Jessica Kiang: Last News

Annika Pham New Europe Film Sales has added U.K. distributor Signature Entertainment to the slew of global buyers won over by Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s “Beautiful Beings,” which has racked up awards from Poland, Bulgaria, Italy and Taiwan, since its first bow at the last Berlinale Panorama. Earlier deals were closed with the U.S. (Altered Innocence), Hungary (Vertigo), Benelux (Arti Film), Germany/Austria (Salzgeber), Spain (Filmin), and CEE (HBO).Billed by Variety reviewer Jessica Kiang as an “Icelandic coming-of age, radiant with violence and tenderness,” Guðmundsson’s drama revolves around a young boy raised by a clairvoyant mother who decides to adopt a bullied misfit into his gang of outsiders. 

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorIFC Films has set the U.S. release date for “Corsage,” whose star Vicky Krieps won the best performance prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. Marie Kreutzer’s film will have its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival has just announced that the film will screen there too.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentOne year after she dazzled at the Cannes Festival, winning its Golden Eye for best documentary for “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” Payal Kapadia’s fiction debut “All We Imagine as Light,” has attracted the most potent production partner support of any project introduced at this year’s Locarno Match Me!“Night’s” producers. Petit Chaos’ Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff  in France and Ranabir Das (also DP and editor on “Night”) at India’s Another Birth will produce “Light.”Also on board, confirmed early July, is Oliver Pere at Arte France Cinéma.  Further co-producers take in Zico Maitra and Aastha Singh (Chalk & Cheese, India), Frank Hoeve (Baldr, Netherlands), Gilles Chanial (Les Films Fauves, Luxembourg and, in the latest addition to partners, Denise Lee and Roberto Minervini (Pulpa Films, Italy).

Manori Ravindran International EditorThe Belfast Film Festival has named Variety film critic Jessica Kiang and Rose Baker as its new programmers, and has also launched an inaugural feature competition.Kiang and Baker will serve as the creative leads for this year’s BFF, which runs from Nov. 3-12.

Jessica Kiang “Okinawan kindness leaves no one behind!” goes the chirpy sign-off on a political radio commercial halfway through Japanese director Masaaki Kudo’s artful and affecting Karlovy Vary competition title, “A Far Shore.” Already it plays like the bitterest irony. Aoi, a 17-year-old mother working illegally as a nightclub hostess in Okinawa, the poorest prefecture in Japan, listens with a dissociated look in her eyes: She has been left behind by practically everyone, and while Kudo’s film is deeply compassionate toward the struggling, stubborn, subjugated teen, this is an Okinawa of precious little kindness.We first meet Aoi — rivetingly played by Kotone Hanase — at work with her lissome best friend Mio (Yumemi Ishida), also a minor, as the girls giggle, drink and flirt with a couple of guys in town for a good time.

Jessica Kiang With eternal respect to Virginia Woolf, whose “A Room of One’s Own” clearly inspires the title of Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze’s beautifully articulate miniature, even before a woman needs money and her own space to be able to pursue self-fulfillment, she needs to know she needs those things. Bliadze’s superbly performed, remarkably immersive Karlovy Vary competition entry is one such story of tentative, interior emancipation, described in the tiniest arcs of change: the width of a smile, the warmth of an embrace, the directness of a gaze.

Christopher Vourlias Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s “Utama,” which won the grand jury prize in the World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance this year, took home top honors at the closing ceremony of the Transilvania Film Festival on Saturday night.Grisi’s feature debut tells the story of an elderly couple in the Bolivian highlands who refuse to relocate to the city despite the constant threat of drought. In a glowing review, Variety’s Peter Debruge described the film as a “sublime, quietly elegiac” character study that “looks quite unlike anything else.”“By relying on the simplicity, purity and poetry of his cinematic approach, the director takes the audience on a universal journey, talking about the essence of life, death and everything in between,” said the Transilvania jury, praising a film that “gives the audience a deep, multilayered feeling of how fragile our future is.” “Utama” was also feted with the festival’s Audience Award.

Jessica Kiang When left-wing coalition leader Gabriel Boric was elected to the Chilean premiership in 2021, he was 35 years old. When, a few months later, he was sworn in as the nation’s youngest-ever president — also the youngest state leader in the world — revered Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán was 80.

Jessica Kiang The Empress is unimpressed. Introduced to us at the beginning of Marie Kreutzer’s sneaky and terrific Un Certain Regard premiere “Corsage,” submerged in a bathtub during one of her many self-imposed endurance training rituals, Duchess Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie in Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, is holding her breath underwater for as long as she can.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorBig World Pictures has taken distribution rights in U.S. and Canada to Salomé Jashi’s documentary “Taming the Garden,” which competed at the Sundance Film Festival, and also played in the Forum section of the Berlinale. World sales are being handled by Toronto-based Syndicado Film Sales.In her review for Variety, Jessica Kiang described the film as “quietly magnificent and strange,” adding that it is “surreal, serene and maybe just a little bit sacred.”The opening shot of this environmental tale captures a tree as tall as a 15-story building floating on a barge across the Black Sea.

Naman Ramachandran Arrow Films have acquired U.S., Canada, U.K. and Ireland rights to Berlinale title “Incredible But True,” by French writer-director Quentin Dupieux (“Mandibles”).The quirky comedy, which had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, sees a husband and wife move into a suburban house of their dreams only to discover that a mysterious secret is hidden in the basement, which may change their lives forever.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentAlmost two weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s film industry continues to parse the complexities of a boycott on Russian cinema in order to express solidarity with the Ukrainian film community.While some film festivals, such as Stockholm and Glasgow, haven’t hesitated in boycotting Russian state-funded films outright, others like Cannes and Venice are taking a more nuanced approach, banning official delegations, but not necessarily Russian films and directors.The war’s more immediate effect, however, is that Ukrainian cinema is set to gain an increased visibility in the festival arena and beyond.On Monday evening, Rome’s Cinema Troisi hosted a free screening in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival of Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasynovych’s “Reflection” (pictured), set during the war in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in 2014. The film, which premiered in competition on the Lido last September, “asks, with brutal austerity, what happens to the soul of a man — and a nation — at war,” as critic Jessica Kiang put it in her Variety review.The Rome event, introduced by Venice Biennale president Roberto Cicutto, is being followed by other screenings of “Reflection,” organized by the fest in Italy.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentKino Lorber has acquired North American rights for Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s debut feature “Murina” which won the Golden Camera Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.Executive produced by Martin Scorsese and lushing lensed by Hélène Louvart (“The Lost Daughter”), “Murina” will be playing on opening night of the First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.“Murina” is a tense and sensual tale about a restless teenager, Julija, whose urge to break free from her oppressive father and isolated existence in coastal Croatia is triggered by the visit of a family friend. Variety‘s Jessica Kiang wrote in her review that “If Patricia Highsmith had ever written a coming-of-age story set on the rocky, clear-watered Croatian coastline, it might have looked a lot like Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s bright, brooding debut.” The movie also boasts a breakthrough performance by Gracija Filipovic, a promising young actor and professional swimmer who was one of this year’s 10 Shooting Stars at the Berlinale.

Jessica Kiang Two cameras orbit a grand piano on a circular track. Sometimes one will catch sight of the other, passing behind the black-haired singer at the keyboard, flashing between the session violinists or gliding beyond the bearded man crouched low over his synthesizer.

Jessica Kiang “The things of my mother’s that I kept don’t suit the place now,” says Glenda (Nia Roberts) absently as she preps dinner in her modernist sculpture of a house, set on a remote hillock. “They feel … primitive.” Lee Haven Jones’ sharp, striking Welsh-language SXSW midnight movie “The Feast” is designed as a critique of Glenda’s disdain, her casual snobbery toward the heritage and history of the farmland she grew up on.