Ioncinema

The New York Film Critics Circle Awards gave Brady Corbet‘s Venice and Golden Globe winning The Brutalist the top honors in the Best Film and Best Actor categories, while RaMell Ross‘ Nickel Boys is still very much in the race landing Best Director and Cinematography mentions here. Kieran Culkin is confirming his status as the frontrunner for the Best Supporting perf category with his take in A Real Pain while Marianne Jean-Baptiste is still very much in fight mode winning Best Actress for her take in Hard Truths. Flow grabbed Best Animation win, No Other Land landed the Best Non-Fic, and All We Imagine as Light was victor over the likes of Emilia Pérez for Best International.… Read the rest

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Selected for this year’s Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals, winner of the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale (and just last week it landed the grand public prize of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land has been selected as the Indie Film Site Network’s Network Advocate Award. Established in 2022 to highlight independent films each year that illuminate a humanitarian or environmental issue with a singular artistic vision. The top prize is awarded one million (1M) media impressions across the Indie Film Site Network, which represents The Film Stage, Hammer to Nail, RogerEbert.com,… Read the rest

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The Traveler Has Come: Huppert Shines in Latest Collaboration with Sang-soo

There are few directors who seem to rightly channel the comic side of Isabelle Huppert’s unique strangeness than the perennial Hong Sang-soo. Having worked together on the lovely In Another Country (2012), in which she stars as a quartet of different foreign women in South Korea, and the slight lark Claire’s Camera (2017), they’ve united once again for an equally delicate venture, A Traveler’s Needs. Once again, Huppert is a stranger in a strange land as a woman who has her own unique way of teaching French to a growing clientele of Korean women and enjoys having a few drinks (this time around for Sang-soo, the drink of choice is makgeolli, not soju).… Read the rest

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In conjunction with her new narrative feature No Address, which will be released in 2025, director Julia Verdin and co-director Stephen Wollwerth embarked on a simultaneous documentary project about homelessness across the country with Americans with No Address. Her crew took a bus to twenty cities over three weeks, conducting over one-hundred and seventy-five interviews as a means to research common issues and various solutions utilized to combat a complex crisis. We sat with director Julia Verdin plus actors Xander Berkley and William Baldwin, who appeared in both the narrative and documentary feature, as they relay their thoughts and experiences.… Read the rest

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Production is officially underway on Alice Winocour‘s fifth feature film, Coutures aka Stitches, and the casting announcements keep getting bigger. Joining yesterday’s reveal of Angelina Jolie are Louis Garrel and Ella Rumpf who reteams with her Raw co-star Garance Marillier, model Anyier Anei and Finnegan Oldfield who round out the ensemble. Variety reports that filming is currently underway in Paris. Other behind the line players involved include cinematographer Andre Chemetoff (he just completed Shaden Safieddine Tazi’s Un jour tout va disparaitre), costume designer Pascaline Chavanne, and production designer Florian Sanson. Producers include CG Cinéma’s Charles Gillibert and Closer Media’s Zhang Xin and William Horberg.… Read the rest

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We sat with director Soi Cheang to talk about his latest film, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, which premiered in the Midnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and selected as Hong Kong’s official submission for consideration in the category of Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. Cheang clarifies some misconceptions on the project’s origins previously reported in the Western media while also touching on the significant set design of the film in reconstructing a specific portion of 1980s Hong Kong, Kowloon City. Cheang talks about working with the legendary Sammo Hung, as well as how the film’s significant box office success has generated plans for a franchise.… Read the rest

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Back in September we reported that French filmmaker Alice Winocour had begun pre-production on her fifth feature film and a major casting announcement has just landed. Variety reports that Angelina Jolie has been cast (one of three central women characters in the film) in Coutures aka “Stitches.”

Following in the fashion walkways portraits of fellow French filmmakers Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent), this French and English language film is set in the world of high fashion and unfolds in Paris. Jolie stars in the movie as a filmmaker and is one of three women whose lives will collide during Fashion Week.… Read the rest

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It’s awards season in France as well with today belonging to the Prix Louis Delluc awards. It’s only a two category event, but it nonetheless puts the focus on some of the best titles in French cinema with the majority of the films coming from the various sections of the past Cannes Film Festival. Among the favorites in the field of nine noms we find with the likes of Miséricorde, L’histoire de Souleymane and Le roman de Jim measuring up against Golden Bear winner by Mati Diop, while the first films category is completely dominated by Cannes offerings from the Critic’s Week, Directors’ Fortnight and Un Certain Regard sections.… Read the rest

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We sat with director Tia Kouvo to talk about her directorial debut, Family Time, which premiered in the Encounters program of the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and selected as Finland’s official submission for consideration in the category of Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards. Touching on the short film project which provided the initial impetus to expand it into a feature, Kouvo talks about shooting in her grandparents’ home alongside her returning DP Jesse Jalonen to craft the film’s intimate mise en scene. Kouvo also explains specific soundtrack selections and cinematic influences for her first film, which she describes as a more realistic film about familial Christmas traditions, but overall, a hopeful one.… Read the rest

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The Big City: Kapadia Designs Lovely Portrait of Friendship and Free Will

Mumbai is a city of illusions, a character remarks in Payal Kapadia’s debut narrative feature, All We Imagine as Light. To survive, one has to buy into the illusion. Opening upon a bus moving through the city, a variety of offscreen characters share their thoughts on the difficulties of living there, a place of impermanence, a city which robs one’s time. We focus on a quiet, withdrawn woman who works as a senior nurse at a specialty hospital, and slowly begin to learn about her life, which includes a new roommate, a much younger nurse who’s just embarked on a clandestine romance.… Read the rest

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