HBO Acquires Berlin Fest Buzz Title ‘Reality;’ Breakout For Its ‘Euphoria’ Star Sydney Sweeney As Leaker Reality Winner In Tina Satter-Helmed Docudrama

Callum McLennan “Girl, Unknown,” the sophomore feature from Spanish director Pablo Maqueda (“Dear Werner”), currently ranks as one of the early buzz titles at the Málaga Film Festival, even before its world premiere. The film adapts Paco Bezerra’s stage play “Grooming.”  Maqueda, Bezerra and Haizea G. Viana wrote the script, which retains the play’s unsettling cat-and-mouse element. It delves into the recesses of desire, raising questions on depravity, sexuality, and the drive to be fulfilled. The story unfolds a pendulum swinging power dynamic between the seemingly innocent 16 year old Carolina, and a middle aged man she meets in a park named Leo. What begins and is a case of grooming morphs into something far more complex due to Carolina not being all she seems. Maqueda shows a Hanekesque talent in balancing the disturbing with the thrilling. On the film, Maqueda told Variety: “I feel the film as a kaleidoscope and the characters as masks. I like stories that navigate in the daily terror of everyday life,” 

Ben Croll Urban Sales and KMBO have boarded the 2D family film “The Hermit and the Bear,” with the Paris-based exporter handling international sales for the animated title as Gallic distributor KMBO covers the domestic release. This joint distributor/sales agent deal marks a dual show of faith for a development title that recently pitched to substantial buyer interest at the Cartoon Movie pitch and co-production forum in Bordeaux — where KMBO was voted distributor of the year. Adapted from a 1990s tome, the film follows the long apprenticeship between a lonely bear and an irascible hermit. Beginning as an awkward pupil and a rusty teacher, the pair’s bond soon develops into an unusual and life-affirming fellowship. The duo then set off into the forest, singing the benefits of friendship to all the woodland critters.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Mk2 films has enlisted leading distributors around the world for “Reality,” Tina Satter’s feature debut starring Sydney Sweeney, on the heels of its buzzy world premiere at the Berlinale. The movie, which bowed in the Panorama section, stars Sweeney (“White Lotus,” “Euphoria”) as Reality Winner, a 25 year-old whistleblower who spent five years in prison during the Trump administration. A former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, Winner was convicted for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film is based on Satter’s 2019 stage play “Is This a Room” and contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording. “Reality” captures the tense and surreal 90 minutes of FBI’s interrogation with Winner at her home in 2017.

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to the Berlin-premiering family drama “Tótem,” written and directed by “The Chambermaid” helmer Lila Avilés. Winner of the festival’s Ecumenical Jury Prize, the film follows seven-year-old Sol, who spends the day at her grandfather’s home, helping her aunts Nuri and Alejandra with the preparations for a surprise party they’re throwing for her father, Tonatiuh, who is terminally ill. However, as night descends, a strange and chaotic atmosphere takes over, shattering the bonds that hold the family together, and Sol will come to understand that her world will change dramatically.

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

Angelique Jackson Following a buzzy world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, HBO Films has acquired the U.S. rights to the docudrama “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney. In the film, directed by Tina Satter, Sweeney portrays Reality Winner, a woman convicted of leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to the media. The film contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of a FBI audio recording, capturing a tense 90 minutes as the FBI interrogates Winner at her home in 2017. The whistleblower — a former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator — was sentenced to five years in prison. Satter makes her feature directorial debut with the film, based on her 2019 stage play “Is This a Room.” She also executive produced the project and co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas.

European Film Market which at one and the same time has underscored the challenges still facing the international independent film business.  Following by way of an industry wrap, a dozen takeaways on the 2023 Berlin market, including its Berlinale Series Market, an ever more building proposition at the Festival.  The Verdict If the European Film Market is anything to go by, broadly, the international movie market is in some ways making a international comeback, despite still vastly challenging circumstances. On Thursday, the EFM reported “record results” of a total of over 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. “It was a rather busy market, with no single must-have, but much mid-sized product,” recognizesConstantin’s Martin Moszkowicz of this year’s Berlin European Film Market, noting that Constantin received about 90 project submissions prior to market, “which is a lot.” “There’s been more deals happening at the EFM than at Sundance and we sense a new vibrancy in the international markets,” says Nick Shumaker, at Anonymous Content’s AC Independent.

GQ magazine in an interview published on Tuesday that the possibility of bidding farewell to the character after the fourth season would “feel like a death, in a way.” However, he said that he envies some of his peers who have had “that freedom to just shoot yourself out of some different cannons.”“Sometimes Kendall feels like the same cannon over and over again,” Strong added.An HBO spokesperson declined to comment.In addition to Strong, the show’s ensemble cast includes Brian Cox, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, Matthew Macfadyen, Nicholas Braun, J. Smith-Cameron, Peter Friedman, David Rasche, Fisher Stevens, Hiam Abbass, Justine Lupe, Dagmara Domińczyk, Arian Moayed, Scott Nicholson, Zoë Winters, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Juliana Canfield and Jeannie Berlin.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

The documentary Love to Love You, Donna Summer, about one of the world’s greatest pop stars, constitutes a kind of duet – between two filmmakers. The film, making its world premiere in Berlin, comes from directors Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano, daughter of the subject of the film, the legendary Donna Summer. 

There’s a pretty traditional formula that most music documentaries follow. They’ll often center around a standard birth to mainstream success overview, populated with talking heads and contemporaries to contextualize the music, politics, and social scenes.

Sydney Sweeney heats up the red carpet in a red hot dress for the premiere of her movie, Reality.

Marta Balaga Director: Vita Maria Drygas Producer: Vita Żelakeviciute Production companies: Drygas Film Production Sales: Dogwoof Documentary is a journey to places devastated by military conflicts, seen through the eyes of thrill-seeking tourists. (Generation 14plus) Director: Asaf Saban

As the 73rd Berlin Film Festival rolls into its first weekend, one of the buzziest titles on the ground is the taut political thriller Reality, starring Euphoria and White Lotus breakout Sydney Sweeney.

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.

Sydney Sweeney showed off some skin while attending a photocall for her new movie Reality during the Berlinale International Film Festival.

Jessica Kiang In the widely covered story of the U.S. intelligence operative harshly sentenced in 2018 for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to The Intercept, the accidental (in)appropriateness of the operative’s name was always an eyecatching detail. Could one of recent reality’s most highly public losers actually be called Reality Winner? Playwright Tina Satter’s enormously compelling film-directing debut adds another layer of cosmic irony to that nominative determinism. In using the title “Reality,” and being scripted verbatim from exchanges recorded by the FBI during Winner’s 2017 surprise interrogation, Satter not only vividly revisits the story, she also makes us question the very relationship between a narrative film and the truth it claims to expose. Reality can be stranger than fiction, but “Reality” fuses the two to become stranger, and more riveting, still. 

Like so many young performers, Sydney Sweeney proved that she was a star before she could get the chance to prove that she was a well-rounded actor. Her name-making gigs as a vindictive, canonically gorgeous high schooler on TV’s “Euphoria,” a vindictive, canonically gorgeous college sophomore on “The White Lotus,” and a vindictive, canonically gorgeous recent grad in the “The Voyeurs” all required her to channel an innate charisma toward variations on a broadly consistent type, her abilities yet to be stretched far enough to chart their full potential.

Sydney Sweeney passed through the Berlin Film Festival Saturday evening alongside playwright and director Tina Satter to debut their new feature Reality.