Latest news with #TheSnowQueen
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Mads Mikkelsen Joins Voice Cast of ‘Snow Queen' Inspired Animated Adventure ‘North' (EXCLUSIVE)
Mads Mikkelsen has joined the voice cast of the animated feature 'North,' which is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale 'The Snow Queen.' The film is being sold in Cannes by Studio 100 Film, and will be screened on May 13 in the Marché du Film. The film centers on Gerda, who sets off into the great unknown in search of her friend Kai, who has mysteriously vanished. On her journey, Gerda makes friends with people, birds, beasts, and a kind witch, unaware that a hostile, unseen enemy – the Snow Queen and her devil apprentice, Louie – is watching her. The evil queen keeps Kai prisoner in her ice palace way up north in Finnmark, Norway. More from Variety Carlos Rincon to Launch Prestige International Pictures at Cannes, Partnering With Vital Pictures Variety's International Achievement in Film Honoree Tarak Ben Ammar Soars With Italy's Eagle Pictures Pacts and Local Hits Like 'Boy With Pink Trousers' Variety's International Achievement in Film Honoree Tarak Ben Ammar Sees His Studio de Paris Soundstages Fill With Global Hits Mikkelsen will lend his voice to the character of Severin, the father of Kai. Severin is a figure who 'embodies wisdom, sorrow and the timeless magic of storytelling,' according to a statement. As a carpenter, he builds his son a beautiful sled for Christmas and grieves when the sled and the boy vanish. Norwegian composer Rolf Løvland ('Secret Garden,' 'You Raise Me Up') contributed the original song 'Finding You,' performed by Norwegian pop singer Maria Arredondo. 'This lyrical ballad reflects the themes of longing and connection that lie at the heart of the film's journey,' the statement added. Raymond Enoksen, one of Scandinavia's leading film and television composers, with over 200 productions to his name, has created the full orchestral score as well as the original track 'True North,' which 'anchors the film's sonic identity and amplifies its dramatic narrative.' 'North' is directed by fantasy author Bente Lohne, and is produced by Håkon Gundersen ('Flight of the Navigator,' 'Free Jimmy') and his company PictoryLand, in collaboration with Anima Vitae. Ralph Guggenheim ('Toy Story'), co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, serves as consulting producer. Best of Variety 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 New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Time of India
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Mads Mikkelsen joins voice cast of animated feature 'North'
Hollywood star has joined the voice cast of the animated feature "North," inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale " The Snow Queen ." The film centers on Gerda, who sets off into the great unknown in search of her friend Kai, who has mysteriously vanished, reports Tired of too many ads? go ad free now On her journey, Gerda makes friends with people, birds, beasts, and a kind witch, unaware that a hostile, unseen enemy - the Snow Queen and her devil apprentice, Louie - is watching her. The evil queen keeps Kai prisoner in her ice palace way up north in Finnmark, Norway. Mikkelsen will lend his voice to the character of Severin, the father of Kai. Severin is a figure who "embodies wisdom, sorrow and the timeless magic of storytelling," according to a statement. As a carpenter, he builds his son a beautiful sled for Christmas and grieves when the sled and the boy vanish. The film is being sold in Cannes by Studio 100 Film, and will be screened on May 13 in the Marche du Film. Norwegian composer Rolf Lovland contributed the original song "Finding You," performed by Norwegian pop singer Maria Arredondo. "This lyrical ballad reflects the themes of longing and connection that lie at the heart of the film's journey," the statement added. "North" is directed by fantasy author Bente Lohne , and is produced by Hakon Gundersen and his company PictoryLand, in collaboration with Anima Vitae. Ralph Guggenheim, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, serves as consulting producer. Mikkelsen rose to fame in Denmark as an actor for his roles such as Tonny in the first two films of the Pusher film trilogy, Detective Sergeant Allan Fischer in the television series Rejseholdet, Niels in Open Hearts, Svend in The Green Butchers, Ivan in Adam's Apples and Jacob Petersen in After the Wedding.
CairoScene
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
'The Snow Queen' Glides into Coca-Cola Arena This April
Choreographed by Ilia Averbukh, this dazzling ice show features Olympic medalists, world champions, and award-winning skaters. Mar 10, 2025 A winter spectacle is gliding into Dubai. Coca-Cola Arena, in partnership with SAMIT Event Group, is bringing an ice show adaptation of 'The Snow Queen' to Dubai on Wednesday, April 2nd. Based on Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fairytale, the story follows a brave young girl on a journey to rescue her best friend, exploring themes of love, loyalty, and the timeless battle between good and evil. The production is helmed by acclaimed Russian ice dancer Ilia Averbukh, a world champion and Olympic silver medalist, known for his stunning choreography. He's joined by an all-star cast of Olympic medalists, world champions, and elite skaters who will bring this magical tale to life on the ice. Tickets range from AED 125 to AED 475 and are available now via the official Coca-Cola Arena website.
Euronews
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
Berlinale 2025 review: 'La Tour de Glace' ('The Ice Tower') - Marion Cotillard is the Snow Queen
Over the course of three films, from her 2004 debut Innocence to 2021's Earwig via Evolution, one of our favourite European films of the 21st century, Lucile Hadžihalolović has established herself as one of the most singular voices in French cinema. For her transfixing fourth feature, she's reuniting with Marion Cotillard after Innocence as well as her Earwig screenwriter Geoff Cox to loosely adapt Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Snow Queen'. And chilly though it is, this ain't no Frozen. Like a lot of fairy tales, it begins with an unhappy orphan. Jeanne (Clara Pacini, in her first feature role) lives in a foster home in a small, mountainous village in 1970s France. She decides to flee and head to an ice rink she's seen on a postcard. There, she admires an elegant skater named Bianca and adopts her identity when the latter loses her purse. With nowhere to sleep, she breaks into what seems to be an abandoned warehouse. It turns out she's kipping in a film studio, where a production of The Snow Queen – one of her favourite tales - is being filmed. Famous and feared actress Cristina Van Der Berg (Marion Cotillard) is playing the central role and we learn through the chats between the extras that nothing escapes the 'pitiless' Cristina. True enough, she quickly finds out that Jeanne, who has managed to pass herself off as an extra as Bianca, has been sleeping at the studio. Or maybe she knew all along? A relationship develops between them. An obsessive bond from Bianca's part; a fascination from Cristina's. And by crystal yanked from a costume or by bracelet pearl accidentally left behind, the two 'will be connected forever' in a manipulative push-and-pull. Those familiar with Hadžihalolović's films will know the director's affinity for stories brimming with brooding atmospherics and which deal with young characters faced with maturity-triggering circumstances. In adapting 'The Snow Queen', she distils the tale of a young girl's quest for her missing flame and who becomes influenced by an older woman in order to make it something more. More enigmatic; more menacing; more glacial. Glacial is the optimum word, as the form mirrors the content. The pacing is measured - to say the least - in this world of minimal dialogue, full of recurring motifs whose slippery purposes make them seem more pregnant with meaning. It's also a powerfully stylish world to dive into, as the butterscotch lighting and shadowplay in The Ice Tower bolsters the dark fairy tale mood, which is peppered with other references to childhood classics. Little Red Riding Hood's red coat, the bracelet pearls hitting the ground like breadcrumbs from Hansel And Gretel and the ogre figure Jeanne runs away from during her initial escape are some that spring to mind. They come together to tell the tale of heroine on the cusp of womanhood. Central to this is Cotillard's character. Initially, it seems that the celebrated French actress doesn't get to do all that much apart from embrace a sense of noirish beauty and elusiveness, but what she creates in the second half adds layers to Jeanne's quest. Cristina is a diva-like Norma Desmond demanding a vampiric sacrifice from a younger version of herself, but also a wounded soul. The girl in Earwig may have had actual teeth of ice, but Cristina has a jaded heart that threatens to become irreversibly icy. She's an actress who considers her glory days to be over and who sees a coming-of-age occur right before her eyes - while hers is long gone. Bianca drops her dead mother's beads as if progressively abandoning her birth mother and opening herself up to a maternal substitute; Cristina recognises this and strikes during this adolescent awakening. Or is there the possibility that she could resign herself to what she's known all along: that she's now a stepping stone for another to reach her true sense of agency? To say that The Ice Tower 's layers are snowflake-levels of numerous is putting it mildly. There is also a fascinating amount of mise en abyme created throughout – chiefly through the fact that Andersen's tale had the totemic presence of a mirror. This is replaced by a camera in The Ice Tower, creating a film within a film that offers up a meditation on how cameras, like mirrors, can reflect and deform reality. The Cristina / Snow Queen and Jeanne / Bianca dédoublements may simply a way to tell the tale of an older woman both cruelly and resolvedly imparting the love of the facetted medium of cinema itself. The longueurs and prism-like layers in Hadžihalolović's film will frustrate and disorientate viewers looking for either more crystalized meaning or even something overtly stranger. And it's true that even for fans of Innocence and Evolution 's sinister grooming rituals and Earwig 's haunting surrealism, this eerie reverie lacks an impactful sense of strangeness – something initially teased by the ominous title card featuring the American Horror Story font. However, anyone yearning to be entranced by a frosty mood piece will find The Ice Tower 's intoxicating spell tricky to break.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Ice Tower review – Marion Cotillard focus of obsession and idolisation in death-wish fairytale
An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film; it is a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission. It wittily fuses the real and the fictional into a trance-state – and that's the state that I've sometimes found a little static in previous films by Lucile Hadzihalilovic, but not here. Dreamily strange it might be (and in fact, on the face of it, entirely preposterous) this movie had me gripped with its two outstanding lead performances – from Marion Cotillard and newcomer Clara Pacini – and a clamorous musical score. Cotillard plays a diva-ish movie actress called Cristina, who is the lead in a new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen being filmed on a soundstage which is in a remote and snowy spot in late 60s France; she is gorgeously costumed in a sparkling white form-fitting gown and crown, a look she carries off with great unsmiling hauteur. Pacini plays Jeanne, a teenage girl in a foster home nearby, stricken with memories of the death of her mother, whose bead necklace she keeps. In her loneliness and grief, Jeanne has projected her feelings into an obsession with the story of the Snow Queen, an obsession further displaced at another remove into idolising the teen girls who ice-skate at the local rink. One day she runs away, stealing the ID of an older girl called Bianca and breaks into the film studio to sleep overnight; she somehow gets a job as an extra, astonished to realise what story is being filmed, and it is here that her gamine prettiness and air of demurely sensitive adoration for the queen catches Cristina's eye. Cristina's somewhat louche director Dino, played by cameo by Hadzihalilovic's partner Gaspar Noé, is in the habit of telling likely young actresses that he might cast them in his next project, a Hitchcockian thriller. In fact, there is something Hitchcockian in this shoot, with an attack carried out by a bird, and in Cristina's own cold, cruel detachment from the victim's suffering. Hadzihalilovic might intend us to notice in one shot a movie poster for The Red Shoes, but the Powell/Pressburger film that this more resembles is surely Black Narcissus with its female desire and delirium in the bitter mountain cold. Cristina and Jeanne become very close in a dangerous way, although the younger woman is always subject to Cristina's whim and caprices, the starry mannerisms which Cristina has learned to enforce her own status and mask her vulnerability. There is a great shot of Jeanne's awestruck gaze as she turns the pages of a glossy-magazine profile of Cristina. She learns, along with the audience, that they have much in common: Cristina herself was once in a foster home, and appears to have been guided and protected in her early years by a male confidant, Max (August Diehl), who calls himself her friend and doctor. Has Max been prescribing certain medications for Cristina? Sequences in the film let us drift onto the set of The Snow Queen, as if in a dream; it is a production design which fabricates the ice-realm in all its seductive artificiality, with the ice tower in one shot is juxtaposed with Cristina's own statuesque poise. We can feel what Jeanne woozily feels: that she has miraculously found herself in the ice realm with the ice queen herself. But what does Cristina want of Jeanne – and what can she want of Cristina? It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster. The Ice Tower screened at the Berlin film festival.
