Latest news with #Berlinale
Canada News.Net
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Canada News.Net
Huma Qureshi starrer 'Bayaan' to have world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival 2025
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 24 (ANI): Huma Qureshi starrer 'Bayaan' has been selected for the world premiere in the prestigious Discovery Section of the Toronto International Film Festival 2025, to be held in September. Helmed by writer-director Bikas Ranjan Mishra, best known for his acclaimed feature film 'Chauranga', 'Bayaan' is the only Indian film in the Discovery section. The movie was developed at Film Independent, Los Angeles and is produced by Shiladitya Bora of Platoon One Films, India's film studio known for multiple Filmfare award-winning Ghaath (Berlinale 2023), National Award winner Picasso (Amazon Prime's first direct-to-digital Marathi film). Bayaan is a co-production of Platoon One Films with Madhu Sharma (Summit Studios), Kunal Kumar, Anuj Gupta as producers with Switzerland-based Sadik Keshwani (Guidant Films) as co-producer. Huma Qureshi also serves as an Executive Producer on the film. The ensemble cast of the film includes Chandrachur Singh, Sachin Khedekar, Sand, Avijit Dutt, Vibhore Mayank, Sampa Mandal, Swati Das, Aditi Kanchan Singh and Perry Chhabra. Filmmaker Bikas Ranjan Mishra describes 'Bayaan' as a poignant reflection of contemporary India, where 'power and gender intersect in volatile and often invisible ways,' as quoted in a press release shared by the film's makers. The filmmaker added, 'It is my attempt to bear witness to a society in transition, and to the quiet courage of those who choose to speak.' I'm deeply honoured to present my second feature, Bayaan, at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Discovery section, a platform that has launched the journeys of many filmmakers I admire and cherish,' as quoted in a press note. Qureshi, who has headlined several Indian and international titles, said she is thrilled that 'Bayaan' will have its World Premiere in the Discovery section, which has launched the careers of filmmaking giants like Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuaron and Barry Jenkins, among others. The actor billed 'Bayaan' as a 'timely and powerful story' about a woman who is caught in the crossfire of 'power, faith, and systemic complicity' and must confront the system designed to silence her. 'Bayaan gave me the opportunity to play the kind of character I've long been drawn to, someone within the justice system, yet up against forces much larger than herself. It was an absolute joy to work with a team so passionate and fearless in telling a story that feels both vital and universal,' Qureshi said in a statement as quoted in a press note. Platoon One's Shiladitya Bora, the indie stalwart whose past work includes 'Newton' (India's Official Entry to Academy Awards 2017) as well as 'SIR' (Cannes 2018) and 'Ghaath' (Berlinale 2023), said the team is greatly honoured to premiere 'Bayaan' at TIFF. (ANI)
Broadcast Pro
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Broadcast Pro
Egyptian thriller ‘The Settlement' set for screening in Italy
The social thriller is Mohamed Rashad's first narrative feature, following his 2016 documentary 'Little Eagles'. Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Rashad's The Settlement will screen at the Middle East Now in Florence on July 23, following its international premiere at the Berlinale. This marks the film's third screening in Italy, underscoring its rising recognition and critical acclaim, according to MAD Films. Directed, written and produced by Rashad, The Settlement is an exploration of class, labour and survival. The film follows the story of two brothers, Hossam and Maro, who are forced to take jobs at a factory after their father dies in a workplace accident. The job is offered as compensation for their loss, but the situation is complicated by the presence of the man responsible for their father's death, who continues to work at the same facility. As Hossam struggles to adapt to the harsh factory environment and gain the trust of his father's former colleagues, Maro, only 12 years old, sacrifices his education to join his brother on the factory floor, introducing the theme of child labor into the narrative. Praised for its emotional depth and authenticity, the film has drawn attention for the performances of non-professional actors Adham Shoukry and Ziad Islam, who portray the two brothers. Their bond anchors the film's examination of loss, resilience and the complex dynamics of workplace power. The Settlement is produced by Hala Lotfy of Hassala Films in Cairo, with co-production support from partners in France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The film's upcoming screening is hosted by Middle East Now, a cultural festival organised by the Florence-based non-profit MAP OF CREATION. The association focuses on cinema and documentary filmmaking as a means of exploring contemporary social, political, and cultural issues, particularly in the Middle East, and aims to foster dialogue and integration through visual storytelling. During its development, The Settlement garnered support from numerous international funding bodies, including the Berlinale World Cinema Fund, IFFR's Hubert Bals Fund Script and Development Initiative, Hubert Bals Plus Co-Production Minority Support, Doha Film Institute, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Red Sea Development Fund, Fonds Image De La Francophonie, and El Gouna Film Festival's CineGouna Platform. The film's worldwide sales are managed by MAD World, with MAD Distribution handling its release in the Arab world.
Korea Herald
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Review: 'Spring Night' a drink-soaked exercise in aesthetic masochism
Kang Mi-ja's return after 17 years drowns in its own formal experiment, mistaking symptoms for substance If alcoholism is a pathology that corrodes the soul with insidious inevitability, "Spring Night" -- director Kang Mi-ja's second feature after a 17-year hiatus -- is cinema's manifestation of that harrowing condition, in both form and content. Fresh from its run at the Berlinale's Forum section earlier this year, this 67-minute exercise embodies the endless cycle of addiction down to its very bones. Rarely does a film mirror its subject matter with such uncanny fidelity, but the effect proves decidedly less than the sum of its meticulously damaged parts. Kang introduces her characters with an economy that borders on the clinical — fitting for a work that clocks in at barely over an hour. We meet the mild-mannered Su-hwan (Kim Seol-jin) at a wedding afterparty, where the camera holds its ground with documentary-like detachment. Things shift when Yeong-gyeong (Han Ye-ri) enters the frame, consumed by a deeply private trauma that spills out in every gesture. She pounds back soju among unconscious guests before Su-hwan — the sole conscious survivor — carries her home on his back, as she whispers fragments of Kim Su-young's poem "Spring Night" into the darkness. Their subsequent meetings unfold through halting dialogues over drinks, revealing kindred wounds: Yeong-gyeong, a former schoolteacher reeling from a bitter divorce and lost custody; Su-hwan, laid low by crippling arthritis. They bond over shared misery and decide to merge their damaged lives under one roof. Time becomes elastic, uncertain; we soon glimpse the couple, after some indeterminate stretch, deteriorating in a nursing home — Su-hwan wheelchair-bound, Yeong-gyeong's addiction now a full-blown dysfunction. She signs out repeatedly, promising to return the next day, only to break that promise in favor of another binge as Su-hwan waits outside in vain. The camera documents this decline with unflinching patience until a surreal finale suggests the inevitable separation has arrived. There's a sticky, all-consuming sense of lethargy and aimlessness permeating this narrative arc, and that seems precisely the point. The film at times channels aspects of Hong Sang-soo's uneventful cinema but strips away even the minimal gestures toward meaning or resolution. Every stylistic choice here seems reverse-engineered to produce the debilitating symptoms of alcoholism itself. The elliptical structure mirrors the consciousness of a drunk: abrupt cuts to darkness punctuate not just transitions but ongoing scenes, as if consciousness itself keeps shorting out. The opening sequence, where Su-hwan carries the drunk Yeong-gyeong home, repeats twice in succession — a disorienting gimmick that suggests those harsh loops of addiction. Meanwhile, the static camera, stuck at the same height and position, captures everything with equal gravity like an empty gaze: devastating stumbles and wails receive the same visual weight as workers moving furniture through hospital corridors. This flattening of affect through formal restraint becomes the film's primary language, turning viewers into detached observers of endless self-destruction. So what are we to make of this total convergence between form and pathology? As an artistic experiment, "Spring Night" may have its own merits. But in terms of what the director wants to communicate, its emotional core — that desperate passion and love supposedly binding these lost souls — remains criminally underdeveloped, actively undercut by the film's masochistic commitment to its own deterioration. This aestheticization of symptoms, this transformation of cinema into disease as we might say, yields a fragmented conceptual exercise that fails to meet the basic expectations of coherence or emotional totality. Despite the film's commitment to capturing raw, unvarnished despair, its narrative foundations prove rather banal: The romantic betrayal, financial hardship and terminal illness plaguing the two leads are the stuff of countless melodramas. Not that such troubles can't be heartbreaking, but the film presents them in such a way that makes them seem generic, contrived even. The chief culprit here is the curious reliance on dialogue to deliver the backstory — meandering, expository lines that sound lifted directly from the original short story without the necessary adaptations. Their literary heaviness, utterly at odds with the film's otherwise brutal minimalism and bare-bones visual approach, leaves viewers with no real emotional currency to invest in the characters or their plights. One might argue that's the whole point: a film that self-reflexively undercuts its own coherence, so invested in representing trauma and addiction that it becomes indistinguishable from their worst bits. But whether it's aiming for clever metafiction or just floundering in artistic overreach, the result is a punishing viewing experience with little sense of purpose. What value lies in watching a film engaging in thematic sabotage? Why should viewers invest in a documentation of self-destruction devoid of any social or cultural specificity? What does it contribute to our understanding of human experience beyond its own misery? Perhaps the film's saving grace lies in Han Ye-ri's performance. Fresh from her breakout in "Minari," she throws herself into this difficult role with stunning commitment — stumbling, wailing, collapsing, weeping without warning or reason, often all at once. Her background in modern Korean dance may help explain the visceral physicality she brings to these expressions of grief. One prolonged scene where the ailing couple crawls across the ground to embrace each other carries genuine power through sheer bodily eloquence. It's a shame that Han's tour-de-force job gets reduced to something between a freak show and an endurance test, stripped of the broader context that might make it meaningful rather than merely unsettling. "Don't be ambitious, don't hurry, like light fallen on the river" whispers Yeong-gyeong, reciting Kim Su-young's verse that gives the film its title and central motif. Kim Su-young, a modernist voice from Korea's tumultuous 1950s and '60s, wrote from the rubble of a war-torn nation. A raging alcoholic himself, his work pulsed with barely contained fury and anguish, regardless of subject — from nocturnal musings to political rage. His wasn't poetry of pristine beauty; it was raw, unrefined, often an incoherent jumble of high literary language and street-level vulgarity. Appropriating Kim's poem suggests a parallel, perhaps even an aspiration to similar heights, but the crucial difference lies in context. The poet's seemingly personal despairs always carried social and political weight — a society in shambles, a country in ruins, a democracy stillborn. Whether yearning for an elusive dawn in "Spring Night" or confronting his cowardice with the defiant promise of resilience in "Grass," Kim fused the personal with the political in ways that still resonate today. That fusion gave his work its enduring power. It's unclear whether Kang Mi-ja intended her film as homage to Kim's aesthetic of disorder. But for a work that offers so little beyond flickering outbursts of anguish, perhaps a more fitting touchstone would be those famous lines from "Macbeth": "Life is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing."
Time of India
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Raj Kapoor to Ranbir, the India-Iran reel connection lives on
Raj Kapoor to Ranbir, the India-Iran reel connection lives on Shruti Sonal TNN Jun 28, 2025, 17:41 IST Tehran was among the first global stopovers for Hindi cinema. Even as that bond survived the revolution and censorship, Iranian auteurs found a devoted audience in India When a 20-something Sreemoyee Singh was first introduced to Iranian films as part of her film studies program at Kolkata's Jadavpur University, she had no idea that one day, she'd roam the streets of Tehran, with a camera in her hand and legendary filmmaker Jafar Panahi by her side. Or that seven years after first landing in the country, her documentary would be screened globally — from film festivals like Berlinale to packed auditoriums in Delhi.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
First Look at Cillian Murphy in Netflix Movie ‘Steve,' a Reimagining of Max Porter's Best-Seller ‘Shy'
Netflix has released a first look at Cillian Murphy in Steve, adapted by Max Porter from his bestselling novella Shy. Off the back of Porter's Berlinale debut The Thing With Feathers, Oscar-winning Murphy stars as a headteacher in the Tim Mielants-directed Steve. The image released Tuesday shows him holding a tennis ball while leant against a blackboard. More from The Hollywood Reporter Liam Payne Featured in Netflix's 'Building the Band' Trailer YouTube Pitches Itself as a Partner for TV, Including as a Place for Longform Content and Full Episodes 'The Traitors' Are Coming to Bulgaria The movie, set to release in October, follows a day in the life with Steve and his students at a last-chance reform school amidst a world that has forsaken them. 'As Steve fights to protect the school's integrity and impending closure,' a plot synopsis reads, 'we witness him grappling with his own mental health. In parallel to Steve's struggles, we meet Shy (Jay Lycurgo), a troubled teen caught between his past and what lies ahead as he tries to reconcile his inner fragility with his impulse for self-destruction and violence.' Tracey Ullman (The Tracey Ullman Show, Mrs. America), Simbi Ajikawo (Top Boy) and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Small Things Like These) have been revealed as supporting cast members. Additional cast members include Douggie McMeekin, Youssef Kerkour, Luke Ayres, Joshua J Parker, Araloyin Oshunremi, Tut Nyuot, Tom Moya, Ahmed Ismail, Joshua Barry, Archie Fisher, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Priyanga Burford, George Fouracres, Marcus Garvey, Ruby Ashbourne-Serkis and Roger Allam. Steve will release in select U.K. theaters and on Netflix on Oct. 3. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best 13 of Tom Cruise's Most Jaw-Dropping Stunts Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT
