Director Paz Encina Talks Trauma Of Separation From Loved Ones & Climate Crisis In ‘Eami’ – Contenders International

It’s going to take a lot of work for Britney Spears to get better.

Janey Godley has urged fans to hold "loved ones close" this Christmas, as she prepares to undergo more chemotherapy.

Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi has demanded the release of actress Taraneh Alidoosti, who was arrested in Iran.

Iranian authorities have arrested Taraneh Alidoosti, one of the country’s best known actresses, after she expressed solidarity with anti-government demonstrators in a social media post.

A new scheme allowing people to donate towards West Lothian’s trees was officially launched in the grounds of Almondvale Park.

“I had never heard of this guy, and I would be the kind of person who would know about the most prolific serial killer in the U.S.,” The Good Nurse director Tobias Lindholm said of the real-life Charles Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne in the Netflix film.  

Livingston captain Nicky Devlin says he's still awaiting discussions on a new contract but confirmed he'd be more than happy to extend his stay in West Lothian.

In The Corridors of Power, filmmaker Dror Moreh takes a bracing look at the factors that kept America — the sole remaining superpower in the immediate post-Cold War era — from intervening in global instances involving genocide, war crimes and other large-scale atrocities.

Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.

Brazilian drama Mars One follows the Martins family, optimistic dreamers who are quietly leading their lives on the margins of a major Brazilian city following the disappointing election of a far-right extremist president. They are a lower middle-class Black family who feels the strain of its new reality as the political dust settles.

Maryna Er Gorbach’s drama Klondike revolves around a Ukrainian couple on the cusp of parenthood whose lives are turned upside down by the rise of the Russia-backed separatist movement in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

It’s rare that a sequel competes in the International Oscar category, especially when the first part didn’t get selected. It’s a measure of Erik Matti’s latest film that, though it follows on from 2013’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title On the Job—or rather, starts in the aftermath—this second instalment stands alone. “The big difference between the two,” said Matti, “is that the first one was set in urban Manila, and the second one is set in the countryside of the Philippines, just to show two contrasts that exist within both worlds.”

“I always had a very specific sense of urgency with this idea,” said Holy Spider director Ali Abbasi of wanting to make a film noir based on the true story of the “Spider Killer” Saeed Hanaei, who saw himself as on a mission from God as he killed 16 women between 2000 and 2001.

When director Darin J. Sallam came to make her feature debut with Farah, she always knew what the subject matter would be: as a little girl, Sallam’s mother used to tell her the story of a teenage girl who was locked up in her room during the partition of Palestine in 1948. “She was locked up by her father to protect her life,” Sallam recalls. “She survived [the conflict] and she made it to Syria, where she met a Syrian girl and shared her story with her. This Syrian girl grew up, got married and had a child, and she shared the story with her daughter—and this daughter happened to be me.”

The majority of submissions for this year’s International Feature Oscar category deal with serious issues, from major to minor, and while He Shuming’s feature debut Ajoomma (the title translates as Auntie) isn’t exactly the heaviest of them all, it does make a point of focusing on a character type that is vastly underrepresented in cinema across the globe: the older female.

Co-written and directed by filmmaker Santiago Mitre, the Amazon Studios pic Argentina, 1985 is the tale of Argentinian lawyers Julio Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo, who bravely prosecuted members of the country’s former bloody military dictatorship. Under the regime, from 1976 to 1983, an estimated 30,000 people disappeared.

Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor tells the forgotten story of the 30,000 Norwegian civilian sailors who were conscripted at the beginning of World War II to serve on convoys keeping Allied supply chains open.

Writer-director Tarik Saleh’s latest film Cairo Conspiracy follows Adam, the son of a fisherman, who is offered the ultimate privilege to study at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicenter of power in Sunni Islam. Shortly after his arrival, the university’s highest religious leader, the Grand Imam, suddenly dies and Adam soon becomes a pawn in a ruthless power struggle between Egypt’s religious and political elite.

Vicky Krieps says she suffered physically for her art on the shoot of Austrian director Marie\ Kreutzer’s Corsage, revisiting the life of the legendary 19th century Empress Elisabeth of Austria with a contemporary, emancipated eye.