up without knowing his father or mother. Years later, after a tragic accident, he is sent to prison, where he meets Iro. The two form a connection, expressed through music, that will, by turns, haunt them and uphold them the rest of their days. Freely inspired by the story of Oedipus, Schanelec’s latest is as terrifying as myth and as gentle as a folk song.

Ed Meza @edmezavar “Snow,” an Austrian-German co-production and one of 16 titles presented in the Berlinale Series Market Selects showcase, weaves the timely issue of climate change and local folklore into a suspenseful mystery drama set in the picturesque Austrian Alps. Brigitte Hobmeier stars as Lucia, a physician who with her husband and children moves to the village, where she is replacing the local doctor, who is retiring. Things take a troubling turn when her daughter is visited by a strange woman at night. The series presentation at the EFM event brings the title back to Berlin, where it came together in 2020 at the Berlinale Co-Production Market’s Co-Pro Series event.

Shades of Blue creator Adi Hasak didn’t mince his words when discussing the state of U.S. television at the EFM’s Berlinale Series Market today.

“I think we need to find a way to avoid the U.S. brainwash,” said Newen Connect CEO Rodolphe Buet at this morning’s Berlinale Series Adapting to the Market session.

Naman Ramachandran For Indian filmmaker Sreemoyee Singh, world premiering her Iran documentary “And, Towards Happy Alleys” at the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama strand is the culmination of a journey that began in 2015. Singh completed a masters degree in film studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and went on to pursue a PhD on The Exiled Filmmaker in Post Revolution Iranian Cinema, with the objective of understanding the source of “impossible hope” in Iranian films. The filmmaker was also introduced to the poetry of Iran’s Forogh Farrokhzad during the course and “connected deeply” to her verses. A desire to read Farrokhzad’s verses in the original Persian led Singh to learn Farsi.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Berlinale Special section of the Berlin Film Festival is a showcase for movies that are intelligent, but less arty than those in the main competition or festival sidebars. And in showcasing mainstream non-English-language films the section is also a springboard for performers who may be big news at home, but who are little-known outside their core markets. Japan’s Nakajima Yuto fits that description perfectly. He has a dual career as a singer with boy band Hey! Say! Jump! and more than a decade as an actor. His acting credits including the Mike Ross role in the Japanese remake of hit U.S. series “Suits.” In his position as a music idol appealing to a volatile, younger demographic, means that selecting acting roles is — normally — something requiring careful consideration.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Matt Damon revealed he was in the “early stages” on a project about Ukraine during the press conference for “Kiss the Future” at the Berlin Film Festival. Damon is a producer on the documentary which chronicles the struggle of Sarajevo citizens during the Bosnian War. World premiering in the Berlinale Special section, the politically minded documentary is directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and based on “Fools Rush in: A Memoir” the memoir of Bill Carter, an aid worker. It shows how his determination resulted in the enlistment of the world’s largest rock band, U2, to help shine a light. Fifth Season and WME handling worldwide sales. Asked if he was considering following the footsteps of Sean Penn with “Superpower” with a film on the war in Ukraine, he said he’s “watched as everyone has with horror that unfolded there in the last year,” and although they “don’t have anything on it right now there isn’t any doubt that we’ll be doing.”

Naman Ramachandran Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is ready for his close-up. After making a mark with TV’s “Misfits” and “Utopia” and in the film “Candyman,” the British actor is set to explode upon the world stage with “Femme,” world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama strand. Stewart-Jarrett plays Jules, whose alter-ego is Aphrodite, a celebrated drag queen in a gay club in London whose life is destroyed by a homophobic attack. After he spots one of the perpetrators (George MacKay) in a gay sauna, Jules plots revenge.  “Femme” is based on the BAFTA-nominated short of the same name by directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping. Stewart-Jarrett had played a former drag queen in the Tony- and Olivier Award-winning theater production of “Angels in America” and built on that during the “Femme” preparation.

Shayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade. Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books. The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau.

Naman Ramachandran “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney communicated with the real-life Reality Winner to portray her in Tina Satter’s “Reality,” which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival. The film, which contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of an FBI audio recording, follows a tense 90 minutes in the life of whistleblower Winner as the FBI interrogate at her home in 2017. Winner, a former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, was sentenced to five years in prison after she leaked an intelligence report to the media. “I had the honor and privilege to be able actually communicate with Reality. I was able to Zoom with her — Tina connected us — and I would text her throughout the process,” Sweeney told a press conference at Berlin on Saturday.

Martin Dale Contributor Portuguese director Susana Nobre’s first scripted fiction film, “Cidade Rabat,” is about a producer who grew up in the Cidade Rabat neighborhood in Lisbon, and who suddenly has to come to terms with the death of her mother. The title is partly inspired by her own life, since she grew up in the “Cidade Rabat” district of Benfica in Lisbon. Much of the action takes place in the nearby mixed-race neighborhood, Reboleira. Nobre describes the film as a “melancholic comedy about a woman who is about to turn 40, whose life enters a period of chaos when she loses her mother and suddenly lives a second adolescence.” There is a nostalgic feel to the film, of a district that was once brimming with energy but is now crumbling. This nostalgia is mixed with hope for a new life, embodied by the main character Helena’s 12-year old daughter, for which Nobre cast her own daughter.  

Callum McLennan Making its world premiere in the Generation Kplus program at the Berlin Film Festival on Feb. 19, “L’Amour du monde” (“Longing for the World”) is the feature debut from filmmaker Jenna Hasse.  Latido Films manage international sales and will be looking to add to their haul from the previous two years at Berlinale, having won with Fred Baillif’s “The Fam,” in 2021 and with Clare Weiskopf & and Nicolas van Hamelryck’s “Alis,”  in 2022.  Produced by Langfilm (“The Mountain,” “Alpine Fire,” a classic Swiss production house, the film has secured distribution with Mindjazz Pictures in Germany giving it momentum coming into its festival bow.