‘Fragments of Ice,’ About USSR Dreams of a Western Paradise, Drops Trailer Ahead of Visions du Réel World Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)

Naman Ramachandran Freely, the new free streaming service backed by Britain’s public service broadcasters (PSBs) that delivers live TV over broadband, has launched. The initiative is from Everyone TV, the organization which runs free TV in the U.K. and is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Paramount Global’s Channel 5.

Russian oil could flood into Scotland if the Grangemouth refinery closes, it has been claimed.

Jeremy Renner is returning to television in the upcoming third season of Mayor of Kingstown!

Jeremy Renner faces a new foe in the official trailer for season 3 of Mayor of Kingstown, which will premiere Sunday, June 2 in the U.S. and Canada and begin rolling out on June 3 in all other Paramount+ international markets.

Frank Rizzo In Peter Morgan’s tantalizing but disappointing new play “Patriots,” Boris Berezovsky is presented as a larger-than-life oligarch in a post-Soviet Russia who transforms Vladimir Putin from a middling “nobody” to an autocrat who will transform his country in ways unforeseen at home or globally. There’s an expectation that in Morgan’s latest merging of historic fact and fiction that the writer of “The Crown” on TV, “The Audience” on stage and “The Queen” on film will once again provide an intimate and revealing look behind another well-guarded curtain, this time one that is made of iron.

Lise Pedersen In an exclusive interview with Variety after picking up the top industry prize at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, Franco-Iranian director Mehran Tamadon outlined the intention of his upcoming feature documentary “The Last Days of the Hospital.” Set against the backdrop of France’s public health crisis and shortage of personnel, the film will show patients from a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Paris taking charge of their own ward. Tamadon has been running film workshops with the patients at the hospital for the past eight years, and decided it was time to make a film to denounce what he describes as “the ultra-liberal policy which plans the death of the public hospital.” “French public hospitals are not doing well, nurses and caregivers are leaving because they are mistreated and poorly paid.

Lise Pedersen “The Landscape and the Fury” by Switzerland’s Nicole Vögele took the Grand Jury Prize in the International Feature Film Competition at Swiss doc festival Visions du Réel on Friday. Shot on the Bosnian-Croatian border, which is also the European Union border, the film unveils the struggle of refugees being chased away by police and navigating a terrain still contaminated with mines from the Bosnian War.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is shining a spotlight on one of the most revered filmmakers in cinema history.

Lise Pedersen Two new cash prizes introduced this year in Swiss film festival Visions du Reel’s industry section, VdR-Industry, were among a flurry of awards handed out as the program wrapped in Nyon, Switzerland, on Wednesday. The Eurimages Co-production Development Award, created to promote the fund’s role in encouraging international co-production from the initial stages of a project, and which comes with a cash prize of €20,000 ($22,000), went to “The Last Days of the Hospital” by Mehran Tamadon (“My Worst Enemy,” “Bassidji”).

Swiss Films Previews, the only spread of national movies at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel, the country’s leading doc festival. Presented via excerpts at a two-hour showcase on Wednesday, three further titles – “Kalari – the Martial Art of Female Power,” “The Boy from the River Drina” and “Spheres” – underscored the strength in depth of documentary filmmaking in Switzerland and at least in this year’s Previews, a leitmotif.

Joe Otterson TV Reporter The upcoming Apple TV+ series “Government Cheese” has filled out its main cast with four new additions, Variety has learned exclusively. Jahi Winston (“We Have a Ghost, “Charm City Kings”), Evan Alexander Ellison (“She Came to Me,” “Devil in Ohio”), Jeremy Bobb (“The Knick,” “Russian Doll”), and Louis Cancelmi (“Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Billions”) have all joined the show. They will appear alongside previously announced series lead David Oyelowo as well as cast members Simone Missick, Bokeem Woodbine, Sunita Mani, and Adam Beach.

Annika Pham New York-based director/producer Katy Scoggin has worked with high-profile U.S. documentary filmmaker/journalist Laura Poitras on two shorts and three features, notably as co-producer and DP on Poitras’ Oscar-winner “Citizenfour” and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight’s “Risk.” Poitras now serves as executive producer on Scoggin’s feature debut “Flood,” one of six creative documentaries to be pitched as works in progress April 16, at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, Switzerland. “Flood” centers on Scoggin’s journey to repair her relationship with her former missionary father, with whom she has become estranged.

Lise Pedersen Berlinale Forum entry “Shahid,” the debut feature of Iranian-German filmmaker Narges Kalhor, has been picked up by Prague-based doc specialist Filmotor ahead of its premiere at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, where it is competing in the more experimental Burning Lights section. Described by Kalhor as a collective work between herself and other artists, including a costume artist and a painter from Iran, a German music composer and a choreographer from Berlin, “Shahid” shifts playfully between genres, challenging conventional filmmaking rules.

Annika Pham Talent-driven doc sales outfit Rise & Shine has boarded “Fire Fire Fire” (“Feu Feu Feu”), the feature debut of Swiss rising voice Pauline Jeanbourquin (“Dusk”), due to world premiere in the national competition strand of Nyon’s Visions du Réel docu festival. Variety has had exclusively access to the international trailer. The poetic and captivating coming-of-age story of a young girl with healing talents, is produced by high-profile Geneva-based Close Up Films, credited for the 2023 Swiss Oscar entry “Thunder” and as co-producer of the Oscar-nominated “I Am Not Your Negro.” “I enjoy working on first features, meeting a new voice, exploring and questioning what it means to direct, figuring things out together.

Lise Pedersen Zagreb-based doc specialist Splitscreen has boarded Argentinian gaucho tale “Where the Trees Bear Meat” by Alexis Franco ahead of its world premiere at Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel. It is one of 15 films vying for the top prize in the main international competition. Set in the Argentine Pampas, the film follows Omar, a farmer, whose cows are dying as a result of a prolonged drought.

After three successful seasons, the supernatural drama series, “Evil” will return for its fourth and final installment this summer. Yesterday, Paramount+ revealed the official trailer and premiere date for the critically acclaimed original series.

Annika Pham Copenhagen-based DR Sales has secured major sales on the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner and Visions du Réel Grand Angle entry “A New Kind of Wilderness.” The film, directed by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, has been acquired by ZDF and Arte for Germany and France, Cinema Delicatessen for the Netherlands, Dalton Distribution for Belgium, Against Gravity for Poland, Kino Pavasaris for the Baltics and Stardust for Japan. “From the moment ‘A New Kind of Wilderness’ was presented to us, we fell in love with the film,” said DR Sales’ Freja Johanne Nørgaard Sørensen.

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer The “Jet Lag: The Game” creators Sam Denby, Ben Doyle and Adam Chase have set their next reality travel competition series, “The Getaway,” to debut this summer on indie streamer Nebula. The show, which unlike “Jet Lag” (where episodes drop later on YouTube) will be available exclusively on Nebula, follows six creators on a road trip through the American West as they compete in a game of social strategy and deception. While the majority of the details surrounding “The Getaway’s” format are being kept under wraps by Denby’s Wendover Productions, Variety has confirmed the cast includes Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, Matt Krol, Morning Brew’s Dan Toomey, Georgia Dow, Patrick “Patch” Lacey and Steven Bridges.

Annika Pham On the heels of its successful world launch at IDFA, the critically-acclaimed anti-colonial pic “Our Land, Our Freedom,” sold by First Hand Films, has landed a deal with BBC Africa Eye. “Our Land, Our Freedom,” a Kenyan/U.S./Portuguese co-production, and the upcoming India-set “Kalari,” to be pitched in Visions du Réel docu festival’s Swiss Preview showcase, epitomize what First Hand Films stands for.

Lise Pedersen “The Return of the Projectionist,” which is running in the main competition at Swiss doc fest Visions du Réel, where it will have its world premiere, has been picked up by Paris-based doc specialist Cat&Docs. The feature debut of Orkhan Aghazadeh, it tells the story of Samid, a former projectionist in Azerbaijan’s remote Talysh mountains, who is determined to bring cinema back to life in his village using his old Soviet film projector.