Lise Pedersen: Last News

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel (VdR) has unveiled the lineup of its 54th edition, which features a broad panorama of both established names and newcomers from around the world. The festival kicks off on April 21 with the world premiere of “Nightwatchers” by Juliette de Marcillac and runs through April 30. The event will screen a total of 163 films from 46 countries, with a 50-50 parity between female and male directors. No fewer than 12 out of 14 films in the main International Competition and 13 out of 15 in the Burning Lights section, the festival sidebar dedicated to new documentary expression, are world premieres, bearing testimony to the fest’s reputation for setting the trend on the global doc scene.

Lise Pedersen “A Sense of Place,” a collection of six short films by young Iranian directors, had its world premiere this week at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX. The films are inspired by Wim Wenders’ eponymous 2005 book, and the Oscar nominated director – best known for “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire,” “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Pina” – served as the project’s “godfather,” he explained at the festival. Curated by Iranian producer Afsun Moshiry in collaboration with The Wim Wenders’ Foundation, which supports young directors and innovative filmmaking, the anthology takes viewers on a journey that starts in Iran, travels to the country’s southern border, onto a plane to Germany, and ends up in France, where two of the films are shot.

Lise Pedersen Los Angeles non-profit The Film Collaborative has boarded Swedish director Tove Pils’ debut feature “Labor,” which is competing in the Nordic:Dox section at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX. The film follows Hanna, who leaves her family and girlfriend behind in her small Swedish hometown and travels to San Francisco to explore her sexuality in the city’s vibrant queer scene. She soon meets Chloe, a professional dominatrix, and Cyd, a trans man who works as an escort for gay men. Together with her new friends, she embarks on a journey that takes her further and further away from her life in Sweden. “Labor” was shot over more than a decade, and one of the reasons it took them so long to put the film together was their concern for the protagonists’ anonymity and the effect it might have on their lives, Pils explains to Variety.

Lise Pedersen Documentary filmmaker Jialing Zhang, who was nominated for an Emmy for “One Child Nation,” spoke to Variety about her latest film, “Total Trust,” which is running in the main competition at CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Festival. It tells the chilling story of three women and their families fighting for their human rights in China, where state control is ubiquitous thanks to high technology surveillance, such as facial recognition, big data analysis and points systems that mean citizens gain or lose points depending on their behavior. Zhang’s intimate footage offers unprecedented access to the impact of this all-controlling system on the protagonists’ everyday lives.

Lise Pedersen The Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX, has unveiled the full program of its 20th edition, which includes 200 new films, more than half of which are world premieres, sealing CPH:DOX’s reputation as one of the leading events of its kind in Europe. For the first time, all 13 films competing for the top Dox:Award are world premieres. These include “A Storm Foretold,” the long-awaited doc on Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone by Danish political journalist Christopher Guldbrandsen; established filmmaker Margreth Olin’s highly anticipated epic film “Songs of the Earth”; “A Tiger in Paradise,” a surreal journey into Swedish singer José González’ inner world by Ruben Östlund’s regular creative partners Mikel Cee Karlsson and Erik Hemmendorff; and “Total Trust” by Jialing Zhang (“One Child Nation”), described as “the first major film about the Chinese surveillance state (…) – a disturbing tale of technology, (self-) censorship and abuse of power in the 21st century.”

Lise Pedersen The head of the venerable Il Cinema Ritrovato festival and new president of the Rome Film Fest, Gianluca Farinelli, has opened the 10th edition of the Lumière Festival’s Classic Film Market.   Kicking off the keynote, Farinelli was asked how he reconciles his love of classic cinema with his new role as head of the Rome Film Fest, which runs Oct. 13–23.   “Fundamentally, what touches me with heritage films, my passion and love for that cinema, is that sometimes it can speak to you as if the creator was contemporary,” Farinelli said.  “I’ve never considered contemporary and classic cinema separately – I have always seen them as a whole. I love cinema of all eras,” added the man who co-founded Il Cinema Ritrovato in 1986, one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals dedicated to the history and preservation of cinema.

Lise Pedersen Film writer and director Lee Chang-dong (“Burning,” “Oasis,” “Peppermint Candy”), one of Korea’s best-known auteur filmmakers who has contributed to putting Korean cinema firmly on the global stage, is guest of honor at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon, where he was welcomed with a standing ovation.  The Cannes veteran – four out of his six feature films have been screened at the festival and its sidebars – engaged with the audience with characteristic humility on questions of identity, human nature, violence and love, which are central themes to all of his films.  “People sometimes ask me why I always tell stories centered on characters who are suffering. Trust me, I am not sadistic,” he smiled. “But it takes us back to the notion of family [which is central to all my films]: I grew up in a poor family, and I’m familiar with suffering,” he said. 

Lise Pedersen French director Julien Villanueva whose animation and VFX outfit Circus Studio has worked on the likes of “Lego City Adventures”, “Around the World in 80 Days” and “White Fang,” has pitched his first ever original TV series project at Cartoon Forum in Toulouse. “Dr Bob is a very simple concept,” he joked to the crowd of industry professionals gathered at the pitching forum in the southern French city. “It’s like Freud meets Kermit the Frog,” he explained about his show, a sitcom centered around Dr. Bob, a wacky psychologist who goes to extremes to make his patients happy, which often leads to radical consequences.

Lise Pedersen Women in Animation (WIA) has announced the program for its 6th World Summit, an annual event held in conjunction with the Annecy International Animation Festival.Based on the theme Gender Justice: A Global Call for Inclusion in Animation, the June 13 summit will include panels and conversations with key thought leaders, filmmakers and executives from around the world on the issue of gender justice for all, including men, women, transgender, and non-binary people.The Summit will provide a welcome opportunity to address the question of labor shortage in the industry, according to WIA President Marge Dean: “I’m thrilled that our sixth World Summit theme will look at how gender justice can be a solution to some of the issues plaguing the industry including a very real labor shortage. We want to ensure that people of all gender identities have the power and access to opportunities to improve their lives.” These thoughts were echoed by WIA Secretary, Julie Ann Crommett: “We are at an inflection point in our industry and world, where looking more inclusively at the concept of gender, questioning traditional power dynamics, and seeking to build a globally equitable creative community is urgent and necessary.

Lise Pedersen “The Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be” by Benjamin Massoubre and Amandine Fredon is having its world premiere at a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20.Several years in the making, the film brings together the world-famous French schoolboy and his creators, author René Goscinny and cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, as it goes back and forth between their world and his imaginary world.Translated into more than 30 languages, the Little Nicholas short stories have been adapted to fiction but never to animation until now. For the creative team, it was essential to stay true both to Goscinny’s short stories and to Sempé’s drawings.“The main challenge was to create the Little Nicholas’ world in animation and, at the same time, remain faithful to Sempé’s style – his drawings are very small, they’re made in ink, which gives them a sort of awkward but very lively energy, full of emotion.

Lise Pedersen The 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival also marks the 25th anniversary of its partnership with luxury jewelry and watchmaker Chopard.Chopard artistic director and co-president Caroline Scheufele remembers fondly when Pierre Viot, then president of the Cannes Film Festival, asked her to create a new version of the world-famous trophy in 1997.“You can imagine my racing heart when he invited me to redesign a fresh interpretation of the Palme d’Or,” Scheufele tells Variety. “The following year, at the closing ceremony of the 1998 Cannes Festival, the new Palme d’Or was unveiled to the world in the form in which it still exists today.For Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux, the 25-year partnership with Chopard is a relationship based on loyalty and trust.

Lise Pedersen “Like an Island” (“L’îlot”), a hybrid documentary fable tinged with magical realism by Swiss director Tizian Büchi, has won the Grand Jury Prize at international documentary film festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland. The debut feature had its world premiere at the festival, bearing testimony to the event’s reputation as a launchpad for new talent and its tradition for hybrid fiction-reality films.

Lise Pedersen Ukrainian filmmakers and producers discussed the act of resisting war through images during an online talk Thursday at international documentary film festival Visions du Réel.The panel was made up of producer Illia Gladshtein and director Nadia Parfan, whose film “Heat Singers” screened at the festival in 2019, Maksim Nakonechnyi, whose debut film “Butterfly Vision” will be in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes next month, and photographer and director Artem Iurchenko (“Cursed Days,” 2018).Nakonechnyi has been shooting in Ukraine since the first days of the war and Parfan returned from an artist’s residence in Egypt in the wake of the Russian invasion to document what was happening in her country. Iurchenko, who is based in Paris, has been traveling across Europe in his car since the start of the war, transporting refugees, equipment, medical and humanitarian aid to and from Ukraine.

Lise Pedersen Italian director, screenwriter and producer Marco Bellocchio has opened up about his career and upcoming projects during a masterclass at the 53rd edition of Visions du Réel, where he received an honorary award.The 82-year-old master is guest of honor at the documentary film festival, which includes a retrospective of a dozen of his works and a screening of his latest film, “Marx Can Wait,” a documentary about his twin brother Camilo’s suicide in December 1968. Featuring footage filmed during a family get-together, personal archive material and clips from his films, it is an intimate and poignant documentary that explores how his brother’s death deeply influenced Bellocchio’s work over the decades.

Lise Pedersen “Il Posto” (“A Steady Job”), which world premiered Tuesday at Visions du Réel film festival, is set to launch in Europe on Franco-German channel ARTE and German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk in September. The film is directed by Italian duo Mattia Colombo and Gianluca Matarrese, whose “Fashion Babylon” premiered recently at CPH:DOX.

Lise Pedersen “The Eclipse” by Nataša Urban has picked up the top Dox:Award at Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival.It was awarded at a ceremony in the Danish capital, which opened with a homage to Ukraine – where fest organizers announced they would be screening Daniel Roher’s “Navalny” in theaters across the nation immediately after the festival to show “that there is another Russia.”“The Eclipse” was competing with 11 others for the top award – half of them had their world premiere at the fest, part of no fewer than 76 world premieres during the event.Focusing on the events of Aug.

Lise Pedersen “Novorossiya” by Enrico Parenti and Luca Gennari, which had its world premiere this week at CPH:DOX, is a rare film that shows the ongoing conflict in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region from the Russian perspective.Gennari, an experienced cinematographer, was shocked at the way the war in the Luhansk and Donetsk region, where pro-Russian separatists have proclaimed the state of Novorossiya (literally “New Russia”), no longer received any media attention once the Maidan revolution was over.In 2017, he decided to head to the Donbas region with his camera to see what life was like there.The film follows the parallel stories of a handful of characters, ranging from a communist U.S. fighter from Texas to a young Ukrainian soldier, a captain in the separatist army who dreams of rebuilding the Soviet Union, an opera singer from the Donetsk opera house, two young men from a heavy metal band and two elderly women who live in a bunker.

Lise Pedersen Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree, whose previous film “The Painter and the Thief” picked up a host of awards including Best Storytelling at Sundance, has given Variety exclusive access to his new doc film project, “Ibelin,” at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival.The film is named after the “World of Warcraft” avatar of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died at the age of 25 from DMD (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy), a rare genetic disorder that causes muscle degeneration.After his death, Mats’ parents discovered that their disabled son, who for the last 10 years of his life had been wheelchair-bound and needed constant medical assistance, has led a rich and eventful life online and made friends around the world on the way.

Lise Pedersen Filmmakers Sara Dosa and Lars Ostenfeld, whose docs “Fire of Love” and “Into the Ice” are vying for the top Dox:Award at Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, have opened up about the creative challenges of making films about science and climate change during a morning talk at the fest’s industry events.Dosa’s “Fire of Love,” which premiered at Sundance where it was picked up by National Geographic Films, is a lyrical archival collage of extraordinary archive material about the lives of French volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft.Asked how she chose her story, Dosa explained that she came across them when researching her previous film set in Iceland (“The Seer and the Unseen”), and knew they were the perfect fit.

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel (VdR), which revealed its industry program last week, has unveiled its full lineup as it prepares to welcome participants both in person and online. A total of 160 films will be screened throughout the fest, which runs from April 7 through to April 17 in half a dozen venues in and around the city of Nyon.While the event is back in its physical form, organizers have learned from the past two editions and decided to keep a strong online presence.

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled its VdR-Industry selection, which includes 27 projects in different stages of production.The works will be invited to participate in three key forums – VdR-Pitching, VdR-Work in Progress and VdR-Rough Cut Lab – that run as part of the fest’s industry activities in Nyon from April 10-14.Those who cannot make it to the festival will be able to participate online but organizers are focusing strongly on the in-person event.“We can’t wait to finally welcome back project holders and industry representatives to the shores of Lake Geneva. We feel strengthened by the lessons we have learned from the digital and hybrid editions of the last two years.