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"I wouldn't sleep if I were you... a thing like that never stops." Vertical has revealed the official trailer for the indie horror film The Damned, from young Icelandic filmmaker Thordur Palsson marking his feature directorial debut. Not to be confused with the film about US Civil War soldiers also titled The Damned from this year, this is a haunting horror set on Iceland in the past. A 19th-century widow (starring Odessa Young) has to make an impossible choice when, during an especially cruel winter, a foreign ship sinks off the coast of her Icelandic fishing village. The Damned, an ominous and chilling thriller, follows Eve and her crew as they come across a shipwreck and are faced with the moral dilemma to help or not. An atmospheric blend of drama and psychological horror that captivated audiences at the 2024 Sitges Film Festival this fall. Starring Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Siobhan Finneran,...

Survival odds become even more harrowing when a mysterious ship crashes mid-winter in period chiller The Damned from director Thordur Palsson. The first look trailer highlights just how cruel life can be in the 19th century.

Look for the psychological chiller to release in theaters on January 3, 2025.

The Damned follows “a 19th-century widow who is tasked with making an impossible choice when a ship sinks off the coast of her isolated fishing outpost during the middle of an especially cruel winter. With provisions running low, Eva and her close-knit community must choose between rescuing the shipwrecked crew and prioritizing their own survival. Facing the consequences of their decision and tormented by guilt, the inhabitants wrestle with a mounting sense of dread and begin to believe they are all being punished for their choices.”

Jamie Hannigan wrote the screenplay based on a story by Palsson.

The Damned boasts an impressive cast,...

Minimalist documentarian Roberto Minervini says he long ago fell in love with “the physicality of the camera” – a passion so strong, he now demands that his camera operators learn controlled breathing and work out extensively before a shoot can begin.

There’s nothing that bothers him more, he told fans at the Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, than detecting slight movements of the frame from the cameraperson’s breathing.

And sure, he could have used Steadicams while filming this year’s American Civil War drama, “The Damned.” But that would mean “limiting camera movement” and would add 45 minutes of setup time, besides making the rig too imposing, he says.

Making his first in-person appearance at Ji.hlava, Minervini has fascinated audiences with his perspectives. In 2020, the fest screened his docs “Low Tide” (2012), “Stop the Pounding Heart” (2013) and “The Other Side” (2015), but in that Covid lockdown year, live guests were out of the question.

Robert Minervini’s The Damned begins with two wolves tearing into a elk carcass, ripping off its fur and chewing its intestines. This isn’t a nature documentary, but such gruesome images set the harsh tone for a movie imagining what it might be like to follow a regiment of Union soldiers charting unmapped Western territories in 1862. The temperature is dropping, the terrain is uncompromising, the food supply is low, the nearby forest is full of lurking enemies, and there’s no civilization in sight. It is a daily fight for survival, for community, for meaning.

To pull off this journey through the abyss, Minervini enlisted a group of non-professional actors to document what it might have been like at the height of the Civil War in an untouched, desolate part of the country. Over the course of this slice of challenging life, veteran sergeants and youthful scouts engage in...

Roberto Minervini’s new film, which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, is the second feature in this festival round to be titled The Damned. Another movie with the same English-language title, directed by Thordur Palsson and featured at the Tribeca Film Festival, was also set in a period setting, and talked about moral compromises and emotional tolls extreme circumstances can take on human beings. (See review linked below.) Minervini’s feature ventures to explore similar ideas, setting the story in 1862 during the Civil War, somewhere along the borderlands of the Western territories. The Damned (orig. Il Dannati) starts off with a prolonged shot of some wolves ripping into an animal carcass, a grim image that doesn’t promise opistimistic things for the main characters,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

A Work Of Art: "Ice Nine Kills have today unleashed new single, “A Work of Art”, the official track for the highly anticipated slasher sequel, Terrifier 3, which hits theaters nationwide today. Along with the single, the band has dropped a brand new, blood-soaked,14-minute extended-cut of the accompanying music video, the original version of which debuted in over 300 theaters nationwide during exclusive, one-night-only, back to back screenings of Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3 last night at select AMC and Marcus theaters. Fans can stream the track Here and watch the full 14-minute extended cut video Here, featuring an extra 7 minutes of never-seen before footage.

The music video, a cinematic spectacle in its own right, is directed by longtime collaborator Jensen Noen, and stars stars David Howard Thornton (Terrifier’s infamous Art the Clown), Catherine Corcoran (Terrifier), Leah Voysey (Terrifier 2), Sirius Xm’s Jose Mangin and Vincent Rockwell, Richard Christy (Drummer for Death,...

The 28th Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, which runs Oct. 25 – Nov. 3, will offer 340 films, of which 129 are world premieres, 23 international premieres and 11 European premieres.

The program includes a retrospective of Swiss filmmaker Anne Marie Miéville’s work and a showcase of films by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang.

The festival will be attended by U.S. director Kirsten Johnson, the creator of this year’s festival trailer, Italian director Roberto Minervini, Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and Romanian director Andrei Ujică.

Marek Hovorka, the festival’s director, said: “The program of Ji.hlava shows the extraordinary power of documentary film. Documentary filmmakers replace the literalness of reality with playfulness and originality of thought. They show us the world as we could hardly see it ourselves – unless, like them, we would like to spend long years with a camera in those places.

“Dialogue has been important to Ji.hlava since its beginning,...

Japan’s leading indie film festival, Tokyo Filmex (November 23-December 1) has unveiled the line-up for its competition, opening and closing films, and other sections.

The festival, which marks its 25th year in 2024, will open with Jia Zhang-Ke’s Caught By The Tides, which played in competition at this year’s Cannes, and close with Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream, for which actor Kim Min-hee won the Pardo for best performance at Locarno.

The 10 competition titles include the Georgian film April, directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, which won the special jury prize at Venice this year; Girls Will Be Girls, the...

New York Film Festival has revealed the Main Slate titles for its 62nd edition, which runs September 27 through October 14. The selection includes feature films from 24 countries, with 18 directors making their NYFF Main Slate debut, and two world, five North American, and 16 U.S. premieres. As previously announced, the festival will open with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” and close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” and will feature Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” as its Centerpiece.

The Main Slate includes celebrated films from festivals worldwide including Cannes prize winners: Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” (Grand Prize), Sean Baker’s “Anora” (Palme d’Or), Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned”, Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour” (Best Director), Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Special Prize). At this year’s Berlinale, Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” received the Golden...

The Tribeca Film Festival 2024, presented by Okx, is back this week with tons of new genre premieres, retrospectives, and events to get excited about. This year’s Festival, which takes place June 5-16 in New York City showcases the best emerging talent from across the globe alongside established names.

Horror fans can look forward to buzzy titles like The Devil’s Bath, from filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. But the horror extends beyond the Midnight section, including the premiere of Amfad: All My Friends Are Dead. Look for the festival to give special presentations of Alfred Hitchcock and Tod Browning classics, too.

Finally, if you’re a Godzilla fan, don’t miss the epic bash the fest is throwing for the classic film’s 70th anniversary.

Read on for 14 can’t miss events and screenings to catch at Tribeca:

The A-Frame (United States) – World Premiere. A quantum physicist’s machine...

Exclusive: In advance of its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, scheduled for June 6th, the supernatural horror film The Damned, marking the feature directorial debut of Thordur Palsson (The Valhalla Murders), has locked in North American distribution with Vertical. The film will be released later this year.

Written by Jamie Hannigan, The Damned follows Eva (Odessa Young), a 19th-century widow who is tasked with making an impossible choice when a ship sinks off the coast of her isolated fishing outpost during the middle of an especially cruel winter. With provisions running low, Eva and her close-knit community must choose between rescuing the shipwrecked crew and prioritizing their own survival. Facing the consequences of their decision and tormented by guilt, the inhabitants wrestle with a mounting sense of dread and begin to believe they are all being punished for their choices.

Pic’s cast also includes Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders...

Ioncinema.com’s Chief Film Critic Nicholas Bell reviewed the entire competition and more. Here is a comprehensive guide to all the feature films across all sections, including logged reviews and forthcoming ones. Though Cannes might be over, we still have unpublished reviews that will be released over the next month.

In Competition:

All We Imagine as Light – [Review]

Anora – [Review]

The Apprentice – [Review]

Beating Hearts – [Review]

Bird – [Review]

Caught by the Tides – [Review]

Emilia Pérez – [Review]

The Girl with the Needle – [Review]

Grand Tour – [Review]

Kinds of Kindness – [Review]

Limonov: The Ballad – [Review]

Marcello Mio – [Review]

Megalopolis – [Review]

The Most Precious of Cargoes – [Review]

Motel Destino – [Review]

Oh, Canada – [Review]

Parthenope – [Review]

The Seed of the Sacred Fig – [Review]

The Shrouds – [Review]

The Substance – [Review]

Three Kilometres to the End of the World – [Review]

Wild Diamond – [Review]

Un Certain Regard:

Armand

Black Dog

The Damned – [Review]

Dog on Trial

Flow

Holy Cow – [Review]

The Kingdom

My Sunshine

Niki

Norah

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Santosh

September Says

The Shameless

The Story of Souleymane...

Cannes awards have become hugely influential in subsequent awards races, especially the Oscars. The top honor, the Palme d’Or, confers prestige and a stamp of approval — this year from the Competition jury led by multi hyphenate Greta Gerwig — that awards voters take seriously.

Palme winners “Parasite,” “Triangle of Sadness,” and “Anatomy of a Fall” were all Best Picture Oscar contenders and won Oscars. And they were all picked up by specialty distributor Neon before they won their Cannes prize. Neon did not break its streak. It acquired two eventual prize-winners before the closing ceremony: Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” the first American film to win the prize since Terence Malick’s “Tree of Life” in 2011, and Iranian dissident filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which took home a special award.

Thus “Anora,” from veteran indie filmmaker Baker (Cannes entry “The Florida Project...

The 2024 Cannes Film Festival was officially closed yesterday, on May 25, 2024, as the prizes for the movies and the actors were awarded at the closing ceremony. It was a very exciting and content-filled event, and we have also reported on numerous movies that had their premiere at Cannes, some of which were received well, while others… not so much. But, naturally, everyone wants to know who won and who lost at Cannes, and that is what we are going to report about in this article.

The article will be divided into two main sections. The first one will list all the juries at Cannes, since they are the ones who chose the winners at the film festival, so we think that it is only fair that you know who picked the winners. After that, we are going to list all the winners in each of the categories.

As we have said,...

The 77th Cannes Film Festival has come to a close. As with every year, the festival was host to its share of standing ovations, divisive screenings and debates over just which films and performances would take home awards at the end of the 12-day event, widely considered the most prestigious in the entire world. This year, Sean Baker’s Anora took the Palme d’Or while India’s All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix, generally considered the runner-up.

So, who else won out at this year’s Cannes Film Festival? While below is only a partial list of winners, you can check out the complete and extensive list here.

Palme d’Or: Anora, Sean Baker

Grand Prix: All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia

Best Director: Miguel Gomes, Grand Tour

Best Actor: Jesse Plemons, Kinds of Kindness

Best Actress: Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña,...

The hype out of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, for those far-flung and on the ground, tells one story: This was among the weaker lineups in recent memory.

Sure, huge stories broke out of the festival, from Francis Ford Coppola’s distribution push for his self-funded, decades-in-the-making passion project “Megalopolis” to Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof fleeing his home country after being sentenced to eight years in prison, finally making it to Cannes with his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” This journey inspired the jury to award him and his film a Special Prize (Prix Spécial).

Elsewhere in the official selection, Un Certain Regard already handed out its prizes on Friday from a jury led by Xavier Dolan and including Maïmouna Doucouré, Asmae El Moudir, Vicky Krieps, and Todd McCarthy. Among the top winners were Roberto Minervini (“The Damned”) and Rungano Nyoni (“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”) tying for Best Director,...

Gestern Abend wurden die Preise der Cannes-Nebenreihe „Un Certain Regard“ verliehen.

Gewinnerinnen und Gewinner der Cannes-Nebenreihe „Un Certain Regard“ (Credit: Jean-Louis Hupé / Fdc)

Guan Hus Drama „Black Dog” ist mit dem Hauptpreis der Cannes-Nebenreihe Un Certain Regardausgezeichnet worden. Erzählt wird die Geschichte eines Mannes, der nach seiner Haftentlassung in seiner Heimatstadt am Rande der Wüste Gobi einen Job in einer Truppe findet, die im Vorfeld der Olympischen Spiele streunende Hunde von den Straßen entfernen soll. Dabei freundet er sich mit einem schwarzen Streuner an.

Der Jurypreis ging an Boris Lojkines L’Histoire de Souleymane“, dessen Hauptdarsteller Abou Sangaré von der Jury unter dem Vorsitz von Xavier Dolan ebenfalls ausgezeichnet wurde. Den Preis für die beste Hauptdarstellerin erhielt Anasuya Sengupta für ihre Rolle in Konstantin Bojanovs „The Shameless“. Den Preis für die beste Regie hat die Un-Certain-Regard-Jury zweimal vergeben: an Roberto Minervini für „The Damned“ und Rungano Nyoni für „On Becoming a Guinea Fowl...

Guan Hu’s Black Dog has won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival (May 14-25).

It is the Cannes debut for Mr. Six director Guan and follows a former convict who forms an unlikely connection with the titular animal, as he clears stray dogs in his remote hometown on the edge of the Gobi desert before the 2008 Olympic Games. Playtime are handling international sales.

The jury prize went to The Story Of Souleymane from Boris Lojkine, back at the festival 10 years after his 2014 feature Hope, with the story of a...

Chinese director Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog snagged the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard sidebar on Friday night.

The drama, set on the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China, follows a man who returns home after a stint in jail and gets a job clearing a town of stray dogs before the Olympic Games. But he forms an unexpected bond with a black dog, and together, they embark on a new journey.

The film’s canine star won a pooch prize earlier in the day, scooping up the Grand Jury award at the Palm Dog.

For Un Certain Regard, the Jury Prize went to The Story Of Souleymane, Boris Lojkine’s Paris-set story of an African immigrant struggling to make a living and get legalized in the city of lights. Lead Abou Sangare also clinched one of the Un Certain Regard performance awards. The other...

Chinese director Hu Guan’s drama Black Dog won the top prize in Cannes Un Certain Regard on Friday evening.

The Jury Prize went to Boris Lojkine’s Paris-set asylum-seeker tale The Story Of Souleymane.

Best Director went to in ex aequo to Roberto Minervini for U.S. civil war drama The Damned and Rungano Nyoni for On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

The Performance award went to Anasuya Sengupta for her performance as a young sex worker on the run in Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s India-set drama The Shameless, and Abou Sangare for his performance in Boris Lojkine’s The Story Of Souleymane as a young asylum seeker.

In other prizes, French director Louise Courvoisier won the Youth Prize for Holy Cow, while Saudi director Tawfik Alzaidi was feted with a Special Mention for Nora.

This year’s jury was presided over by Canadian actor, director, screenwriter and producer Xavier Dolan,...

Exactly ten years after the genre-mixing, canine-driven Hungarian thriller “White God” landed the Prix Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, this year’s ceremony culminated in the same prize going to a somewhat corresponding title: Chinese director Guan Hu’s “Black Dog,” a fusion of western, film noir and offbeat comedy with a highly lovable mutt at its center. The film, about a damaged loner returning to his desert hometown after a spell in prison and finding a kindred spirit in an equally world-weary greyhound, beat 17 other titles to take the top prize in the festival’s second-most prestigious competitive section. (The festival’s Official Competition awards will be handed out tomorrow night.)

Jury president Xavier Dolan, the actor-auteur behind such films as “Mommy” and “Laurence Anyways,” commended Guan’s film for “its breathtaking poetry, its imagination, its precision [and] its masterful direction.” He echoed the enthusiasm of Variety critic Jessica Kiang,...

Few periods on the calendar mean more to cinephiles than the two weekends in May occupied by the Cannes Film Festival. Since its founding in 1946, the French festival has been a launchpad for some of the most artistically significant films of all time. The Palme d’Or is one of the most coveted film awards on the planet, and the festival’s ability to balance subversive arthouse work with major Hollywood premieres has led many to view it as the world’s most significant celebration of cinema.

The 2024 lineup featured a mix of buzzy premieres from New Hollywood titans like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader alongside exciting new works from emerging directors. Between the Main Competition, Un Certain Regard, special screenings, and sidebars like the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week, the onslaught of new films can be overwhelming for anyone who isn’t able to give the festival their 24/7 attention.

Introducing The Damned at its world premiere, Roberto Minervini stated that the film began from a desire to “deconstruct the precepts in war cinema,” e.g. good versus evil, “hyper-masculinity” and heroism. In the press kit interview, Minervini goes further, stating that there’s never been a war movie “that I would call humane […] Even films that depict tragedy and self-destruction emphasize martyrdom and sacrifice.” Has there really never been a true anti-war film? The existence of Come and See seems to contradict that, and noting that “good versus evil” isn’t real isn’t a breakthrough either, which may be why The […]

The post Cannes 2024: The Damned, The Invasion first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Introducing The Damned at its world premiere, Roberto Minervini stated that the film began from a desire to “deconstruct the precepts in war cinema,” e.g. good versus evil, “hyper-masculinity” and heroism. In the press kit interview, Minervini goes further, stating that there’s never been a war movie “that I would call humane […] Even films that depict tragedy and self-destruction emphasize martyrdom and sacrifice.” Has there really never been a true anti-war film? The existence of Come and See seems to contradict that, and noting that “good versus evil” isn’t real isn’t a breakthrough either, which may be why The […]

The post Cannes 2024: The Damned, The Invasion first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s a lot to look forward to in what has been branded a Mexican comedy-thriller musical from the Palme d’Or winner that brought us Dheepan, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and, more recently, the underseen Western delight that marked his move toward Hollywood, The Sisters Brothers. Or so it seemed.

Writer-director Jacques Audiard is one of the few filmmakers who has been able to, more than once, tell stories from outside their world and capture narrative, character, and culture with a unique foreign perspective that adds meaningful insight without bringing into question the filmmakers’ respect or depiction of the subjects.

Thus it appeared that this cartel-centric, Mexico-set, largely Latina film––about an unsuspecting lawyer being forced to help a violent cartel boss transition into a woman in order to leave her past behind and finally feel like herself––is actually right up the septuagenarian Frenchman’s alley. Unfortunately,...

Les Films du Losange has boarded Italian director Roberto Minervini’s The Damned ahead of the film’s world premiere in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard.

Minervini is known for a long career in documentary and The Damned is his first fiction feature. Set during the American Civil War in the winter of 1862, it follows a troop of volunteer soldiers tasked with patrolling unchartered borderlands in western territories. As their mission ultimately changes course, the meaning behind their engagement begins to elude them.

The Damned is an Italian-American-Belgian co-production from Okta Film, Pulpa Film, Rai Cinema and Michigan Films. The cast includes rising talents Jeremiah Knupp,...