
The thirteenth annual Beaufort International Film Festival will host thousands of film lovers from around the world starting February 19 through February 24, 2019, in the historic coastal town of Beaufort, SC.
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The thirteenth annual Beaufort International Film Festival will host thousands of film lovers from around the world starting February 19 through February 24, 2019, in the historic coastal town of Beaufort, SC.

Spain will be the country focus at 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), and will see work by new and emerging Spanish filmmakers screen alongside that of the country’s best-known filmmakers with a range of industry and special events complementing the cinema program. The 73rd edition of EIFF runs from June 19 to 30, 2019.

British film and stage actress Charlotte Rampling will receive the Honorary Golden Bear at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival for her lifetime achievement, as well as dedicating the Homage to a selection of her films.
On February 14, 2019, in conjunction with the award ceremony for the Honorary Golden Bear, the festival will be showing Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, Italy, 1974), directed by Liliana Cavani.

Samuel Goldwyn Films released the new trailer for Mapplethorpe starring Matt Smith as the Robert Mapplethorpe, considered as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. The film directed by Ondi Timoner and also starring Marianne Rendón, John Benjamin Hickey, Mark Moses, Carolyn McCormick, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Kerry Butler, will be released in theaters on March 1st, 2019.
Robert Mapplethorpe (Matt Smith) is arguably one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Mapplethorpe discovered himself both sexually and artistically in New York City throughout the 70’s and 80’s. The film explores Mapplethorpe’s life from moments before he and Patti Smith moved into the famed Chelsea hotel, home to a world of bohemian chic. Here he begins photographing its inhabitants and his new found circle of friends including artists and musicians, socialites, film stars, and members of the S&M underground
Mapplethorpe’s work displayed eroticism in a way that had never been examined nor displayed before to the public. The film explores the intersection of his art and his sexuality along with his struggle for mainstream recognition. MAPPLETHORPE offers a nuanced portrait of an artist at the height of his craft and of the self-destructive impulses that threaten to undermine it all.

Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, the 28th annual New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) will take place January 9 to 22, 2019. Featuring new work as well as restored classics, the festival’s 2019 lineup includes 32 wide-ranging and exciting features and shorts from the iconic to the iconoclastic. Screenings are held at the Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, NYC.
The NYJFF opens on Wednesday, January 9, with the New York premiere of Eric Barbier’s epic drama Promise at Dawn, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Pierre Niney. This riveting memoir chronicles the colorful life of infamous French author Romain Gary, from his childhood conning Polish high society with his mother to his years as a pilot in the Free French Air Forces.
The Closing Night film is the New York premiere of A Fortunate Man, directed by Academy Award–winner Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror). In it, a gifted but self-destructive young man leaves his suffocating Lutheran upbringing for metropolitan 1880s Copenhagen, where he’s welcomed into a wealthy Jewish family and strives to realize his grand ambitions.
The Centerpiece selection represents the first time an Israeli television series has been presented at the NYJFF with the three-and-a-half-hour miniseries Autonomies, to be presented all at once, binge-style, with a 20-minute intermission. Directed by Yehonatan Indursky, the dystopian drama is set in an alternate reality of present-day Israel, a nation divided by a wall into the secular “State of Israel,” with Tel Aviv as its capital, and the “Haredi Autonomy” in Jerusalem, run by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group. A globally relevant tale of identity, religion, politics, personal freedom, and love, this gripping story follows a custody battle that upends the fragile peace of the country, pushing it to the brink of civil war. Indursky will present a master class in conjunction with the screening of Autonomies.
New to the NYJFF this year is an annual initiative that highlights a film made by a woman filmmaker that deserves broader American recognition. Maria Victoria Menis’s Camera Obscura (2008) tells the story of an immigrant woman whose encounter with an itinerant photographer reveals a sense of self she never knew. The film was shot in the lush forests and lagoons of Buenos Aires province in a mélange of visual styles, including elements of hand-drawn animation, World War I archival footage, and early surrealist black-and-white films.
Filmmaker Amos Gitai returns to the 2019 NYJFF with the U.S. premiere of his thought-provoking new drama, A Tramway in Jerusalem. Gitai uses the tramway that runs through Jerusalem to connect a series of short vignettes, forming a mosaic of Jewish and Arab stories embodying life in the city.
The NYJFF will also present the U.S. premiere of Fig Tree by first-time director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian. Set in Addis Ababa during the Ethiopian Civil War, the film concerns a young woman who plans to flee to Israel with her brother to reunite with their mother. But she is unwilling to leave her Christian boyfriend behind and hatches a scheme to save him from being drafted.

11 films competed for nine awards in the Competition section as well as six film in the “New Chinese Cinema” for the Best New Chinese-language Film of the Year at the 3rd International Film Festival & Awards Macao (“IFFAM” or the “Film Festival”). The Film Festival screened 54 spectacular films this year and winners were revealed at the Awards Ceremony on Friday night.
The Competition section once again spotlighted first and second-time feature film directors this year, pitting 11 films against each other for nine accolades attributed by the jury and the Macao Audience Choice Award, of which the winner was voted by local audiences. The 11 films include “School’s Out”, “The Guilty”, “Clean up”, “The Good Girls”, “Ága”, “Scarborough”, “Suburban Birds”, “White Blood”, “All Good”, “Jesus” and “The Man Who Feels No Pain” with Best Film awarded to “Clean up.”
The new competition section “New Chinese Cinema” pitted six films against each other including “Dear Ex”, “Baby”, “Xiao Mei”, “Up the Mountain”, “Fly by Night” and “The Pluto Moment”. “Up the Mountain” took home the Best New Chinese-language Film of the Year.
Besides the above awards, an array of other accolades was presented at the Awards Ceremony to commend outstanding films and filmmakers for their achievements. Internationally-acclaimed film director and Jury President of the 3rd IFFAM, Chen Kaige, directed his first film “Yellow Earth” in 1984, which garnered a number of awards and ushered in the new era for Chinese cinema. Recognized as one of the Chinese film classics, his acclaimed masterpiece “Farewell My Concubine” (1993) won the Palme d’Or at the 46th Cannes Film Festival in the same year, making Chen the only Chinese director who has received this top accolade to this day. At the Awards Ceremony, Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture of the Macao SAR Government, Alexis Tam, presented the “Spirit of Cinema” Achievement Award to film director Chen Kaige.
In addition, the NETPAC Award went to “Suburban Birds” (presented by Mimi Plauché, Sunny Joseph and Marco Martins, jury members from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC)). The Asian Blockbuster Film 2018 went to the film “Crazy Rich Asians”, whereas the Variety Asian Star: Up Next Award went to five actors and actresses as follows: Anne Curtis, Iqbaal Ramadhan, Zaira Wasim, Xana Tang and Ryan Zheng Kai.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite leads all films in the Vancouver Film Critics Circle’s international section with six nominations, and Katherine Jerkovic’s Roads in February leads all films in the Vancouver Film Critics’ Circles’ Canadian section with six nominations.
In the international section, Lanthimos’ delectable bodice ripper shares the Best Picture category with First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s pointed diagnosis of our ill-stricken times, and Alfonso Cuarón’s technically virtuosic and emotionally devastating Roma; Lanthimos, Schrader and Cuarón also assume their respective places in the Best Director category.
Burning, Roma and Shoplifters are up for Best Foreign Language Film, while Free Solo, Minding the Gap and Won’t You Be my Neighbor? are nominated for Best Documentary.
In the Canadian section, a wistful story about a young woman returning home to Uruguay after more than a decade away, Roads in February is nominated for Best Picture alongside Fausto, Andrea Bussmann’s loose adaptation of Goethe’s version of the Faust legend, and Edge of the Knife, co-directors Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s 19th century epic, scripted entirely in two endangered Haida dialects (of which there are only 20-odd fluent speakers remaining). Jerkovic, Bussmann and Edenshaw and Haig-Brown are all nominated for Best Director, where they are joined by Philippe Lesage for Genesis.
The Best Canadian Documentary nominees are ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch, The Museum of Forgotten Triumphs, and What Is Democracy?

The Polish period drama Cold War ( Zimna wojna) directed by Paweł Pawlikowskiis dominated the 2018 European Film Awards winning five awards including the top prize Best European Film along with Best Director for Paweł Pawlikowski.
The Best European Comedy prize went to The Death of Stalin by Armando Iannucci, and the Best European Documentary went to Bergman – A Year in a Life by Jane Magnusson.
2018 European Film Awards Winners

The first nine films have been selected for the Competition and the Berlinale Special of the 69th Berlin International Film Festival.

The film Dirty God by Dutch filmmaker Sacha Polak (Hemel, Zurich) will open the 48th edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Dirty God is a compelling portrait of a young mother named Jade (a powerful debut role for actress Vicky Knight), and deals with themes of courage, self-acceptance and motherhood in contemporary London.

A Star is Born leads the nominees for the 25th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® for outstanding individual, cast and ensemble performances in film with four nominations, followed by BlacKkKlansman and The Favourite with three nominations each. The cast of BlacKkKlansman and A Star is Born were also nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture along with Black Panther, Bohemian Rhapsody and Crazy Rich Asians.