International Insider: Euro Studio Vuelta Emerges; Karlovy Vary Embraces Vachon; Greenbird Flies With STV

Good afternoon Insiders, it’s been quite the week as the ripples of the SAG strike continue to be felt around the world. Max Goldbart here with the roundup. And you can sign up here.

Good afternoon Insiders, Max Goldbart here back from a (hopefully) well earned break with a packed newsletter following a week in which actors joined writers on the pickets for the first time in more than 60 years and the BBC found itself mired in crisis, yet again. Read on, and sign up here.

A collection of European festivals including Locarno, Thessaloniki, Tallinn Black Nights, Rotterdam, and Karlovy Vary, have partnered to create a new network aimed at integrating film professionals.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlin- and Paris-based Salaud Morisset, a leading short film production and distribution outfit, has acquired two feature films for world sales – one selected by Karlovy Vary Film Festival and the other by Locarno Film Festival – as the company accelerates into feature film sales and production. Salaud Morisset has taken world sales rights on Cyril Aris’ feature documentary “Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano,” which premiered in the main competition at Karlovy Vary this week, and Una Gunjak’s fiction feature “Excursion,” just announced as the opener of Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present section. Salaud Morisset, which is also a co-producer on “Excursion,” aims to continue fostering synergies between its production and sales operations as it commits to a full slate of feature projects.

Jessica Kiang At a festival the size and stature of the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary, new discoveries are a daily occurrence. But it is rare that at festival’s end, one of the most excitingly buzzy emergent names should be that of a filmmaker who died 27 years ago and who has languished in relative obscurity – certainly in the Anglophone world – ever since. And yet here we are, at the tail end of an 11-film Yasuzo Masumura retrospective – the biggest of its kind ever mounted at an international film festival – that has proved, in a word, revelatory.  It’s not just in terms of blowing the dust from this extraordinary, unjustly overlooked filmmaker’s catalog, but also in the broader sense of being an exemplary model for how to connect a vibrant, youthful regional audience to global film history. There is a classic film fan born every minute, but in Karlovy Vary this year, you could feel it happen in real time during the screenings of Masumura’s  “A Cheerful Girl” (1957), “Hoodlum Soldier” (1965), “Spider Tattoo” (1966) and so on.  

For writer-director Naqqash Khalid, questions are more important than answers and this premise is something the academic-turned-filmmaker explores heavily in his debut film In Camera, which recently premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The bold film, which opened to positive reviews after it screened in the fest’s Proxima section last week, is the first feature to come out of the 2019 iFeatures slate, the low-budget Creative UK scheme from the UK’s BFI Film Fund and BBC Film. 

Since producing Todd Haynes’ Sundance-winning drama “Poison” in 1991, Christine Vachon has helped bring some of the most unique and memorable independent films to the big – and small screen.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.  READ MORE: ‘You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder’ Review: A Vulnerable Ewan McGregor Can’t Save This Father-Daughter Addiction Drama [Karlovy Vary] An impressive tracking shot moves from a nighttime soccer game through a lively street in Saigon before settling on friends having send-off drinks for a member of the group who is forsaking the city for a simple life in the mountains.

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline spoke to leading international sales firm Playtime about why it made sense to join new European film and TV studio Vuelta Group, which we revealed earlier this morning.

EXCLUSIVE: A significant shakeup in the European indie film space is underway with the formation of new studio Vuelta Group, Deadline can reveal.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Assel Aushakimova’s dark comedy about journalism in Kazakhstan “Bikechess” has won the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Works in Progress award, which runs as part of the festival’s industry section, Eastern Promises. The section is focused on feature film projects from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa. The Kazakh film follows Dina, who works as a journalist for the national television station. The stories she is asked to report on are becoming increasingly absurd and full of praise for the government. Her love life is limited to a few secret meetings with her married camera­man. Dina looks after her young sis­ter, a lesbian activist, who regularly finds herself in trouble with the au­thorities.

The unseen and the obscene are the subject of Pascal Plante’s disturbingly brilliant psychological horror, which takes an overused genre — the serial killer movie — and an often-misused technique — dark Lynchian surrealism — and somehow alchemizes the two into something new and original. It’s strong meat for sure (the courtroom-drama framing is deceptive, since this is not really a film about justice), but word-of-mouth cult status beckons, and a healthy nightlife on the genre circuit is assured.

EXCLUSIVE: Christine Vachon offered her outlook on some of the industry’s most pressing issues at a keynote masterclass session this afternoon at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Will Tizard Contributor In Robert Hloz’s sci-fi feature debut “Restore Point,” second chances are big business. In the year 2041, anyone who has an unnatural death has the right to be brought back to life, provided they’ve dutifully created a backup of their personality called a “restore point.” Naturally, some object to the notion of artificially extending life ad infinitum, wherein the story begins to get complicated. “I wanted to make a sci-fi film since I was a little kid,” Hloz says, “but I would never guess that it will happen to be my debut. I thought maybe third, fourth film.”

Nick Holdsworth Naqqash Khalid always wanted to make films. An English literature graduate of Salford University in Manchester, England, who began his working life as a lecturer in the university’s School of Arts and Media, Khalid dreamed of working with actors to create films that reflect our 21st century experience of a fractured world, dominated by mobile phones and social media, where time no longer seems to follow a linear path. His chance to make his dreams reality came when a script he wrote while still teaching at Salford was picked up by iFeatures – a BBC Film/Creative England/British Film Institute program for debut directors. A development grant in early 2020 enabled him to realize his script “In Camera,” which had its world premiere Saturday in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Proxima competition slot (for the Variety review see here).

You know the modern world is in a dark place when even a middle-aged Iranian woman says that things were better in the old days. Indeed, for his feature debut, director Behrooz Karamizade has fashioned an intelligent and thoughtful drama that should travel well in today’s climate of insecurity, offering a fresh perspective on a multiplicity of worldwide issues (trickle-down theory, the gig economy) while adding an especially nuanced subplot exploring the refugee crisis and the mechanics of people-trafficking.  

Brave is the man who will sign up for a real-life father-daughter road movie set the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, but Ewan McGregor his no regrets about pairing up with his eldest child — by his first wife — for You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder, which screened as a tribute to the actor in Karlovy Vary. Set in a dreamlike American West, and very far removed from the specifics of the McGregors’ own personal situation, it finds a reformed alcoholic dad trying to reconnect with his offspring after collecting her from hospital. She thinks they’re off to visit an artist friend of her father’s, but the truth is that, in a bid to absolve himself of many years’ worth of guilt, he’s taking her to rehab.

The raucous period drama “Firebrand” was the official opening-night film at the 57th annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on Friday night in the spa resort town outside Prague, but there was a lot more going on in and around the Grand Hall at the Hotel Thermal than just the on-screen battle between Alicia Vikander’s Catherine Parr and Jude Law’s King Henry VIII. It also included the presentation of awards to Vikander and Russell Crowe, the usual complement of opening-night speeches, an extended dance number that appeared to be performed on ice skates (though it wasn’t on ice but on an artificial surface that mimicked ice but could be walked on safely) and, during breaks and after the movie, complete concerts by the British band Morcheeba and by Crowe’s nine-piece band, Indoor Garden Party.

The 57th Karlovy Vary Film Festival opened last night with a spirited musical performance from Russell Crowe, and the energy remained high this evening with actor Ewan McGregor in town to receive the fest’s honorary President’s Award.

Given the stories that Russell Crowe was still celebrating his open-air concert at Karlovy Vary’s Thermal Hotel until the small hours of the morning, there was little surprise that the actor was late for his meeting with a group of international journalists. However, the 59-year-old showed no signs of wear and tear, and even graciously insisted the press conference go on past its strict 30-minute cut-off time.