Ulrike Ottinger came out of a long gestation period for The Blood Countess and now fellow female German filmmaker Maren Ade is in early prep mode to direct her fourth feature film — which comes almost a full decade since Toni Erdmann premiered in Cannes to critical acclaim. Ade has been busy wearing the producer’s hat: some notable recent items include About Dry Grasses, Ahed’s Knee, Corsage, Exile, Spencer and The Story of My Wife. In a Screen Daily profile on power horse producers Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach of Komplizen Film, they revealed that they are now tying up financing coin for Ade’s Zauberwort (aka Magic Word).… Read the rest
Among the many wise observations written by nineteenth century Englishman Lord Acton, he noted “Great men are almost always bad men…” But what if they were just plain bad to begin with? And what exactly constitutes greatness? With his fourth film, The Apprentice, filmmaker 
Other invited folks bunking in the Paris staycay incvlude Australian filmmaker (based in Berlin) Rudolf Fitzgerald-Leonard (who had his short shown in the Directors’ Fortnight), Colombian filmmaker Theo Montoya of Anhell69 fame, Lithuanian filmmaker Eglė Razumaitė whose last short (Ootidé) was in the running for the short film Palme d’Or, India’s Diwa Shah (she had her feature debut at the 2023 San Sebastian Intl.… 
