The cast, producers and collaborators of Roman Polanski’s The Palace showed their support for the filmmaker here in Venice today during a press conference for the movie that world premieres out of competition this evening.
13.08.2023 - 19:13 / variety.com
Katharina Huber’s “A Good Place” (“Ein schöner Ort”) which won on Saturday Locarno’s best emerging director award and best performance (Clara Schwinning) in the Swiss fest’s Filmmakers of the Present, a remote and untimely village sets the scene for an imminent apocalypse but also for an otherworldly fairytale. Or are these two one and the same? Huber’s first feature opens with an image of a forest fire, foreshadowing the dystopian tone of an elusive audiovisual journey where emotions prevail over rational explanations. Set to the rhythm of a countdown, this chaptered story sees Margarita (Céline De Gennaro) and Güte (Schwinning) – two women with contrasting personalities, juggle mundane tasks of daily life with disruptive acts of sabotage.
Yet they themselves don’t seem to know what the looming menace is and what they are rebelling against. People keep mysteriously disappearing. An unknown sickness starts sweeping through the village.
As if an omen of a terrible disaster, dismembered parts of chicken appear out of nowhere. How are all these related? Or are they related at all? The paradoxical pleasure of watching “A Good Place” is that neither the characters nor the viewer are able to make sense of all these strange circumstances. Huber never intended her debut to be conceptual, but rather as a film that speaks more to the senses and is less concerned with the narrative and content.
“It was important to do something that doesn’t communicate on a factual level. Something where people would come out of the film with a feeling that they were moved, but without being able to pinpoint the exact sentiment”, says the director. In the background to all the village’s bizarre occurrences, some eerie radio broadcasts update on an
.The cast, producers and collaborators of Roman Polanski’s The Palace showed their support for the filmmaker here in Venice today during a press conference for the movie that world premieres out of competition this evening.
Actor, producer and director Luca Barbareschi is at the Venice Film Festival this year as one the main representatives of Roman Polanski’s new film The Palace.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Venice Gap-Financing Market is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year with record-breaking attendance and impressive new figures on the projects that the core component of Venice’s industry side has helped bring to the big screen. All told, over the span of a decade, “We have had 370 films (including immersive) from 70 countries and 80% of them have been completed within six months after the festival,” says Pascal Diot who heads the Venice Production Bridge, as the Lido’s market is known.
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Making World Cup history certainly calls for some time to celebrate, and that is exactly what the Spanish Women's football team are doing as they enjoy a well-deserved relaxing break in Ibiza. After leaving Sydney, the squad are now soaking up the sun in Ibiza where they have been spotted enjoying a stunning day out on a boat, having fun playing on paddleboards, and splashing around.The girls swapped out their football kits for their bikinis before they will probably get back to work and start preparing for the UEFA Women's Euro’s, which has been confirmed to take place in Switzerland in 2025.
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Marta Balaga The hype is real: Ali Ahmadzadeh’s “Critical Zone” (“Mantagheye bohrani”) has picked up the top Golden Leopard at Locarno. It has been a bumpy ride for the film, set in Tehran over the course of one lonely night and described by the fest as “a hymn to freedom and resistance.” As reported by Variety, Iranian authorities have been pressuring Ahmadzadeh to pull it from the Swiss festival – arguing it was shot without permission – and with the director himself banned from leaving the country. “Instead of actors, I worked with real people.
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Disney, trying to swing its streaming business into the black, has set substantial price hikes for Disney+ and Hulu standalone premium plans in the U.S. — while also rolling out a heavily discounted Disney+/Hulu ad-free combo bundle. As of Oct.
Arthouse Crunch Over the last decade, theatrical arthouse markets have imploded soufflé-like. “We used to make 5,000 admissions per title, now the target audience is 500,” Peter Bognar, at Hungary’s CinefilCo, told Variety at Locarno. So, to close the gap and move hopefully into a little upside, having tapped subsidies and local TV pre-buys, producers are looking ever more to overseas public-sector coin, channelled via international co-producer partners.
Marta Balaga You can approach old classics just like new films, argued participants during Locarno’s Heritage Monday panel. “I talked to an exhibitor in Paris and they don’t consider repertory cinema to be different from contemporary cinema. They are collapsing both models into one and it’s very interesting,” said K.J.
Climate change activists briefly halted the Locarno Film Festival’s honorary awards ceremony for environmentalist and documentarian Luc Jacquet on Monday evening.Jacquet, who won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2006 for The March Of The Penguins, was being feted with the Locarno Kids Award, followed by a screening of his new film Magnetic Continent in front of a 7,000-strong crowd on the festival’s landmark Piazza Grande.
John Bleasdale Guest Contributor “The Vanishing Soldier” is a coming of age story, as breathless as its protagonist: the kind of film that will make cinephiles of seventeen-year-olds. Which is one of the reasons that Dani Rosenberg, the film’s 43-year-old director, is delighted to be in Locarno, where the film, sold by Intramovies, is screening in main competition, and has just got a trailer, and poster, shared in exclusivity with Variety. “We had options for other festivals,” Rosenberg told Variety at the Swiss fest.
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