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U.S. filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, now based in Denmark, worries his “home country is perhaps becoming a dictatorship.”

“It remains to be seen. The question we all face, each and every one of us, is this: ‘Is it too late for us?’ I encourage you to look up and see that above you, there’s still a sky,” he said at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival on Sunday.

“When we read about the genocide in Gaza – which horrifies me particularly because it’s committed in my name as a Jew – when we read about thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea every year, trying to escape conditions of misery that we knowingly impose on them so that our clothes, our electronics, our food and our energy remains cheap… We feel heartbroken for a second and then we look for suitably heartbroken emoji,” he noted.

“Through that sentimental gesture of placing that emoji,...

The revered cinematographer was making an apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton deep in a salt mine when he realised he had to flee. Can he now save his son?

It was March 2022 and Joshua Oppenheimer was waiting at Copenhagen airport for the young man who would be staying with him for a few weeks. Oppenheimer, who directed two devastating Oscar-nominated documentaries about the 1965 Indonesian genocide, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, had been working closely with Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. He was now preparing to make The End, an audacious musical about the last family on earth hiding in their bunker following a climate-related apocalypse in which they were complicit. And Mikhail’s 22-year-old son, Vlad, was travelling to Copenhagen to participate in a workshop addressing the challenges implicit in The End, which was to be shot partly in German and Italian salt mines.

Oppenheimer had never met Vlad before,...

Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End” revolves around an apocalyptic scenario in which a wealthy family lives in an underground bunker two decades after the apparent end of the world. It is not the only 2024 film that explores a catastrophic global crisis. Guy Maddin and Johnson brothers’ “Rumours” also highlighted the hypocrisy of those with wealth and power misusing it while being complacent about their minor noble deeds. Oppenheimer’s film uses the absence of an exterior world to highlight certain aspects of this family’s interior lives. Instead of calling its characters by their names, the writer refers to them by their roles in the context of their isolated setting. So, in this story, they are just friends, doctors, mothers, or girls – depending on what they represent in their isolated world.

Spoilers Ahead

The End (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

“The End” follows a wealthy family living in an underground luxurious...

What’s the deal with the film Academy’s documentary branch? This season’s shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar, released Dec. 17, was missing one of the year’s most acclaimed crowd-pleasers, Warner Bros.’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story — which is at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, won the top Critics Choice documentary award and is nominated for the Producers Guild’s top doc award — and also impressive documentaries about Martha Stewart (Martha), Celine Dion (I Am: Celine Dion), James Carville (Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) and John Williams (Music by John Williams), among others.

This isn’t to say that the 15 docs that were shortlisted are lacking — to the contrary, most are excellent. But it does reconfirm the doc branch’s weird aversion, over roughly the past decade, to populist titles.

During that period, the branch declined to shortlist Good Night Oppy, a charmer about a Wall-e-like Mars...

Joshua Oppenheimer wasn’t planning on making his narrative feature debut about the end of the world — and he certainly didn’t think it would be a musical. And yet, eight years after the idea popped into his head, at last his bold opus has come to the big screen, ready to jolt audiences out of their complacency.

The End (in theaters now) is like no other movie this year. Yes, there are several that feature singing and dancing, but none of those take place in a lavish underground bunker...

For filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, the beginning of “The End” came somewhat unexpectedly as an extension of his work in documentary. This might sound strange considering this narrative feature is a musical set in the bunker of a family partly responsible for an apocalyptic event 25 years prior, but throughout the project’s inception, production, and edit, Oppenheimer was constantly drawing upon his skills as a documentarian to further his examination of humanity’s ability to — drawing upon a fitting allegory — “fiddle while Rome burns.”

To hear Oppenheimer tell it, if there were a way to have told the story depicted in “The End” as a documentary, he probably would have. In a recent interview with IndieWire, he said he intended to follow 2012’s “The Act of Killing” and its 2014 followup, “The Look of Silence,” with a third documentary about the oligarchs who exploited the pain and suffering of those featured in these films to enrich themselves.

After fearlessly interrogating man’s capacity for evil in Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer returns with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. Despite that unexpected logline, the core themes Oppenheimer grapples with in his work––i.e. the nature of absolution and the self-deception that makes us uniquely human––are still very much present in his fiction-feature debut.

The End’s bunker is occupied by wealthy energy magnate (Michael Shannon), his wife (Tilda Swinton), and their son (George MacKay). An allegory, they are credited as Father, Mother, and Son. A few lucky others get to join them in waiting out the apocalypse––also nameless, their titles, their vocations: Butler (Tim McInnerny) and Doctor (Lennie James). Bronagh Gallagher has a meatier role as Mother’s best “Friend,” who also functions as the chef. Moses Ingram as...

A work of profound optimism, an ambitious mishegas staring into the abyss, an experimental theater piece trapped on film, the most bizarre musical of the year in an annum filled with strong contenders for that title — this is only the beginning of possible descriptions for The End, Joshua Oppenheimer’s wild swing for the fences. A Sondheim-esque tale that’s tuneful and atonal in equal measures, this tale of a collective living in extravagance as the world gasps its last ecological breath is the kind of movie you want adventurous cineastes to make,...

The End director Joshua Oppenheimer reflects on the dangerous qualities of hope and how his new approach to the musical carries on the themes at the core of his documentaries like The Act of Killing. After directing some of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of the 21st century like The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, The End proves to be a compelling exploration of what people go through while trying to deny the things they've done. Set within a bunker after the end of the world, The End centers around survivors dealing with a newfound guest.

This forces the group as a whole to evaluate the choices they made to survive the collapse of the world and the hard decisions they made to ensure their future at the cost of others. The End is a harrowing and powerful film, that uses musical tropes as a means of delving into the guilts,...

Despite the relatively light release year, a welcome spread of films this holiday season brings us good tidings and cheer. From indies to majors, from talking lions to dog-women, there’s variety under the tree this year, offering a mix of blockbuster studio baubles, idiosyncratic character-driven Hanukkah presents, and new stocking-stuffers from stalwart filmmakers.

Joshua Oppenheimer is tired.

The two-time Academy Award nominee isn’t simply spent at the tail end of an exhausting week for the American body politic. Nor has he tossed and turned his way through countless sleepless nights, doomscrolling through the nightmare scenarios of what a second Trump administration could mean for Americans’ civil rights, the rule of international law, women’s bodies, the fate of the planet — take your pick.

Speaking with Variety at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, where the “Act of Killing” director’s first fiction feature, “The End,” is the closing film, Oppenheimer has just arrived from Japan, where he spent two weeks with his husband, a Japanese novelist, visiting the in-laws while his partner researches his next book.

The filmmaker barely managed to sleep on the plane, though he is poised, thoughtful and gracious to a fault as he powers through his festival press junket. He is also determined and defiant,...

Creating an original musical in the year 2024 is an achievement in its own right, even if it’s only part of the reason why Joshua Oppenheimer’s new narrative feature “The End” is so audacious. Audiences seem to flock to new musicals like “Wonka” and “Mean Girls” because they offer an only slight alteration on a previously existing work of intellectual property that they are already familiar with, and even this year’s divisive “Emilia Pérez” has ostensibly sold itself on being a “musical for people that hate musicals.” If there’s anything that “The End” does that is most worthy of admiration, it’s that Oppenheimer does not insert a hint of derisiveness or irony within his razzle dazzle, Golden Age style musical. If it weren’t for the very specific correlations made to recent events in world history, “The End” could have feasibly have been released in the...

Joshua Oppenheimer, who has been nominated for an Academy Award, is making his first narrative feature picture, “The End,” a post-apocalyptic musical starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. The movie is about how people connect in a world where the environment is breaking down.

The movie is set 25 years after Earth stops being livable. It takes place in an underground bunker where a biological family and their friends are shocked when a stranger shows up. Oppenheimer started the project after doing a lot of study on how the rich stay alive. He went to see former Soviet command bunkers and decommissioned nuclear missile silos that were being turned into high-end underground spaces.

Oppenheimer told people at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, “It’s a miracle this got made.” Live musical performances shot in a salt mine were just one of the many ambitious parts of making the movie. It was only...

Greece’s Thessaloniki Film Festival ends this evening with a screening of The End, the latest feature project from the enigmatic filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer.

Best known for his intellectually rich and Oscar-nominated non-fiction works The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Oppenheimer’s latest is his first fiction project, and for it he has recruited one of the most impressive ensembles of the year. Starring are Oscar winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Oscar nominee Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), BAFTA-nominee George Mackay (1917), and Emmy-nominee Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit).

Styled as a Golden Age Hollywood musical, The End is set in a post-apocalyptic world twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable. A biological family and their companions – part-found-family, part-hired-help – live in harmony in a subterranean bunker. But the arrival of a stranger smashes the synthetic veil of their strictly organized world. The ensuing struggle to maintain their...

Lo protagonizan Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Moses Ingram y Michael Shannon. © Avalon

Neon ha publicado el primer tráiler de The End, un musical post-apocalíptico (por muy extraño que suene) del director de The Act of Killing y The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer.

The End sigue a una de las últimas familias de la Tierra, compuesta por un exmagnate energético (Michael Shannon), una exbailarina (Tilda Swinton) y su hijo (George MacKay), quienes viven en un lujoso búnker en unas minas de sal junto a un doctor (Lennie James), un mayordomo (Tim McInnerny) y una amiga (Bronagh Gallagher), hasta que la llegada de una chica superviviente (Moses Ingram) empieza a sacudir la aparente perfección de sus vidas y a sacar a la luz todas las verdades y sentimientos reprimidos que han ido forjando en su idílico mundo.

La película está protagonizada por Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon, Bronagh...

Tilda Swinton and George Mackay star in apocalyptic musical The End, and the first trailer has landed. Right here.

Actor George Mackay is set return to the world of big screen musicals with The End, which is, er, joyously set during the apocalypse.

The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny and Lennie James.

The songs were written by Marius De Vries and Josh Schmidt. De Vries won a BAFTA and an Ivor Novello award for his score to Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, while The End marks the feature debut of Schmidt. Joshua Oppenheimer, best known for the award-winning documentaries The Act Of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014) directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg.

George MacKay is no stranger to movie musicals. In 2013 he starred in Dexter Fletcher’s film adaptation of Stephen Greenhorn’s ebullient Proclaimers musical Sunshine On Leith...

Neon has debuted a trailer for the apocalyptic musical feature ‘The End.’ featuring Tilda Swinton and George McKay.

From director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

The family consists of a couple and their young adult son who has never seen the outside world. There’s also a maid, a doctor, a butler and a young woman who managed to survive and find her way in. Initially feeling righteousness over their survival, the couple are soon haunted by regret for those they lost and guilt over their own contribution to the apocalypse.

The movie stars Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

Also in trailers – “She’s been feeding us government secrets…” Trailer drops for Netflix series ‘Black Doves’

The post “Who could we trust?” Tilda Swinton stars in trailer for ‘The End’ appeared first on HeyUGuys.

Tilda Swinton, George Mackay, Michael Shannon, and Moses Ingram sing for their lives in “The End.”

Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic family drama “The End” stars Swinton as a mother who protects her family by living in a bunker for decades after the world has ended. George Mackay, her plays her son, has never seen the outside world. Shannon co-stars as his father, while Moses Ingram plays a stranger who arrives, interrupting their carefully crafted underground world.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine. Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds...

"I think I like her!" "But you've never met anybody before..." Neon has unveiled the full trailer for a unique musical creation called The End, the first narrative feature film directed by the acclaimed doc filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. This cynical take on the end of the world is a Golden Age-style musical about the last human family. Described as a poignant and deeply human musical about a wealthy family living in an ornate bunker in a salt mine. An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay, with Moses Ingram. Featuring original songs from Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics). The cast also includes Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James. I've heard mixed on this - some people love it, some people hate it, as if the movie was trolling the audience the entire time. A musical about a family of rich idiots?...

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, building up to a December theatrical release. The film is scheduled to start playing in New York and Los Angeles on December 6th, with the limited release expanding on December 13th. As those dates are swiftly approaching, a trailer for The End has...

Neon has revealed the trailer and poster for the apocalyptic musical film The End, which was co-written and directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. The movie will open in Los Angeles and New York on Dec. 6 and in select cities on Dec. 13.

From Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.

Twenty-five years after environmental collapse left the Earth uninhabitable, Mother, Father and Son are confined to their palatial bunker, where they struggle to maintain hope and a sense of normalcy by clinging to the rituals of daily life—until the arrival of a stranger, Girl, upends their happy routine.

Son, a naïve twenty-something who has never seen the outside world, is fascinated by the newcomer, and suddenly, the delicate bonds of blind optimism that have held this wealthy clan together begin to fray.

As tensions rise, their...

From Academy Award®-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer comes Neon’s The End, being described as “a poignant and deeply human musical about a family that survived the end of the world.” Watch the official trailer below.

End of the world musical The End will release in theaters on December 6, 2024.

An urgent and unforgettable cautionary tale, The End stars Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Academy Award® nominee Michael Shannon, George MacKay (1917) and Moses Ingram.

The screenplay is by Joshua Oppenheimer and Rasmus Heisterberg (A Royal Affair), with songs by Joshua Schmidt (music) and Joshua Oppenheimer (lyrics).

Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James also star.

The post ‘The End’ Official Trailer – Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon Star in Apocalyptic Musical appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

A decade after his staggering documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer has now returned, but this time with a narrative feature. The End, which stars Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Michael Shannon, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James has a logline unlike another this year: a human musical about a family that survived the end of the world. Following its Telluride and TIFF festival premieres, Neon will release the film on December 6 and has now debuted the first trailer.

In a rave from the premiere, Caleb Hammond said in his review, “From the jump, The End embodies a more classical filmmaking mode. Following an establishing shot of an unspeakably beautiful underground salt mine, a lush orchestral score plays over close-ups of oil paintings while opening credits roll. A remarkable level of craft is visible at once and maintained throughout the extended 148-minute runtime.

Exclusive: Spring Films, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated British documentary producer, is shutting its doors.

Founded by André Singer, the company has filed for liquidation after 18 years of trading. Accountancy firm Azets has been appointed to oversee the winding-up process.

Singer and Spring Films CEO Chris Smith have been contacted for comment.

Spring Films has 12 employees listed on its website, while its most recent accounts showed debts worth £1.5M ($2M), according to a UK Companies House filing.

Night Will Fall, a film chronicling the making of the 1945 British government documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, won outstanding historical programming at the 2016 News & Documentary Emmy Awards.

The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which examined mass killings in Indonesia, were both Oscar-nominated. The Act of Killing won a BAFTA.

Spring Films’ other projects include Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, a documentary that spotlighted the Fitzcarraldo director and some of his celebrated collaborators,...

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam has announced the 55 documentary projects selected for this year’s IDFA Forum, chosen from among 820 entries.

Among the prominent names heading to the forum, which runs November 17-20, is Emmy winner Eva Mulvad (The Cave), who will pitch her upcoming project House of the Holy Father, co-directed with Andreas Koefoed. “In an intriguing cinematic exercise that straddles fiction and documentary,” a release notes, “the film seeks to bare intricate workings of domination and manipulation, as ex-members of the notorious Christian sect Faderhuset direct scenes with well-known Danish actors, including Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik.”

Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann, who has won prizes at film festivals around the world, will participate in the Rough Cut Presentations section with Issa’s House, a film set in the West Bank. Another film shot in...

Joshua Oppenheimer and George Mackay during the press conference After establishing himself as a successful documentarian with The Act Of Killing and The Look Of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer tackles a musical about the end of the world with his fiction debut, The End. Set in a near-future, a family has retreated to a bunker underground. There a Father (Michael Shannon), Mother (Tilda Swinton) and their Son (George Mackay) live with a butler (Tim McInnery), a doctor (Lennie James) and Mother’s friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who also essentially takes care of the housework. Their world is one of recreated comfort, packed with famous artworks, where the older members of the household carefully curate their own version of history, which they pass on to the son, who was born into the environment. Their equilibrium is rocked when a Girl (Moses Ingram) unexpectedly enters their world as the family and their new guest...

by Cláudio Alves

Ambitious mess will always be more exciting and artistically valuable than cautious mediocrity. The timid filmmaker has their place, but they'll never rise above those whose ideas reach for the sky, the heavens, the likely impossible. Or, in Joshua Oppenheimer's case, those who burrow down below, digging to the center of the Earth, mayhap to hell. For his feature debut, The End, the director of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence goes underground, setting the scene in a not-so-distant future when the Earth has been left ravaged by climate change and other related catastrophes, virtually inhabitable, so hostile to life that those who survive must fight one another for the scant resources around…...

Chatting with the head of a prominent documentary-production company recently, I asked if hybrid filmmaking had reached its natural limit. Could it conceivably be pushed further? He posited these limitations might be behind a recent trend of documentarians pivoting to fiction: Kirsten Johnson is making a Susan Sontag biopic with Kristen Stewart; Frederick Wiseman made his first narrative feature A Couple after half a century spent in non-fiction; Roberto Minervini’s The Damned and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh both premiered at Cannes this past Spring; most recently, RaMell Ross adapted the Pulitzer-winning novel Nickel Boys. Documentarians are realizing that if fiction and non-fiction are both highly constructed, then why not work this construction openly, with the added perks of larger budgets and access to stars?

Joshua Oppenheimer joins that cohort with The End, a bunker-bound musical set at the end of the world. From the jump, The End embodies a more classical filmmaking mode.

Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer shines a light on humanity’s darker side. His acclaimed works The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence uncovered atrocities in Indonesia with unflinching honesty. For his narrative debut, The End, Oppenheimer tackles similarly profound themes through a unique lens.

Set decades after climate change renders Earth uninhabitable, the film centers on an affluent family holed up in an underground bunker. For twenty-five years, they’ve hid from the devastated world above. Down here, Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, and their son (George MacKay) live in lavish, museum-like conditions. But to maintain their insular bubble, they must deny responsibility for the crisis.

Oppenheimer uses gilded cages and original songs to examine how privilege can breed willful blindness. Digging into guilt, denial, and desperate rationalizations, he peers into humanity’s capacity for self-delusion. The family’s cushy isolation gets disrupted by an outsider’s arrival, shaking foundations and dislodging long-buried feelings.

It’s a classic story prompt: The last man on Earth hears a knock at the door. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s delirious and delicately monumental “The End,” the man is an über-affluent family. The “door” (so to speak) connects the scorched ruins of our planet to the cavernous underground bunker where these characters have buried themselves for the last 25 years. The knock reverberates with a force powerful enough to dislodge all the feelings they’ve worked so hard to bury along with them — the humanity they’ve had to deny somewhere deep within themselves in order to make peace with the humanity they chose to leave behind on the surface.

Despite the broad familiarity of its premise, however, this story doesn’t unfold like any post-apocalyptic fable before it. For one thing, it’s a full-throated musical that starts with Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton leading the rest of the...

What will the existence of the elite class, whose conspicuous consumption is a status symbol and has a negative impact on the environment, look like once everything has been completely destroyed? Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End imagines what that future could look like, joining the ranks of other recent films that have put outrageous privilege in their often sanctimonious cross hairs. But the willful blindness of the ruling class is something that Oppenheimer has intimately grappled with in his documentary work, namely The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, and he attempts to carve out a unique approach to eating the rich on screen by dressing up his venom in the fanciful garbs of a Golden Age musical.

Set 20 years after an environmental collapse has wiped out society, The End takes place in a lavish underground bunker within the depths of a salt mine. This is the home...

Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay star in “The End,” a new post-apocalyptic musical about the last human family on Earth. I mean, we’re sold already, but further tantalizing is the fact that “The End” is the narrative debut and long-overdue latest film from filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer. If Oppenheimer’s name rings a bell, it should. He’s the director behind the heralded Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” (2012) and “The Look of Silence” (2014), the former film listed in our feature about the Best Documentaries Of The 2010s.

Continue reading ‘The End’ First Look: Photos & Poster Of Joshua Oppenheimer’s Golden Age Musical With Tilda Swinton & Michael Shannon at The Playlist.

Almost three years have gone by since Joshua Oppenheimer, the director behind the documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, announced that he was teaming up with Neon to make his narrative feature debut with The End, “a golden-age musical about the last human family.” That film went into production last year, with a cast that includes Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michael Shannon (The Shape of Water), George MacKay (1917), Moses Ingram (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Bronagh Gallagher (Pulp Fiction), Tim McInnerny (Notting Hill), Lennie James (The Walking Dead), and Danielle Ryan (The Silencing). Now it’s making the festival rounds, with the Telluride Film Festival unveiling the image that can be seen above, and a teaser poster arriving online just ahead of the film’s screenings at both Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival. The poster can be seen at the bottom of this article.

La sección oficial a competición del Ssiff se llena de grandes nombres. © 72Ssiff

Hace unas semanas se dieron a conocer los títulos españoles que competirán por la Concha de Oro en la 72ª edición del Festival de Cine de San Sebastián, que se celebrará del 20 al 28 de septiembre. Éstos son Soy Nevenka, de Icíar Bollaín, El llanto de Pedro Martín-Calero, Los destellos, de Pilar Palomero, y Tardes de soledad, de Albert Serra.

Hoy se han anunciado títulos restantes de la sección oficial a competición del festival, los cuales acompañarán a Bollaín, Martín-Calero, Palomero y Serra en la contienda por el prestigioso galardón. Entre los títulos más destacados encontramos Cónclave, The End, Hard Truths y The Last Showgirl.

Cónclave, de Edward Berger, director de Sin novedad en el frente, se presenta como un fuerte contendiente a la Concha de Oro. Este film tendrá su premiere mundial en el Festival de Cine...

New films from directors Mike Leigh, François Ozon, Edward Berger, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Costa-Gavras will vie for the Golden Shell at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival. Organizers on Tuesday announced the competition line-up for the 72nd edition of San Sebastian, which runs from September 20-28.

Highlights include Leigh’s hotly-anticipated new film Hard Truths, which will see the iconoclastic British director reunite with his Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste; and Conclave, Berger’s follow-up to his multiple-Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front. The Vatican thriller stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal tasked with supervising a conclave following the sudden death of the Pope to choose a successor.

Veteran political filmmaker Costa-Gavras (Missing, Z) returns to San Sebastian with Last Breath, a drama about a palliative care doctor. Ozon will make his sixth appearance in the festival’s official selection with When Fall Is Coming, a French drama starring Hélène Vincent,...

Two Netflix Originals and new movies from Mike Leigh, Joshua Oppenheimer, Gia Coppola and Edward Berger will vie for San Sebastian’s top Golden Shell this September.

The festival features a main competition that is stronger than usual on both bigger-name directors and ‘A’ list stars, such as Tilda Swinton in Oppenheimer’s “The End,” Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson in Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” and the ensemble cast of Berger’s “Conclave” that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini.

Bound for Toronto and Telluride before San Sebastián, Oppenheimer’s “The End” stars Swinton, George MacKay and Michael Shannon in what is described as a post-apocalyptic “Golden Age” musical.

“Conclave,” from “All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger,” is a psychological thriller written by Peter Straughan, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow.

International documentary filmmakers and industry reps are gathering at Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. at a moment of political tumult in Europe. British voters head to the polls for a general election on July 4; in France, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections after a French ultranationalist party surged in voting for the European Parliament. Germany’s far-right AfD party also scored substantial gains in that European Parliament vote. Overall, the center held — more or less.

If there’s anything the documentary community is used to dealing with it’s turbulence, whether at the macro level of major change in the business itself, or at the micro level of getting a film production off the ground. The message to DocFest attendees this week has been to insist on solidarity – to support each other — in the face of geopolitical and economic uncertainty.

Patrizia Mancini, Head of...

The sudden end of Participant Media came as a shock to many in the entertainment industry, but it hit documentary filmmakers particularly hard, with some concerned that backers for serious-minded, issue-driven projects are becoming ever more scarce.

Since its founding in 2004, the company — which sought to bring stories that could spark change to a wide audience — has been a staunch supporter of documentaries focused on social and justice issues, funded by the largesse of a billionaire, ex-eBay president Jeff Skoll.

None of its other nonfiction titles quite achieved the heights of 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, released just two years after the company was formed: The Davis Guggenheim-directed film about Al Gore’s climate change slideshow rocketed to become the third-highest-grossing doc ever at the time and focused mainstream attention on climate change, inspiring studies about its impact. “That’s why we exist,” Skoll told The Hollywood Reporter in 2006, as Truth became a sensation.

U.S. content management, financing and sales banner Cinetic Media has secured world rights to the life affirming doc “Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other,” about legendary photographer Joel Meyerowitz and artist and author Maggie Barrett, his wife.

Rising filmmaking duo Manon Ouimet and Jacob Perlmutter of London-based Manon et Jacob are making their documentary debut, with Ouimet serving as producer alongside multi-Oscar nominated Danish producer Signe Byrge Sørensen of Final Cut Four Real.

“Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other” is having its world premiere March 16 in the Dox:award main competition at Copenhagen’s leading documentary festival Cph:dox, and also screen in the international competition section of Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on the same day.

Pedigree co-producing partners attached include Fremantle-owned doc label Undeniable, helmed by Mandy Chang, and long-time Final Cut for Real U.S. partners Louverture Films.

The character-driven documentary chronicles the loving yet...

Danish sales outfit Dr Sales, attached to the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning doc “A New Kind of Wilderness,” has boarded another high-quality Norwegian documentary – “Phantoms of the Sierra Madre” by the multi-awarded Håvard Bustnes.

The epic and self-reflective film, made in partnership with the Mescalero Apache Tribe, is due to world premiere in the main Dox:Award competition of Copenhagen’s Cph:dox festival, running March 13-24.

Bustnes, Christian Aune Falch and Torstein Parelius are producing for Norway’s Upnorth Film, in co-production with Finland’s Napa Films. Executive producers are Bird Runningwater, a high-profile figure from the Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache tribes and former Sundance programmer, key film collaborator Pius Garcia, great-grandson of legendary Apache warrior Geronimo, as well as Upnorth’s Ingrid Galadriel Aune Falch.

In the film, established Danish screenwriter Lars K. Andersen embarks on a quest to locate a disappeared Apache tribe in Mexico. His odyssey filmed...

Battered by disappointing markets at Toronto and AFM, both of which were held under the shadow of the actors strike, buyers and sellers are looking to Berlin’s European Film Market (EFM), which runs Feb. 15-21, to re-energize the indie business. The outlook, coming out of Sundance, is good.

“The difference in Sundance from last year to this was extreme, there were a lot more deals being down, both by distributors and streamers,” says Janina Vislmaier, head of sales at Protagonist Pictures, which screened The Outrun with Saoirse Ronan and Sasquatch Sunset with Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg in Park City, both of which will screen at the EFM. “Everyone is really excited ahead of Berlin, especially because all the buyers are back, including from Asia, which is a really good sign.”

The end of the SAG and WGA strikes hasn’t, yet, delivered the flood of new projects and packages many had predicted,...

Exclusive: Ahead of EFM 2024, XYZ Films has promoted James Emanuel Shapiro to President of Domestic Distribution, upping Alex Williams to Sr. Manager, Acquisitions and Development.

Shapiro, formerly the Executive Vice President of U.S. Distribution, reports to XYZ CEO Nick Spicer and Partner Nate Bolotin. The promotions come following XYZ’s recent hiring of Celine Lin for the role of Senior VP of International Sales.

XYZ launched its domestic distribution arm in 2021 and has since then released films from Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Something in the Dirt), Nic Cassavetes (God Is a Bullet) and Michelle Garza (Huesera: The Bone Woman).

Said the Partners at XYZ in a joint statement, “These are well deserved promotions and we couldn’t be happier for James and Alex. James has done a terrific job launching the division, with strong support from Alex, and we’re excited about our upcoming slate.”

Prior to his time at XYZ Films,...

Screen shines a light on 30 European titles that look set to grab the attention of festival directors in 2023, including new features by Tom Tykwer, Paz Vega, Paolo Sorrentino, Cecilia Verheyden and Baltasar Kormakur.

For our separate list of French festival hopefuls for 2024, click here.

Ariel (Sp-Por)

Dir. Lois Patiño

Patiño won the Encounters special jury prize at Berlin last year for Samsara and picked up the emerging director prize at Locarno in 2013 with Coast Of Death. His latest is a free adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, shot in Galicia and The Azores islands. Ariel stars Goya winner Irene Escolar...

Documentary producer dedicated to using non-fiction storytelling to bring about change on many vital issues

Jess Search, who has died aged 54 of brain cancer, did much to shape and inspire the world of documentary film. With the colleagues who had joined her in creating the non-profit organisation Doc Society, she sought to harness the power of non-fiction storytelling to bring about change on such issues as the climate crisis and defending democracy.

The many dozens of films she funded, advised, mentored, distributed, produced or executive produced include Citizenfour (2014), about the whistleblower Edward Snowden; Virunga (2014), on protecting gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo; The Look of Silence (2014), recalling the murder of a million supposed communists in Indonesia in the mid-1960s; Knock Down the House (2019), following the campaign in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to the House of Representatives; Cow (2021), a portrait of bovine life on the farm; and the...

Jess Search, the veteran documentary producer and co-founder of the nonprofit film foundation Doc Society in the U.K., has died. She was 54.

Search died Monday in London after a short battle with brain cancer that began with a diagnosis in June, Doc Society announced in an Aug. 1 letter.

“As a fierce supporter of independent artists and co-founder of Doc Society, Jess spent the weeks following her diagnosis focused on her passions laid out in her recent announcement, No Time Like The Present,” which first revealed her brain tumor discovery, Doc Society said.

“Her greatest wish was to continue to secure the Doc Society mission of unleashing the transformational power of documentary film to address the two critical and intertwined issues of climate change and democracies in crisis.”

Films the Doc Society has helped finance include the Oscar-nominated Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, Virunga, Whose Streets, Hooligan Sparrow, The Square and The Look of Silence.

Rarely a film “reinvents the wheel” when it comes to cinematic language, and, on top of that, does it to maximize the emotional impact. The documentary “The Act of Killing” by Joshua Oppenheimer and associates is one of such films. Although, production-wise, it is not an Asian film, it is so rooted in the context of Indonesia it could serve as a recommendation for the Movie of the Week here.

Oppenheimer first came to Indonesia to film parts of his 2003 video-documentary “The Globalisation Tapes”, but there he found a haunting story from the country's history and spent the greatest part of the following ten years working on the project. During the 60s, the tensions mounted between the left-leaning government lead by Sukarno and the army that resulted in a series of massacres of suspected communists, progressive intellectuals, syndicalists and members of the Chinese minority. Massacres were conducted by the military and the paramilitary forces,...

“Seven Winters in Tehran,” about a 19-year-old Iranian woman sentenced to death for killing the man who tried to rape her, will open the 34th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival on May 31 in New York City.

The festival, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center, will feature 10 documentaries about humanitarian challenges around the world. This year’s edition spotlights themes and topics including the Ukraine conflict (“When Spring Came to Bucha”), climate gentrification and justice (“Razing Liberty Square”), women’s rights (“Draw Me Egypt”) transgender rights (“Into My Name”) freedom of the press (“The Etilaat Roz”) and access to health care in the United States (“Pay or Die”).

“From the war in Ukraine to women’s rights and bodily autonomy, to environmental gentrification and freedom of the press, these films span some of the most pressing human rights issues of our time,” says John Biaggi,...

Neon has unveiled a raft of cast additions for Joshua Oppenheimer’s musical The End as principal photography begins in Ireland.

The freshly-unveiled cast includes Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon, Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, and Lennie James. They join previously announced lead actors Tilda Swinton and George MacKay.

Neon is co-financing the international co-production. The long-gestated project revolves around the story of the last human family.

Principal photography has begun in Ireland and will continue through the spring in Italy and Germany.

“I am thrilled to be making The End in collaboration with this miraculous ensemble of artists. I am in awe of each of them. It has been a journey of six years to reach this point, and I could not be more humbled,” said Oppenheimer.

Final Cut for Real’s Signe Byrge Sørensen and Oppenheimer are producing with Wild Atlantic Pictures, The Match Factory, Dorje Film, Moonspun Films and Anagram co-producing.

First announced back in the fall of 2021, one of our most-anticipated films in development is The End, a narrative feature from The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence director Joshua Oppenheimer. Starring Tilda Swinton and George MacKay, it’s described as a “Golden Age musical about the last human family,” and now with production getting underway in Ireland, we have more new details about the project.

“I’m the mother in basically the richest family on the planet. The father has been at the forefront of engineering the destruction of the biosphere, and they’ve lived for the last 20-something years in a bunker underneath Middle America, which is like Versailles,” Swinton told W Magazine, while also revealing at her SXSW keynote last weekend she’s headed from Austin to Dublin to begin production.

Courtesy of the production company’s site, it’s also been revealed that cinematographer...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

As the 4K restoration of Keane opens (read our interview with Lodge Kerrigan here) and Three Colors: Blue continues alongside Three Colors: White, the series “Animating Funny Pages” shows the inspiration of Owen Kline’s new feature—work by Robert Downey Sr, Frank Tashlin, and more.

Film Forum

To mark the great Alain Resnias’ centennial, a massive retrospective continues with Marienbad, Hiroshima, Je t’aime, je t’aime, and some of his lesser-seen (but no less great) features—Mélo, Stavisky, Love Unto Death, and Life is a Bed of Roses.

Bam

“Intimate Epics” continues with Happy Hour, Barry Lyndon, Andrei Rublev, and Sátántangó.

Museum of the Moving Image

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Licorice Pizza, and Sleeping Beauty all play on 70mm this weekend, while one of cinema’s most unsung heroes—women in Australian cinema—get...