‘Hysteria’ Director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay Discusses Struggles of Minority Filmmakers in Germany, Breaking Stereotypes, Adapting ‘Mephisto’

William Earl administrator SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot points from “The Piper.” Horror Film School is a feature in which talent in front of and behind the camera share the ins and outs of creating the biggest onscreen scares. Icelandic director Erlingur Thoroddsen‘s latest film is “The Piper,” starring Charlotte Hope and the late Julian Sands. The indie horror feature follows a musician hoping to finish a lost piece of music that may conjure up the evil entity that was the inspiration for the dark German legend “Pied Piper of Hamelin.” From a fiery opening to a enigmatic midsection to a bonkers ending act that evokes VHS-era supernatural slashers like “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Wishmaster,” Thoroddsen’s film works because of its clever pacing, walking a tightrope between thrills and mysteries.

Disney has been like “sitting in the desert”.In 2021, the MMA fighter-turned-actor was fired by Disney and the show The Mandalorian after she posted a string of controversial opinions online.Carano has recently filed a lawsuit against Disney and its subsidiary Lucasfilm, alleging that the production companies wrongfully terminated her from The Mandalorian and other Star Wars titles for sharing a range of far-right opinions.Last month, Elon Musk said he would help to fund Carano’s suit.The posts in question saw Carano — who portrayed Cara Dune on The Mandalorian — upload a string of controversial posts, one of which compared the treatment of conservatives in the US to that of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.Others included ridiculing mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and furthering false suggestions of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Carano also shared online comments criticising protesters during the Black Lives Matter movement.And now, in an interview with The Post Millennial, she has spoken out about the knock-on effects of the firing, saying that it has “stuck” on her, making it difficult for her to get acting work or to attract an agent.“It’s like I’ve been in this desert where I belong nowhere,” she explained.

Ellise Shafer Outgoing Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian has spoken out about the political discourse surrounding the festival’s closing ceremony this year. As the Berlinale handed out prizes on Saturday night, several winning filmmakers took the opportunity in their acceptance speeches to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Ivo (Minna Wündrich) spends her days tending to terminally ill patients. In her capacity as a palliative care nurse, she’s not responsible for saving them — that’s the doctors’ concern — though this 40-ish single mother does her best to listen to their complaints and ease their pain.

Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who last week picked up the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, has said he has received death threats and had to cancel his flight home after German officials and Israeli media described his acceptance speech as “anti-Semitic”.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor Germany’s Beta Film is introducing at the London TV Screenings the first episode of “Maxima,” a six-part drama about the love story between future Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and the then Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander. The series is produced by Millstreet Films “The Neighbors”), with Videoland (RTL Netherlands) holding Dutch broadcasting rights.

Sandra Huller is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Anatomy of a Fall and she just picked up a Cesar Award for her work!

Palme d’Ors don’t grow on trees, so it’s small wonder that the world has fallen for Justine Triet’sAnatomy of a Fall, and the outstanding lead performance of Sandra Hüller, since it won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize. Hüller’s turn dominates the ‘sort of’ courtroom drama of the film, in which her German novelist — also called Sandra — is accused of pushing her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, from the top floor of their alpine home. Sandra maintains he fell, or jumped, and the film spends much of its runtime chewing over the truth, though never revealing it.

With his debut feature Last Swim, an ambitious and quietly radical portrait of young life in London, Sasha Nathwani has achieved one of the most difficult tasks for a new filmmaker: cutting through with a festival audience. 

BBC Scotland has ditched its flagship news programme The Nine after it struggled to win viewers.

Ed Meza @edmezavar While medical dramas have long been a favorite staple on German TV, a new series helmed by Alex Schaad, director of the award-winning fantasy romance “Skin Deep,” and penned by British writer Samuel Jefferson looks set to give the genre a bold, modern take. “KRANK Berlin” is an eight-part series that follows a young team of doctors in the toughest and most overcrowded medical facility in the city.

Ed Meza @edmezavar An ambitious new production company is making waves in Germany, where it’s following up its successful 2020 comedy pic debut with a stylish erotic thriller that harkens back to Hollywood classics of the 1980s. Launched in 2020 by Andreas Kröneck and Antonio Fernandes Lopes in the southwestern Baden-Württemberg city of Heilbronn, Hnywood is aiming high with plans to recapture the cinematic magic of yesteryear, including Edgar Wallace masked-killer mysteries and sexy swashbuckling space operas.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Since its establishment in 2018, Gaumont Germany has produced a wide range of series and TV movies, among them such timely shows as the critically acclaimed “Deutsches Haus” (“The Interpreter of Silence”), which was nominated for the Critics Choice Awards, and the Ukrainian series “In Her Car.” A subsidiary of the French entertainment powerhouse, the Cologne and Berlin-based company also created such ambitious shows as Netflix’s historical epic “Barbarians” – the first season of which was one of the streamer’s most successful non-English-language series worldwide – and the award-winning Sky Original comedy “The Wasp,” about a professional dart player seeking to return to his former glory. Discussing the company’s latest productions, Gaumont Germany President Sabine de Mardt says it’s important to combine broader entertainment with relevance, something both “The Interpreter of Silence” and “In Her Car” offer.

UK-based casting directory Spotlight and Filmmakers Europe, a similar online platform for mainland Europe, have set a new cross-platform partnership. 

Nick Holdsworth European film agencies, festivals and organizations could do more to support Ukrainian filmmakers, the head of Germany’s state film promotion body, German Films, says. Simone Baumann, managing director of German Films — which supports the promotion of national filmmakers at festivals and events worldwide — says there is a lot of talk at festival panels and industry gatherings of supporting Ukrainians, but little financial backing.

Ed Meza @edmezavar An unsung master of movie magic, Solon Luigi Colani has worked on some of the biggest Hollywood movies ever shot in Germany and beyond, among them works by Quentin Tarantino, Ron Howard, George Clooney, Denis Villeneuve, Paul W.S. Anderson, Gore Verbinski and the Wachowskis.

A youthful crowd of industry professionals filed into a bustling room at the Gropius Bau Saturday afternoon for the inaugural AfroBerlin symposium here at the Berlin Film Festival. 

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor When Laila Stieler’s script for “From Hilde, With Love,” which world premiered Saturday in competition at the Berlinale, first came to director Andreas Dresen he was a little reluctant to take the project on. The issue was not the script but the subject-matter: set in Nazi-era Berlin, “From Hilde, With Love” is a love story about two real life members of the pro-Communist, German resistance movement known as the Red Orchestra, Hilde and Hans Coppi. More than 50 members of the group were guillotined in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison between 1942 and 1943, including the Coppis.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Aslı Özarslan’s “Elbogen” (“Elbow”), an adaptation of Fatma Aydemir’s award-winning novel of the same name, tells the story of Hazal (played by Melia Kara), a young woman in Berlin struggling to find a job and start a life of her own. After a violent incident on her 18th birthday, she flees to Istanbul, a strange city in a country she doesn’t know and where she is forced to survive. Produced by Jamila Wenske‘s Berlin-based Achtung Panda!, the film premieres in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus.

Catherine Bray Two years after their Berlinale prizewinner “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush,” veteran German director Andreas Dresen and his regular screenwriter Laila Stieler reteam for the moving drama “From Hilde, With Love.” Drawing on the compelling real-life case of the Hilde and Hans Coppi, a young married couple arrested and executed for treason by the Gestapo in wartime Berlin, the film cross-cuts between an idyllic summer romance and much darker later events.