Christopher Vourlias Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Christopher Vourlias South African filmmaker Jenna Cato Bass might not seem like the obvious choice to direct a horror movie. For most of her life, the 35-year-old helmer has steered clear of scares.

Christopher Vourlias When producer Robert Lantos began developing the big-budget historical drama series “Rise of the Raven,” adapting Hungarian author Bán Mór’s series of bestselling novels presented obvious challenges. “It’s an 11-volume novel, each volume being 500-600 pages long,” says Lantos.

Christopher Vourlias “Rise of the Raven” Producers: Robert Lantos (Serendipity Point Films) and Tibor Krsko Showrunner: George Mihalka Synopsis: An epic drama series about Janos Hunyadi, a fearless warrior who defeated the vast Ottoman army and defended Europe in 1456 at the Battle of Belgrade.

Christopher Vourlias Sebastian Meise’s “Great Freedom,” a prison drama about a gay man repeatedly incarcerated under a draconian law outlawing homosexuality in West Germany, won the award for best feature film at the Sarajevo Film Festival.The Austrian director took home the Heart of Sarajevo at Thursday night’s ceremony, while leading man Georg Friedrich won the award for best actor for a film that won the runner-up prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar.

Christopher Vourlias Wim Wenders says cinema is facing an “existential crisis” brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the rise of streaming services, urging film lovers to “fight” for movie theaters, and calling on his fellow filmmakers to rise to the challenge at a time when their voices are needed more than ever before.“[The pandemic] made me realize how much responsibility we have as filmmakers, and that this crisis that the whole of humanity is going through is also a task for us

Christopher Vourlias U2 frontman Bono made a surprise appearance at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Sunday, where he introduced a digitally restored version of Wim Wenders’ “The Million Dollar Hotel” – a film the iconic rock star presented at the Bosnian fest more than 20 years ago.Addressing a full house at the Sarajevo National Theater – where fans had gathered outside for more than an hour in the blistering heat, clutching photos and singing along to U2’s hits as they waited for his arrival on

Christopher Vourlias Philipp Yuryev’s “The Whaler Boy,” which took home the Venice Days award at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the top prize at the Transilvania Film Festival on Saturday.The jury praised the Russian director’s feature debut, an offbeat story of a teenage whale hunter on the Bering Strait who sets out to meet a webcam model, for being “beautiful and meticulous in its sense of time and place” while also being “really resonant and contemporary at the same time as being

Christopher Vourlias South Africa’s Local Motion Pictures, whose dystopian sci-fi feature “Glasshouse” will world premiere at the Fantasia Intl.

Christopher Vourlias Three volunteer workers set out from Bucharest in a convoy destined for the mountainous hinterlands of Romania, where they plan to distribute aid supplies to remote villages. But when their SUV breaks down after they decide to help a lonely old man on a desolate mountain road, their notions of empathy and charity get put to the test.

Christopher Vourlias A young gay police officer who’s worked hard to keep his sexuality hidden must face his inner demons when he’s forced to intervene during an anti-gay protest at a Bucharest movie theater.

Christopher Vourlias Saul Williams spent nearly a decade bringing his directorial debut “Neptune Frost” to the screen, but not even the multi-talented, multi-disciplinary artist could have scripted the mad dash it took to take his passion project from the rolling hills of East Africa to the Croisette in Cannes.Shot on location in Rwanda over the course of 27 frenetic days, “Neptune Frost” had just wrapped principal photography last spring when the coronavirus pandemic began grounding planes and

Christopher Vourlias When she was growing up in Nalchik, the capital of Russia’s remote Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Kira Kovalenko wasn’t particularly interested in cinema. She can cite few films that inspired her as a girl.

Christopher Vourlias When she was a student at the prestigious Lodz Film School in Poland, Jagoda Szelc was offered the chance to shoot a feature film. It was an unexpected opportunity for the aspiring filmmaker, who was then in her third year.

Christopher Vourlias The Netherlands and South Africa launched a new co-development fund July 10 in Cannes. The two counties signed a co-production treaty in 2015, and are looking to build on that through stronger collaboration.The SA-NL Thuthuka Fund will provide selective script and co-development support for feature film and documentary projects with South African- and Dutch-related content.

Christopher Vourlias Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun returns to the sun-scrubbed Sahel region of West Africa for his latest feature, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which competes for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.Set on the outskirts of the capital city of N’Djamena, “Lingui” is the story of a single mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), whose already fragile world threatens to collapse when she learns that her daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio Brahim), is pregnant — a

Christopher Vourlias French distributor ARP has acquired the rights to “Fools,” an upcoming drama by Berlinale Silver Bear winner Tomasz Wasilewski (“United States of Love”). Jan Naszewski’s Warsaw-based sales outlet New Europe Film Sales brokered the deal.“Fools” is the story of Marlena and Tomasz, who are hidden away from the world in a small seaside town and have been in a happy relationship for many years.

Christopher Vourlias When she was growing up in Croatia, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović would often spend summers on her grandparents’ island in the Adriatic Sea, an experience “that really informed my childhood,” she says. Years later, as she was pursuing a Master’s degree in film at Columbia University, a simple image came to her: the deep blue of the sea thrust against a summer sky.

Christopher Vourlias Monoduo Films, the leading distributor of feature-length music documentaries, has acquired world sales rights to “Faith and Branko,” an intimate story that chronicles the relationship between two musicians over the course of seven years.

Christopher Vourlias “When business in brothels is slow, that means the economy is on the ropes.” Those words, uttered by the indelible madame at the heart of director Eva Stefani’s “Days and Nights of Demetra K.,” offers a fitting introduction to the way in which the ups and downs in the life of a single sex worker mirror the larger political and economic uncertainties rattling post-crisis Greece.Stefani’s feature-length debut, which has its premiere in the main competition at the Thessaloniki

Christopher Vourlias To succeed in the motley and polyglot world of 21st-century media, where the borders between film and TV have grown porous, and global streaming platforms have become such a disruptive force that the very word “TV” seems old-fashioned, one could do worse than get a schooling in the rough-and-tumble world of Ukrainian television in the post-Soviet era.With the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, the old ways of doing business were crumbling, new players were

Christopher Vourlias To understand the success of Triggerfish, the fast-rising, Cape Town-based animation house, which won the prestigious MIFA Animation Industry Award this week in Annecy, one need look no further than the circumstances of its birth 25 years ago.South Africa was finally emerging from the shadows of apartheid, a cruel and exploitive system of institutionalized racism that had oppressed its Black-majority population for nearly 50 years.

Christopher Vourlias Walt Disney Animation Studios and the pan-African entertainment company Kugali revealed the first images of their hotly anticipated Disney Plus original series “Iwájú” during a presentation Wednesday night at the Annecy Animation Festival.Set in a futuristic version of Lagos, Nigeria, the series offers what production designer Hamid Ibrahim described as a “Kugali-Disney mash-up.” “This is a true collaboration.

Christopher Vourlias The CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, a training program for women documentary filmmakers conceived with a focus on Southern and Eastern Europe, has selected the four projects that will take part in its showcase as part of the Cannes Docs program of the Cannes Film Market, Variety can reveal.Hailing from the program’s backyard in the Balkans to as far afield as Brazil and Taiwan, the selection reflects the growing ambition of a program now in its third year.“Although CIRCLE

Christopher Vourlias Russian state film promotion body Roskino and public broadcaster Channel One are launching sales on a lavish, eight-part series based on the life of poet, singer, composer and cabaret artist Alexander Vertinsky, a cultural icon whose life played out against the backdrop of history-altering events in the first half of the 20th century.The series, which is being presented during Roskino’s Key Buyers Event, is available in two versions.

Christopher Vourlias Having chronicled countless landmark moments in African-American history, acclaimed documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson (“The Black Panthers,” “The Murder of Emmett Till”) understands the stakes at a time when both the culture at large, as well as the documentary industry, are in the midst of a wholesale reckoning.

Christopher Vourlias Marcela Santibañez, who was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary contender “The Mole Agent,” is executive producing a new documentary about a company of heroic firefighters, Variety has learned exclusively.Set against a backdrop of protest, pandemic and social unrest in the city of Valparaíso, “Piropolis” follows the firefighters of the fifth company as they battle the epic forest fires raging around their city.

Christopher Vourlias When the coronavirus pandemic began sweeping across the globe last year, Canada’s Hot Docs, one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals, was among the first international fests forced to pivot to an online edition.

Christopher Vourlias Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” which won the Golden Bear for best film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, has sold to major territories for Heretic Outreach, Variety has learned exclusively.The Romanian writer-director’s latest feature is an irreverent satire about a schoolteacher, Emi (Katia Pascariu), who finds her reputation under threat after a personal sex tape is uploaded on the internet.

Christopher Vourlias When she was a young girl growing up in the U.K., where she was born and spent most of her early life, classmates would struggle with Mosunmola Abudu’s name. One took to calling her “Monsoon.” Another called her “Mozambique.” In Yoruba, the name Mosunmola roughly translates as someone who is close to wealth, but the elegant appellation so flummoxed friends and neighbors that they eventually settled on a pared-down, characteristically British shorthand.

Christopher Vourlias When “Stranger Things” recently returned to Lithuania, where parts of season four of the Netflix supernatural drama were filmed in early 2020, the Baltic winter delivered on its usual promises of frigid temperatures and frosty weather.