New trailer for WWII drama ‘Liberation’

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s Fandango Sales has taken global distribution rights outside Italy to Carlo Sironi’s coming-of-age drama “My Summer With Irène,” which will premiere in the Berlin Film Festival‘s Generation section. Sironi, whose first feature “Sole” made a splash on the international fest circuit, is back with this relationship drama starring rising French indie star Noée Abita (“Slalom”) and Maria Camilla Barandenburg (“Slam Italia”) playing two 17-year-olds named Clara and Irène who both have health issues.

Spaceman has landed online ahead of its debut at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival in February.Adam Sander and Carey Mulligan lead the cast of the film which will be released on 1st March.Directed by Johan Renck and based on the novel ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’, the film also stars Kunal Nayyar, Lena Olin, and Isabella Rossellini.Six months into a solitary research mission to the edge of the solar system, an astronaut, Jakub (Adam Sandler), realizes that the marriage he left behind might not be waiting for him when he returns to Earth. Desperate to fix things with his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), he is helped by a mysterious creature from the beginning of time he finds hiding in the bowels of his ship.

Scanbox Entertainment has finalized a restructuring of its senior management team with a series of internal promotions alongside a new hire. 

Alex Ritman “Kneecap,” the wildly raucous comedy biopic about the Irish rap group that became one of the unexpected hits of this year’s Sundance, has scored more international sales. The film, the debut feature of director Rich Peppiatt starring the band members as themselves along with Michael Fassbender, was already picked up in Park City by Sony Pictures Classics, which acquired all rights to the title for North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle East.

Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. Today we’re talking to UK film veterans Richard Kondal and Patrick Fischer, founders of post-production house Creativity Media and film finance company Creativity Capital. The duo, which sold Creativity Media to Fulwell 73 in 2019, talk us through the jump from post-production to financing to the launch of their new London-based co-production outfit Big Safari, international sales strand Architect and investment in VFX house Koala FX. 

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent For decades, the Berlin Film Festival has been forging its own iconoclastic path, known for screening the best of world cinema and edgy underground discoveries as well as its cold February temperatures, while the starrier and warmer Cannes and Venice fests have been in fierce competition to grab the limelight (aka Oscar movies). But the Berlinale — a public institution created at the beginning of the Cold War in 1951 — could be changing course next year with the appointment of Tricia Tuttle, a progressive American film journalist and curator who led the BFI London Film Festival during a fast-growing five-year chapter, and has been indirectly tasked by Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth to turn the Berlinale into a proper rival to Cannes and Venice, while maintaining its political edge and flare for arthouse cinema.

Naman Ramachandran Film and TV studio Fifth Season has secured international distribution rights to “Monsieur Spade,” the crime drama series starring and executive produced by Clive Owen. Fifth Season will represent the title at the upcoming Berlin European Film Market. The six-episode series is based on Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled private detective Sam Spade, the protagonist of 1930 novel “The Maltese Falcon,” adapted several times for the screen, most notably in 1941 by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart as the sleuth.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Indian director and cinematographer Jatla Siddhartha has assembled several of the biggest names in world cinema in service of “In the Belly of a Tiger.” The film has its premiere next week at the Berlin Film Festival. Pitched as a blend of surreal horror and selfless love, the film is a fictionalization of reportedly real events in rural India, in which a couple arranges to be eaten by a tiger in order to ensure their family’s financial security.

Oldham's Alex Batty, who came back to the UK after spending six years as a missing person living on the run in Europe, has revealed details of his life after returning home at the end of 2023. Including that he does not want either his mum or grandad to get caught by police after he was 'kidnapped'.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Nele Wohlatz‘s “Sleep With Your Eyes Open,” which has its world premiere in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival, has debuted its trailer (below). Rediance has taken world sales rights. Wohlatz’s fiction debut “El futuro perfecto” won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for the best first feature in 2016, and was invited to more than 70 international film festivals.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sony Pictures has acquired international distribution rights to “YOLO,” a mainland Chinese comedy film that releases in China on Saturday, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday. The film is written, directed by and stars Jia Ling, China’s top-grossing female filmmaker. She portrays Le Ying, an unemployed woman in her thirties who still lives with her parents until one day, she meets a boxing coach (portrayed by Lei Jiayin), who just may change her life.

Annika Pham Copenhagen-based DR Sales has snapped up international rights on the anticipated opening film of the 21st CPH:DOX Festival, “Life and Other Problems.” Variety debuts the trailer below. The playful existential film by Danish documentary filmmaker Max Kestner (“Blue Collar White Christmas,” “Amateurs in Space”) is shepherded by Denmark’s Bullitt Film (Prix Europa for “Absolute Beginners”), with Ruben Östlund’s Swedish banner Plattform Produktion and the U.K.’s Hopscotch Films (“Story of Film”).

Nick Holdsworth There is a certain inevitability about a film inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel “Steppenwolf,” first published in German in 1927, and two famous Westerns of the 1950s — John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and Howard Hawks’ “Red River.” In acclaimed Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s latest film — also called “Steppenwolf” — two characters who are essentially loners existing outside of the usual moral boundaries of the world come together united in a common task: to save a small boy who has gone missing. The world premiere of “Steppenwolf” is slated for International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Big Screen Competition.

open letter from the Strike Germany movement, which called for a boycott of state-funded cultural events, claiming that the “use of McCarthyist policies” suppressed “freedom of expression” in relation to displays of solidarity with Palestine and criticism of the Israeli state.The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism cites examples including “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”.Strike Germany claimed that the IHRA definition was “increasingly becoming official state policy, effectively censoring criticism of the state of Israel and anti-Zionist perspectives from the German cultural sphere, furthering a dangerous false equivalency that ultimately harms the fight against anti-Semitism”.A post shared by STRIKE GERMANY (@strikegermany)As of Monday (January 22), however, the clause has been dropped. “I must take the legal and critical voices that saw this clause as a restriction on the freedom of art seriously,” said Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture senator, in a statement (via The Art Newspaper).

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Chinese filmmaker Lin Jianjie‘s debut feature “Brief History of a Family,” which is being sold by Films Boutique, has debuted its trailer (below), following its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival. The film, which will make its European premiere in the Panorama program of the Berlin Film Festival, was received warmly by Variety critic Carlos Aguilar. In the review, Aguilar says the suspenseful drama was “elevated by its consistent visual inventiveness.” He adds that although at first it seems to be the story of a “cunning infiltrator wreaking havoc in an unsuspecting household,” it then “reveals itself as a tale of wish fulfillment for everyone involved.” Aguilar says that it is this approach which “turns Lin’s debut into an engrossing brain-tickler.” The drama is put in motion by an incident at the high school attended by Wei, an outgoing only son from a middle-class family, and Shuo, his quiet, perceptive classmate.

Award-winning actor Colin Firth is set to star in the upcoming Sky and Peacock Original limited event series 'Lockerbie' which is based on the 1988 disaster.

EXCLUSIVE: There’s a famous line from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado that is familiar to most Spaniards: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar,” which translates as “Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.” 

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been seeing reports of several films making their debuts at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. However, we haven’t really gotten a full picture of the festival just yet.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Playtime has boarded “The Devil’s Bath,” a period psychological thriller directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the Austrian filmmaking duo behind the critical and commercial hit “Goodnight Mommy.” The movie reteams Franz and Fiala with Ulrich Seidl, who also produced “Goodnight Mommy.” Set in rural Austria in 1750, “The Devil’s Bath” stars Anja Plaschg, the up-and-coming singer and composer known as Soap & Skin. Plaschg plays Agnes, a young married woman who feels oppressed in her husband’s world which is devoid of emotions and limited to chores and expectations. A pious and highly sensitive woman, Agnes falls into a deep depression, before committing a shocking act of violence that she sees as the only way out of her inner prison.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Gaumont has unveiled a first still and trailer for “Black Tea,” Abderrahmane Sissako‘s highly anticipated follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated film “Timbuktu.” The movie will world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. A lushly-lensed romance drama, “Black Tea” (previously titled “The Perfumed Hill“) tells the story of Joice, who leaves the Ivory Coast after walking out on her wedding day and sets off to start a new life in Guangzhou, China.