
49 films have been named by the European Film Academy for this year’s EFA Feature Film Selection,
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49 films have been named by the European Film Academy for this year’s EFA Feature Film Selection,
Two filmmakers -So Young Shelly Yo and Erica Liu have been selected by SFFILM to receive 2018 Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellowships, which will support the development of their narrative feature screenplays. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellowships are part of the organization’s efforts to support programs that cultivate and champion films exploring scientific or technological themes and characters. SFFILM fellowships, awarded under the auspices of the organization’s artist development program, SFFILM Makers, are presented to film artists developing screenplays that tell stories related to science or technology.
SFFILM Sloan Science in Cinema Filmmaker Fellowships include a $35,000 cash grant and a two-month residency at FilmHouse, SFFILM’s suite of production offices for local and visiting independent filmmakers. Fellows will gain free office space alongside access to weekly consulting services and professional development opportunities. SFFILM will connect each fellow to a science advisor with expertise in the scientific or technological subjects at the center of their screenplays, as well as leaders in the Bay Area’s science and technology communities. In addition to the residency and grant, SFFILM’s artist development team will facilitate industry introductions to producers and casting, financing, and creative advisors—investing in fellows from early script development stages through to release with the goal to further professional development and career sustainability.
The jury noted in a statement: “We are delighted to support these two immensely talented women. Each filmmaker is taking a strikingly different approach to capturing the life of a female scientist, but they share a commitment to deepening the science in their screenplays in order to more fully realize those characters and the worlds they move in.”
The 11th Endeavor
So Young Shelly Yo, writer/director; Mark Castillo, producer
A fiery female biotechnologist, hoping to break ground outside the realms of her lab, competes to be Korea’s first astronaut on the nationwide televised Korean Astronaut Program. In her obsessive quest to become Korea’s first astronaut, So Yeon steps into a world of unmeasurable physical and mental stress and discovers shocking revelations about her country. Based on the true story of Yi So Yeon, South Korea’s first astronaut.
So Young Shelly Yo is a Korean-American filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. She is a recent graduate of the MFA film program at Columba University, where her thesis film Moonwalk with Me was awarded faculty honors. Her short films have screened and received accolades at film festivals around the world including the Mecal Barcelona International Short Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, and New Filmmakers LA, among others. Prior to schooling, Shelly worked as a video editor for a tech company known as ZEFR and as an assistant in the freelance commercial film industry.
The Mushroomers
Erica Liu, writer/director; David Yu-Hao Su, producer
Following her husband’s death, a young mycologist attempts to sublimate her grief by embarking on an offbeat project to heal a contaminated old-growth forest using only super fungi, but Mother Nature and the mechanics of her own mourning prove far fickler than she had anticipated.
Erica Liu is a Taiwanese-American writer/director based in Los Angeles. She participated in the AFI Conservatory Directing Workshop for Women in 2015. Her films have screened at Clermont-Ferrand, AFI Fest, and Palm Springs International Shortfest, among others. Springtime aired on public television nationwide via KQED and affiliate stations. The Disappointment Tour received a Will & Jada Smith Family Foundation grant. Erica earned her MFA from NYU Tisch Asia and previously spent five years working and shooting throughout Asia, collaborating with companies including BBC, Google, and China Film Group. Erica is currently incubating her first feature, The Mushroomers.Martin Sulik’s The Interpreter has been selected by the Slovak Film and Television Academy (SFTA) to represent Slovakia in the category of Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.
Youth v. Gov[/caption]
SFFILM awarded its inaugural SFFILM Environmental Fellowship along with the $25,000 cash prize to filmmaker Christi Cooper and her documentary Youth v. Gov. Cooper will also receive a year of mentorship and services to support the development, production, and impact campaign for the film.
The SFFILM Environmental Fellowship in partnership with Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Productions is geared towards mid-career filmmakers with a feature documentary project in development or early production that focuses on pressing environmental or conservation issues. Cooper is an Emmy Award-winning cinematographer with a passion for transforming complex issues into compelling storytelling. Youth v. Gov will chronicle a landmark lawsuit brought by 21 youths who are suing the U.S. government and fossil fuel industry for creating a climate emergency and endangering their futures.
Youth v. Gov was selected from a field of 70+ submissions by a committee of film and environmental experts from SFFILM, Vulcan Productions, Sierra Magazine, EarthX and the Redford Center.
“Talented filmmakers are telling powerful stories about climate change and the environment, and we are proud to be able to help bring this particular story to life via this new partnership with SFFILM,” said Carole Tomko, general manager and creative director of Vulcan Productions. “We support Christi’s incredibly timely film and recognize the importance of providing filmmakers financial and creative support.”
“We’re thrilled to partner with Vulcan to add to our commitment to the crucial early development stage of this documentary and elevate emerging voices tackling such significant issues of the environment and conservation,” added Caroline von Kühn, Director of Artist Development at SFFILM. “Through this process, it was really quite encouraging to see how many talented filmmakers are out there tackling these critical issues, but we are especially excited to support Christi and this timely, inspiring story of the next generation fighting for the future of our climate.”
“We are incredibly honored for this needed support to continue documenting this important story,” said Cooper. “We are once again at a point in history where youth are rising up and demanding change, from gun reform to social justice. These youth plaintiffs are on the frontlines of the climate crisis in our highest courts of law, holding their government accountable to protect their rights and inspiring other youth to take action. This story also has the power to change our discourse on climate change in a time of intense partisan divide, and to reframe it as a paramount responsibility of our government to protect our future.”
The SFFILM Environmental Fellowship supports a documentary filmmaker over the course of six months who is creating a powerful story about conservation and the environment. In addition to the $25,000 grant, the fellow will travel to San Francisco and Seattle to participate in filmmaking and environmental workshops and to cultivate connections within the entertainment industry. The program consists of three key components: a residency at SFFILM’s FilmHouse for artistic support and mentorship; guidance from a dedicated environmental advisor; and development of a community outreach campaign and educational plan. The fellowship will run from June to December 2018.
An Emmy-award winning cinematographer, Christi Cooper grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where she was fortunate to be surrounded by people that nurtured and helped her develop a strong connection to nature and the outdoors. She obtained an M.S. in Microbiology from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Regensburg, Germany. After significant time in basic research and teaching at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, she made the decision to pursue her dream of an MFA in Science and Nature Filmmaking at Montana State University. In addition to communicating sometimes very complex issues through storytelling and visual narrative, her primary goals are to combine her research skills and in-depth knowledge of science with her desire to create compelling narratives focused on raising awareness about socio-political issues. In what little “free” time she has, she enjoys being a mother and a partner, growing her own food, and relishing in the incredible beauty and lifestyle of Montana.
In 2015, 21 young plaintiffs, ages 8 to 19, filed suit against the U.S. government asserting a willful violation of their constitutional rights. Youth v. Gov follows this turbulent legal battle as the government and fossil fuel industry take extraordinary measures to get the case dismissed. The case will go to trial on October 29, 2018 in Eugene, Oregon.
The refugee crisis documentary Eldorado by Oscar nominee Markus Imhoof has been selected to represent Switzerland in the category of Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards. Eldorado had its world premiere earlier this year at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival.
Drawing inspiration from his personal encounter with Giovanna, the refugee child who was taken in by his family during World War II, Markus Imhoof tracks today’s refugees on their dangerous journey to Europe. Eldorado was screened out of competition at the Berlinale 2018 and received a Special Mention from the jury of the Amnesty International Film Prize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwfMCvY33pY
Additionally, four short film productions from Switzerland are eligible for a nomination at the 91st Academy Awards in the categories of Animated Short Film, Live Action Short Film or Documentary Short Subject as a result of winning awards at Oscar-qualifying festivals: COYOTE by Lorenz Wunderle; INTIMITY by Elodie Dermange; BLACKJACK by Lora Mure-Ravaud; and ANTHONY, THE INVISIBLE ONE by Maya Kosa and Sergio Da Costa.
On behalf of the Federal Office of Culture, the promotion agency SWISS FILMS has been assigned the task of coordinating and carrying out the selection process of the official Swiss entry for the Academy Awards in the category of Foreign Language Film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the short list in December, and the Oscar nominations on January 22, 2019. The 91st Academy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on February 24, 2019.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association today announced that the 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, January 6, 2019 and nominations will be announced on Thursday, December 6, 2018.
Produced by dick clark productions in association with the HFPA, the Golden Globe Awards are viewed in more than 236 countries and territories worldwide and are one of the few awards ceremonies to include both motion picture and television achievements.
The deadline for Motion Picture and Television submissions is Wednesday, October 31, 2018.
Actress Elmarie Wendel who played Mrs. Dubcek on the NBC sitcom 3rd Rock From The Sun, has died. She was 89. Elmarie Wendel’s daughter, actress J.C. Wendel, confirmed her death on Instagram, writing “you were a great mom and a badass dame.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BlheeB1gFDH/?utm_source=ig_embed
In addition to 3rd Rock From The Sun her acting credits also included the 2011 comedy-drama film A Bag of Hammers directed by Brian Crano that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2fq-saH1FE
Luz[/caption]
Yellow Veil Pictures, Inc. a new worldwide film sales company focusing exclusively on arthouse genre cinema launches out of the Frontières Co-Production Market at the Fantasia International Film Festival with the German horror film Luz.
Yellow Veil Pictures is formed by Hugues Barbier, Ithaca Fantastik Founder and Festival Manager and Acquisitions for Raven Banner, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival founder and former Theatrical Manager of FilmRise, Justin Timms, and the former Festivals and Non-Theatrical Assistant Director of Visit Films, Joe Yanick, Co-Director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – NYC. In addition to Barbier, Timms, and Yanick, the team has brought on Fantasia International Film Festival’s International publicist Kaila Sarah Hier to handle the company’s press and publicity.
Acquired after its world premiere at the Berlinale 2018, Luz has been celebrated internationally at festivals such as BAFICI, Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, and Fantaspoa (Best Actress winner – Luana Velis). It will make its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in the Camera Lucida competitive section on July 20th.
“From the first image, hell even the first sound, in Luz, it’s not only Tilman’s incredible talent but also his understanding of horror cinema is cemented. We just fell in love with the movie, and we knew we had to have it. It’s frankly one of the most impressive debuts I’ve ever seen. We couldn’t have found another film to better demonstrate our mission statement,” said Joe Yanick.
Wrapping post-production, Josh Lobo’s directorial debut A Man in the Dark also joins Yellow Veil’s slate. Starring AJ Bowen (You’re Next), Jocelin Donahue (House of the Devil), Chris Sullivan (Stranger Things), Scott Poythress (The Signal), and Susan Burke (Southbound), the Christmas-set psychological horror focuses on man’s descent into paranoia, after he traps what he believes to be the devil in his basement.
Yellow Veil Pictures will also extend its company reach towards projects in development and have struck a deal with Man Underground (New Flesh Award Winner – Fantasia Film Festival 2016) filmmaking team Michael Borowiec and Sam Marine to package and secure financing for their sophomoric effort, Desert Witch. The script follows a punk singer, who, after being exiled from her community, is thrust into a small town conflict between religious extremists and an alleged coven of witches her estranged mother once belonged. The film will take place in a small desert community in the American West, and is slated for a 2019 production schedule.
With a focus on the sustainability of the festival circuit, Yellow Veil Pictures offers their hand to titles needing festival strategy consultation and bookings. As part of this effort, they’ve penned a deal with Glass Eye Pix and Hood River Entertainment for the exclusive festival/non-theatrical rights on Jenn Wexler’s punk rock slasher, The Ranger, out of SXSW’s Midnights program
“We seek to challenge the limits for commercial viability of arthouse genre and foreign language films for a redefined distribution landscape. These films were often lost in the festival circuit in years past, despite a noticeable growing interest from a more adventurous audience looking for new, exciting films with greater representation” Hugues Barbier added.
(l to r.) Director Boots Riley and Steven Yeun on the set of SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, an Annapurna Pictures release.[/caption]
Ten indie narrative films will receive a total of $250,000 in funding in the latest round of SFFILM Rainin Grants, to support the next stage of their creative process, from screenwriting to post-production. SFFILM Rainin Grants provided by SFFILM, in partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, are awarded twice annually to filmmakers whose narrative feature films will have significant economic and/or professional impact on the Bay Area filmmaking community or meaningfully explore pressing social issues.
Applications are currently being accepted for the Fall 2018 round of SFFILM Rainin Grants; the deadline to apply is August 29. For more information visit sffilm.org/makers.
SFFILM, in partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, is the largest granting body for independent narrative feature films in the United States. The SFFILM Rainin Grant program has awarded over $5 million to more than 100 projects since its inception, including Boots Riley’s indie phenomenon Sorry to Bother You, which hit theaters nationwide this month; Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Monsters and Men, which won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year; Geremy Jasper’s Sundance breakthrough Patti Cake$, which closed the 2017 Cannes Director’s Fortnight program; Chloé Zhao’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me, which screened at Sundance and Cannes in 2015; Short Term 12, Destin Cretton’s sophomore feature which won both the Narrative Grand Jury Award and Audience Award at SXSW 2013; Ryan Coogler’s debut feature Fruitvale Station, which won the 2014 Film Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, the Un Certain Regard Avenir Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, and both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the narrative category at Sundance 2013; and Ben Zeitlin’s debut phenomenon Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and Cannes’ Camera d’Or in 2012 and earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture).
The panelists who reviewed the finalists’ submissions are Noah Cowan, SFFILM Executive Director; Lauren Kushner, SFFILM Senior Manager of Artist Development; Kimberly Parker, film producer; Jennifer Rainin, CEO of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation; Jenny Slattery, SFFILM Associate Director of Foundations and Artist Development; Shelby Stone, President of Production at Freedom Road Productions; and Caroline von Kühn, SFFILM Director of Artist Development.
The jury noted in a statement: “We are delighted to support these ten extraordinarily talented filmmaking teams, five of whom are filmmakers based here in the Bay Area. Each of these filmmakers is creating a rich and singular world while wrestling with essential social justice issues. We look forward to being allies and supporters to these artists as they bring this expansive range of visions to life.”

Five projects will convene at the Sundance Resort in Utah for the Sundance Institute flagship Documentary Edit and Story Lab on July 6.
French film-maker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, best known for directing the Holocaust documentary Shoah, died today in Paris, he was 92.
His first documentary Pourquoi Israel? (Why Israel?) was released in 1973, and he began filming Shoah, a year later in 1974, conducting a series of filmed interview with death camp survivors all over the world. Lanzmann was reportedly attacked while attempting a covert interview, and was hospitalized for a month.
Over nine hours long and 11 years in the making, Shoah presents Lanzmann’s interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to German Holocaust sites across Poland, including extermination camps.
Released in Paris in April 1985, Shoah won critical acclaim and many prestigous awards, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film in 1985, a special citation at the 1985 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary in 1986. That year it also won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Non-Fiction Film and Best Documentary at the International Documentary Association.
Lanzmann has released four feature-length films based on unused material shot for Shoah.
A Visitor from the Living (fr) (1997) about a Red Cross representative, Maurice Rossel, who in 1944 wrote a favourable report about the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001) about Yehuda Lerner, who participated in an uprising against the camp guards and managed to escape.
The Karski Report (fr) (2010) about Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski’s visit to Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.
The Last of the Unjust (2013) about Benjamin Murmelstein, a controversial Jewish rabbi in the Theresienstadt ghetto during World War II.
Previously unseen Shoah outtakes have also been featured in Adam Benzine’s HBO documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah (2015), which examines Lanzmann’s life during 1973–1985, the years he spent making Shoah.
Lanzmann’s final film, Napalm, which premiered at Cannes in 2017, drew on his earlier visits to North Korea as a young journalist, in which he revealed his brief affair with a North Korean nurse.
Claude Lanzmann received a Honorary Golden Bear at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, and was made Grand Officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honor on July 14, 2011.
Update: Berlinale issued a statement
French director and author Claude Lanzmann has passed away.
“Claude Lanzmann was one of the great documentarists. With his depictions of inhumanity and violence, of anti-Semitism and its consequences, he created a new kind of cinematic and ethical exploration. We mourn the loss of an important personality of the political-intellectual life of our time,” says Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick.
Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) made cinematic history as an unparalleled masterpiece of commemorative culture. The nine-and-a-halfhour documentary on the genocide of European Jews was screened in the Berlinale Forum in 1986 and received numerous international awards.
Born in Paris in 1925 to Jewish parents, Claude Lanzmann fought in the Résistance, studied philosophy in France and Germany, and held a lectureship at the then newly founded Freie Universität Berlin in 1948/49. His exploration of the Shoah, anti-Semitism and political struggles for freedom infuse both his cinematic and journalistic work.
His first film was made in 1972, the documentary Pourquoi Israël (Israel, Why; France 1973), in which he illustrates the necessity of Israel’s founding from the Jewish perspective. In the film Tsahal, which screened in the 1995 Berlinale Forum, he focuses on women and men who serve in the Israeli Army. Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures (France 2001), about the 1943 revolt in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, was also screened in the Berlinale Forum, in 2002.
In 2013, the Berlinale honoured him with an Homage and awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIV7SYk9mWk
Dieter Kosslick[/caption]
The Sam Spiegel International Film Lab (Son of Saul, The Kindergarten Teacher, Red Cow) will present the first Force-of-Nature Filmmaking Award to longtime Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick. The Sam Spiegel International Film Lab in Jerusalem is a program to promote filmmakers’ projects launched by the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in 2011. The new Force-of-Nature Filmmaking Award is conceived to honor extraordinary personalities committed to the development of world cinema.
Dieter Kosslick will be presented with the Force-of-Nature Filmmaking Award in Jerusalem on July 6, 2018. “A particular concern of mine has always been the national and international promotion and funding of talent and up-and-coming filmmakers. I’m exceedingly pleased to receive this award,” said Dieter Kosslick.