Poland Showbiz Latest News and Updates

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Polish public broadcaster Telewizja Polska (TVP) has added feature film “Shattered Games” to its international sales slate alongside rom-com film “The Love Buzz” and historical series “The Bay of Spies.” “Shattered Games” explores Poland’s rich history and influence in the game of chess. The Polish national chess squad, known as the “Golden Team” in Poland, won the world chess championship in Hamburg in 1930, and was renamed by the German press as the “Bombenmannschaft” or “Bomber Crew.” “The matches the team played are still to this day described in chess textbooks as examples of masterful moves and games,” TVP said in a statement.

Robin Williams called him every week to cheer him up while he was filming his 1993 Holocaust movie, “Schindler’s List.”Spielberg’s friendship with Williams stretched back to “Hook,” the 1991 flick that Spielberg directed and featured Williams as an adult Peter Pan.Spielberg opened up about “Schindler’s List,” and several other topics, in a wide-ranging interview in the Hollywood Reporter to talk about the 30th anniversary of the movie, which was filmed in Krakow, Poland, in 1993.The movie, which won seven Oscars at the 66th Academy Awards in 1994 — including Best Picture and Best Director (for Spielberg) — told the story of German industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories.“Robin knew how hard it was for me on the movie, and once a week, every Friday, he’d call me on the phone and do comedy for me,” Spielberg said.“Whether it was after 10 minutes or 20 minutes, when he heard me give the biggest laugh, he’d hang up on me.”Neeson also remembered Williams’ Friday phone calls to Spielberg.“Steven would tell us afterward the sorts of things Robin would say,” Neeson recalled. “Once he started a riff of ‘I’m not a Nazi, I’m a nutsy,’ all this sort of s – – t.”Williams, the comedically brilliant “Mork & Mindy” star and Oscar-winning actor (“Good Will Hunting”), died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63.Spielberg said that shooting “Schindler’s List” took its toll on him, emotionally.“The hard days were beyond my imagination and the easy days were never easy,” he told THR.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor When filmmaker Jonathan Glazer sent sound designer Johnnie Burn the script for his Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” a year before production even began, Glazer laid down clear guidelines for the role sound was going to play: He did not want to share images that audiences knew and he wasn’t going to show the familiar, devastating scenes of the Polish concentration camp. He wanted to reflect everything through sound.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Berlin Film Festival hosted the 10 young European actors selected for the Shooting Stars program, run by European Film Promotion, at a gala event Monday. The presentation of the Shooting Stars took place prior to the screening of Claire Burger’s “Langue Étrangère,” which plays in competition.

Marta Balaga Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu and his Bucharest-based company Mobra Films will join forces with Poland’s Kijora Films on “Tales of the Golden Age – The Warsaw Pact,” a follow up to his 2009 sketch comedy referencing urban legends from the Ceausescu regime. Expanding to accommodate stories from different ex-communist Eastern European countries, including Poland, it will be written by Mungiu and directed by Ioana Uricaru.

BBC Making Sarah Everard Documentary

Annika Pham Copenhagen-based sales and financing outlet REinvent has inked major deals on the Danish/German thriller “Oxen”, ahead of its screening Feb. 19 as part of the Berlinale Series Market Selects label. The show, produced by Scandi major SF Studios with Germany’s Square One for TV2 Denmark and ZDF, has been acquired by GSN Networks for the UK, AMC for Spain/Portugal as well as Orion Group for Poland.

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.

A Jewish uni student has claimed daily life on her Scots campus involves relentless anti-Semitism and harassment. The account was supplied to Jewish community leaders monitoring racism, particularly since the war in Gaza erupted after October 7.

U2 singer Bono paid tribute Saturday night to recently deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny during his concert at The Sphere in Las Vegas. The frontman got the crowd to chant Navalny’s name as a memorial to the dissident’s struggle against the Russian establishment.

77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday. Gothic fantasia “Poor Things” took five prizes.Christopher Nolan was named best director for “Oppenheimer,” and Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing J.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic U2 has been performing Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” in concert at the band’s Sphere residency recently, and before Saturday night’s show, the introduction to that song extended far longer than usual, as Bono paid tribute to the dream of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in prison days earlier. The singer spoke up for the freedom of the Ukrainian people and against Russian leader Vladimir Putin — who many believe is directly responsible for the political prisoner’s still-unexplained death — before leading the crowd in a chant of Navalny’s name. “Next week it’ll be two years since Putin invaded and tried to destroy the hard-won freedoms” of the Ukrainian people, Bono said.

EXCLUSIVE: Foundation, the Apple TV+ series from Skydance TV, is set to resume production on its upcoming third season March 6 in the Czech Republic capital Prague and Poland, Deadline has learned. The cast and crew of the sci-fi drama starring Jared Harris and Lee Pace were just notified about the new principal photography start date, sources said.

EXCLUSIVE: Urban Sales has unveiled key deals for Mascha Halberstad’s CGI animation Fox And Hare Save The Forest ahead of its world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s young audience-focused Generation Kplus sidebar this weekend.

Guy Lodge Film Critic After several years working in German TV and locally-oriented film projects, Julia von Heinz had a significant breakthrough with “And Tomorrow the Entire World” — a taut, punchy political thriller with a youthful spirit of anti-fascist revolt, vigorous enough to land a Venice competition slot. Its success evidently raised the status of the director’s long-held passion project, an adaptation of Australian novelist Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical 2001 title “Too Many Men,” which reckoned thoughtfully with her parents’ experience as Auschwitz survivors, and the hereditary nature of trauma.

When Australian writer Lily Brett published her novel Too Many Men in 2001, critics marvelled at the light, comic tone she had managed to strike in a novel about the lasting impact of the Holocaust, passed down from one generation to the next. Families have their customary jokes; they squabble over the dinner table; they may be funny characters but, underneath it all, there is a consciousness of pain. That’s not an easy balance to strike, as a writer or as an actor.

Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry joined filmmaker Julia von Heinz for a press conference for new tragic comedy Treasure, which debuts this weekend in the Special Gala section at the Berlin Film Festival.

Ellise Shafer When Lena Dunham first read the script for Julia von Heinz’s “Treasure,” it hit home. The “Girls” creator’s grandmother had just died at 96, and Dunham found herself thinking a lot about her heritage. “Treasure,” based on the 1999 novel “Too Many Men” by Lily Brett, follows Ruth (Dunham), a journalist who travels to Poland with her Holocaust survivor father (Stephen Fry) to confront their family’s tragic past.

K.J. Yossman Stephen Fry has been described as a “quintessential Englishman” and, thanks to his Cambridge University degree and roles in films such as “Gosford Park” and “Wilde,” he’s got a resumé to prove it. But it turns out his latest role, as Polish Holocaust survivor Edek in the upcoming feature “Treasure,” is closer to home.

EXCLUSIVE: Film Mode Entertainment has locked a series of deals on Blue Light, the latest feature from American filmmaker Andy Fickman (Race to Witch Mountain, Parental Guidance, The Game Plan, and She’s The Man). 

Marta Balaga Following the October parliamentary election that saw the defeat of the right-wing Law and Justice party and appointment of leader of the opposition party Donald Tusk as prime minister, Polish filmmakers are cautiously readying for change. “So far, our cinema authorities have not changed. It remains to be seen whether they will change their approach to funding more topical or controversial projects.

Marta Balaga “The Zone of Interest” producer Ewa Puszczyńska has teamed up with France’s Elzévir Films and Ireland’s Copper Alley Prods. on “Safe and Silent,” backed by Arte France. “I decided to join the project because of the quality of the script.

OK, we’ve been through this one before, but let’s recap. In late fall of 2022, an incredible project was announced worth of our Most Anticipated Films Of The Year list, but perhaps more for 2025.

Alex Ritman Jonathan Glazer returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, where he shot elements of his Holocaust drama ‘The Zone of Interest,’ on Feb. 15 for the Polish premiere of his acclaimed and Oscar-nominated film.

EXCLUSIVE: France TV Distribution has posted new deals for French director Delphine Deloget’s custody battle drama All To Play For (Rien à perdre) starring Virgine Efira.

Emiliano De Pablos Pink Parrot Media, the Montreal and Madrid-based international sales house, has revealed a flurry of deals for the German-Canadian CG animated fantasy feature “Elli and Her Monster Team!,” which is making its market premiere at the EFM. Underlining the appetite for toon family features by European distributors, the film has been sold to Just Entertainment in Benelux, Bim Distribuzione in Italy, NOS Lusomundo in Portugal, Flins&Piniculas in Spain and GPI for Baltics. “Elli” has also been acquired by Pro Films in Bulgaria, Rocket Releasing for CIS, Forum (Czech Republic/Slovak), MCF Megacom Film (Former Yugoslavia), Cinetel (Hungary), Forum for Poland, Romania and Israel, and Front Row in the Middle East.

Bill Pullman‘s turn in the 1995 hit rom-com “While You Were Sleeping” may have been iconic, but he was desperate to get out of it pre-production.The film’s producer, Jonathan Glickman, revealed that the “Casper” alum, 70, was not allowed to quit the movie — because he’d just abandoned a previous project.According to Glickman, the initial screenplay was a dumpster fire, having gone through many rounds of edits and even a screenwriter change.“We went to Chicago and we did a read-through, a table read of the script,” Glickman said on the “Hollywood Gold” podcast. “And the script was kind of a cut-and-paste of the stuff that the original guys had written and the new person had written.“And then Jon [Turteltaub, the director], I think, did sort of a polish to make it make sense,” he added.The former MGM executive recalled that the table read was “one of the worst” of all time.He continued: “It just tanked.

Best Picture at the 2024 Oscars, will have its Polish premiere on Thursday at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.According to Variety, director Jonathan Glazer will introduce the harrowing film at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where parts of the movie were shot. “Zone” is about Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the Nazi officer and commandant of Auschwitz during World War II, and juxtaposes his home life with wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children to the horrors of the Holocaust happening right next door.“To acknowledge the couple as human beings was a big part of the awfulness of this entire journey of the film, but I kept thinking that, if we could do so, we would maybe see ourselves in them,” Glazer, 58, told the Guardian.

Marta Balaga Berlin-based Rise and Shine World Sales has acquired international rights to Lidia Duda’s documentary “Forest” ahead of European Film Market. Previously noticed at Ji.hlava, where it picked up the New Visions Award.

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