Latest news with #DéniOumarPitsaev
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Imago' Director Déni Oumar Pitsaev On Winning Two Prizes In Cannes: 'I Didn't Expect It At All'
When Chechen-born filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev came to Cannes with his new documentary Imago, he felt very uncertain about how it would be received. After all, it's a personal story and it's set in a place far from the experience of most people – a remote enclave in a corner of Georgia called Pankissi, very close to the border with Chechnya. But Pitsaev has received the kind of validation in Cannes that filmmakers only dream of, winning two prizes: the L'Oeil d'or for the top documentary at Cannes, and the jury prize at Critics Week. More from Deadline Palm Dog: 'The Love That Remains', 'Sirât', 'Pillion' And 'Amores Perros' Honored - Cannes Film Festival Foul Play Suspected In Cannes Power Outage With Electricity Pylons Sabotaged Cannes Power Restored; Festival Closing Ceremony To Go Ahead As Planned In Wake Of Five-Hour Power Outage In South Of France 'I didn't expect it at all,' Pitsaev told Deadline Friday after the L'Oeil d'or announcement. A day earlier, he shared similar sentiments after winning the French Touch Prize of the Jury from Critics Week. We spoke on the beach at the Plage Miramar as high winds whipped waves in the Mediterranean a few feet away. 'For the moment, it's like an adrenaline rush,' he commented. 'It's going to be a big help for the film for sure. I mean, my producers, they're happier than I am for the moment.' Imago begins with the filmmaker contemplating what to do with a plot of land his mother has given him in Pankissi. Should he sell it? Build a house there? If he goes the house route, what kind should he build? For Pitsaev, who lives in Brussels and Paris, dealing with the Pankissi property involves returning to a place of some painful memories, and reengaging with complicated family dynamics. When Déni was only a few months old, his mom left his dad, and mother and child moved to Kazakhstan, 'defying Chechen tradition that dictates divorced women must leave their children behind,' as Pitsaev writes in a director's statement. 'My grandfather forbade her to return home, but she refused to abandon me.' After his grandfather died a few years later, Pitsaev and his mom moved back to Chechnya. He grew up in the '90s in a chaotic time for the former autonomous Soviet republic, as Chechnya tried to assert independence from Russia. 'We had two wars. The first war started in 1994, and I was like eight years old or something. It's my first experience with war,' Pitsaev recalled. 'When the second war started, it was a few years later in 1999 after Putin arrived in power in Russia… [Starting] the war in Chechnya, it was his first move, actually. And we forget about this; what's happened in Ukraine today, it didn't come from nowhere. It was already there 25 years ago.' As Russian bombing devastated parts of Chechnya, Pitsaev and his mother moved to St. Petersburg. But as a Chechen, he became an immediate object of prejudice. 'It's a really strange thing because you're still a child and you are innocent. You've done nothing wrong and you are a victim of what's happening. It's not Chechnya who invaded Russia. It's Russia who invaded Chechnya and it's Russian bombs killing the people inside of Chechnya,' he said. 'When you're in Russia, they hate you. But for what? I mean, it's like schizophrenic. You don't understand. You are a victim.' His mother encouraged him to change his name to something more Russian sounding: Andrey Andreyevich. 'It was a traumatic experience as a child to change my first name and last name,' he recalled. 'It was like a Russification of my name to protect me from the harassment in school and not to be bullied — not only by children but also by teachers. The teacher in school would say, 'Why we don't stop the war in Chechnya now? It will be easier if we drop an atomic bomb there.' And then you're terrified and you are thinking, 'Does the teacher know that I'm from Chechnya?' You are so scared, and you feel, oh, maybe someone will know. Or maybe my accent will be wrong. You try to do better so your Russian is perfect. It's quite a terrible thing, actually.' For Pitsaev, going back to Pankissi meant facing the strictures and conformity of a quite traditional society. In his director's statement, the filmmaker writes, 'I cannot return to Chechnya today. For political reasons, the land of my childhood is closed to me. It exists now only in memory—a place of freedom and loss. My mother's gift of land in Pankissi felt like a bridge to that unreachable past, but it came with expectations: build a house, start a family, grow the clan. Become 'a Chechen man.'' In the film, Pitsaev is constantly asked when he's going to get married. And when he shows family members the design for the house he wants to build – a modern A-frame, elevated from the ground — they react with a degree of alarm. Both he, a single man, and his house would stick out. Pitsaev's father appears in the film – a genial man who remarried and has two teenage sons with his new wife. Pitsaev tries to confront perhaps the most painful memory of all from his childhood – why his father didn't come for him. There is no simple answer to that question. Traditions and expectations of masculinity bear on his dad's decision to stay away. 'My approach was kind of gentle with them and it's not a big clash in the film,' he said. 'I didn't want to make too much drama, because the film is all about the things we say and especially the things we don't say, and about the silence — almost like secrets, going around things, always playing with them, playing with the words, what we say in words and what we say by our body movements, like body language.' Pitsaev tells Deadline he's now at work on a narrative-fiction film. Imago, meanwhile, will be released in cinemas in France in late October. 'We're more than happy that people can see the film on a big screen as it was planned,' he said. 'All of the images and also sound, all the work we did, it's done for cinema theater to have the full experience.' Pitsaev added, 'For international sales, we're dealing with Beijing-based company Rediance. And we hope they will bring the film all over the world. But yeah, we'll for sure have a New York premiere soon as well.' Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg Everything We Know About Amazon's 'Verity' Movie So Far Everything We Know About 'The Testaments,' Sequel Series To 'The Handmaid's Tale' So Far
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Critics' Week Awards Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's ‘A Useful Ghost'
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's 'A Useful Ghost' has picked up Critics Week's Grand Prize. The film has been picking up fans among journalists since the premiere, intrigued by its absurd yet sweet story of a woman who dies from dust pollution and a husband who's shocked to find out her spirit has been reincarnated – in a vacuum cleaner. More from Variety 'Romería' Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents' Obscured Past in Carla Simón's Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage 'My Father's Shadow' Producer Funmbi Ogunbanwo Headlines Inaugural African Producers Accelerator Program (EXCLUSIVE) Mórbido TV and Screen Capital Unveil Umbra, a Genre-First Streaming Hub for the LatAm Market (EXCLUSIVE) 'A ghost-possessed vacuum cleaner might sound like standard horror fare, but in the hands of Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, it transforms into a sly commentary on pollution, power dynamics, and the cost of living crisis in Bangkok,' wrote Variety's Naman Ramachandran earlier this week, with the director adding: 'Thailand is well known for horror cinema, and we also have a genre that might not travel abroad very much – horror comedy. But with this film, I try not to follow the conventions of both paths. One of my first ideas was wondering how a ghost could exist in contemporary society. Do they need to work? Because the cost of living here is now very expensive.' The jury, presided over by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and featuring Jihane Bougrine, Josée Deshaies, Yulina Evina Bhara and Daniel Kaluuya, also awarded 'Imago' by Déni Oumar Pitsaev. In the film, Déni inherits a patch of land in the wild valley of Pankissi and sees a chance to finally build the house in the trees that he's dreamed of. But nothing in the rugged Caucasus is ever simple. Returning to a village just across the Chechen border where he was born, Déni stirs up old feuds. The Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award went to Théodore Pellerin for 'Nino' by Pauline Loquès. Among other partners' prizes, the SACD Prize, awarded by France's Writers' Guild, went to Guillermo Galoe & Victor Alonso-Berbel, co-scribes of Sleepless City ('Ciudad sin sueño). Directed by Galoe, the Spanish-French feature delivers a lyrical, stylish but heavily grounded vision of a increasingly fissiparous Roma family in La Cañada Real, said to be the biggest shanty town in Southern Europe, whose way of life is disappearing as its residents are moved to sterile high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts of Madrid. . Le Pacte, French distributor for 'Left-Handed Girl' by Shih-Ching Tsou, was awarded the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution. Here's the full list of awards: Grand Prize 'A Useful Ghost' by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke French Touch Prize of the Jury 'Imago' by Déni Oumar Pitsaev Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award Théodore Pellerin for 'Nino' by Pauline Loquès Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for Short Film 'L'mina' by Randa Maroufi Awards given by partners Gan Foundation Award for Distribution Le Pacte, French distributor for 'Left-Handed Girl' by Shih-Ching Tsou SACD Award Guillermo Galoe and Victor Alonso-Berbel, authors of 'Sleepless City' Canal+ Award for Short Film 'Erogenesis' de Xandra Popescu Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Critics' Week Awards Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's ‘A Useful Ghost'
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's 'A Useful Ghost' has picked up Critics Week's Grand Prize. The film has been picking up fans among journalists since the premiere, intrigued by its absurd yet sweet story of a woman who dies from dust pollution and a husband who's shocked to find out her spirit has been reincarnated – in a vacuum cleaner. More from Variety 'Romería' Review: A Budding Filmmaker Pursues Her Parents' Obscured Past in Carla Simón's Lovely, Pensive Coastal Voyage 'My Father's Shadow' Producer Funmbi Ogunbanwo Headlines Inaugural African Producers Accelerator Program (EXCLUSIVE) Mórbido TV and Screen Capital Unveil Umbra, a Genre-First Streaming Hub for the LatAm Market (EXCLUSIVE) 'A ghost-possessed vacuum cleaner might sound like standard horror fare, but in the hands of Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, it transforms into a sly commentary on pollution, power dynamics, and the cost of living crisis in Bangkok,' wrote Variety's Naman Ramachandran earlier this week, with the director adding: 'Thailand is well known for horror cinema, and we also have a genre that might not travel abroad very much – horror comedy. But with this film, I try not to follow the conventions of both paths. One of my first ideas was wondering how a ghost could exist in contemporary society. Do they need to work? Because the cost of living here is now very expensive.' The jury, presided over by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and featuring Jihane Bougrine, Josée Deshaies, Yulina Evina Bhara and Daniel Kaluuya, also awarded 'Imago' by Déni Oumar Pitsaev. In the film, Déni inherits a patch of land in the wild valley of Pankissi and sees a chance to finally build the house in the trees that he's dreamed of. But nothing in the rugged Caucasus is ever simple. Returning to a village just across the Chechen border where he was born, Déni stirs up old feuds. The Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award went to Théodore Pellerin for 'Nino' by Pauline Loquès. Among other partners' prizes, the SACD Prize, awarded by France's Writers' Guild, went to Guillermo Galoe & Victor Alonso-Berbel, co-scribes of Sleepless City ('Ciudad sin sueño). Directed by Galoe, the Spanish-French feature delivers a lyrical, stylish but heavily grounded vision of a increasingly fissiparous Roma family in La Cañada Real, said to be the biggest shanty town in Southern Europe, whose way of life is disappearing as its residents are moved to sterile high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts of Madrid. . Le Pacte, French distributor for 'Left-Handed Girl' by Shih-Ching Tsou, was awarded the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution. Here's the full list of awards: Grand Prize 'A Useful Ghost' by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke French Touch Prize of the Jury 'Imago' by Déni Oumar Pitsaev Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award Théodore Pellerin for 'Nino' by Pauline Loquès Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for Short Film 'L'mina' by Randa Maroufi Awards given by partners Gan Foundation Award for Distribution Le Pacte, French distributor for 'Left-Handed Girl' by Shih-Ching Tsou SACD Award Guillermo Galoe and Victor Alonso-Berbel, authors of 'Sleepless City' Canal+ Award for Short Film 'Erogenesis' de Xandra Popescu Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chechen Documentary ‘Imago' Debuts Clip Ahead of Cannes Premiere, Rediance Handles Sales (EXCLUSIVE)
An exclusive clip of Chechen documentary 'Imago,' directed by Déni Oumar Pitsaev, is being debuted by Variety. The film, which is sold worldwide by Rediance and will be released by New Story in France, has its world premiere in Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival. Oumar Pitsaev, an exiled Chechen filmmaker, returns to Pankissi, a Georgian valley at the foot of the Caucasus, inhabited by descendants of his Chechen clan. When he inherits a small patch of land in the valley, he sees a chance to finally build the house in the trees that he's dreamed of since he was a boy. More from Variety Spanish Comedy Icon Fernando Colomo's 'The Delights of the Garden' Swooped on by Latido Films in the Run-up to Cannes (EXCLUSIVE) 'White With Fear' Documentary Sets June On-Demand Release Date (EXCLUSIVE) Sheffield Doc/Fest Announces Full Lineup, Including Mstyslav Chernov's Frontline Doc '2000 Meters To Andriivka' But nothing in the rugged Caucasus is ever simple. Returning to a village just across the Chechen border where he was born – a place he barely knows – he stirs up old feuds, buried family dramas, and above all, the question everyone keeps asking: when, and with whom, is he finally going to get married? In a statement, the director said: 'When my cousin invited me to spend a summer in Pankissi, I knew I would have to confront everything I had spent years running from: the pressure of tradition, the demands of family, the weight of religion, and the silence around identity. 'This film is both a return and a reckoning — with my Chechen roots, my fractured family, and my own internal exiles. I navigate the tension between belonging and freedom, between the home I fled and the one I might one day build. ' 'Imago' is a story of metamorphosis—of what it means to grow, to forgive, and to imagine a future that honors the past without being bound by it.' The film is produced by Triptyque Films in France and co-produced by Need Productions in Belgium, Arte Cinema and RTBF. It has been supported by the Sundance Institute, ASR and Eurimages, and was part of a number of pitching forums, notably Hot Docs, Toronto, Sheffield and Locarno. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
