region Donbass: Last News

The idyllic surroundings of the Lake of Menteith would seem for most to be a million miles away from the destruction of the Ukraine war.

Christopher Vourlias Croatian writer-director Juraj Lerotić’s “Safe Place,” an emotional story of a family reeling in the wake of a suicide attempt, took the top prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which wrapped a record-setting 2022 edition in the Bosnian capital on Friday night.The Heart of Sarajevo Award for best feature film was given by a jury headed by Austrian filmmaker Sebastian Meise (“The Great Freedom”), which included French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović (“Earwig”), Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović (“Murina”), Serbian actor Milan Marić (“Dovlatov”) and Israeli producer and consultant Katriel Schory.“Safe Place” plays on Lerotić’s own pained family history, with the Croatian multihyphenate taking on the lead role in his deeply personal story — a performance that also earned him the award for best actor in Sarajevo. Fresh off a triumphant world premiere in Locarno, where the film won three awards including best first feature, “Safe Place” was described by Variety’s Guy Lodge as a “supremely poised and moving first feature” and a “shattering” debut, “with a long trail of further festival bookings surely ahead.”Ukrainian director Maryina Er Gorbach was named best director for “Klondike,” which portrays the brutal realities of the war unfolding in Ukraine’s Donbass region through the lens of a pregnant farmstead owner whose life and home fall apart.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorLeading arthouse sales company The Match Factory has acquired distribution rights to murdered Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius’ documentary “Mariupolis 2,” ahead of the film’s premiere next week at the Cannes Film Festival as a Special Screening.Kvedaravičius was captured and murdered by the Russian army in Mariupol, Ukraine in early April. The film was co-directed by Kvedaravičius’ fiancée Hanna Bilobrova, who was with him at the time of his death, and was able to bring back the footage filmed there, and edited it with his editor Dounia Sichov.The Match Factory worked with Kvedaravičius on his debut feature “Barzakh,” which played in the Berlinale in 2011.

Oliver Stone is well-known for taking contrarian stands both onscreen and off.

Further doubt has been cast on Scotland 's play-off with Ukraine, as players could be called up to fight in the escalating response to Russia's invasion.