The Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA) announced their top honorees for 2020 with Nomadland taking five wins including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress for Frances McDormand, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.
For the Retrospective of the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, the festival will showcase a program of 27 comedies featuring three different American actresses under the title “No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard”. The films were chosen with a focus on the strict morality rules of the Motion Picture Production Code, which were increasingly enforced after 1934. Officially adopted in 1930 and dubbed the “Hays Code”, it was a voluntary system by which the Hollywood Studios agreed to uphold moral standards in filmmaking to avoid the censors’ knife. But the Hays Office soon became an even stricter arbiter than the actual censorship office of what could and couldn’t be shown on screen. The code prohibited explicit depictions of sex and promiscuity, as well as the use of profanity. Yet during that period, these three women succeeded in shaping their own film roles, finding their own style, and subtly subverting the Hays Code rules.
Southern India-set Pebbles by Vinothraj P.S won the Tiger Award, while I Comete – A Corsican Summer by French filmmaker Pascal Tagnati and Looking for Venera by Norika Sefa from Kosovo both won Special Jury Awards at the expanded 50th anniversary edition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The VPRO Big Screen Award went to El perro que no calla by Ana Katz from Argentina and Quo Vadis, Aida? by Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić won the BankGiro Loterij Audience Award.
Nomadland won three top honors including Film of the Year, at the 41st London Critics’ Circle Film Awards, which were held in a virtual ceremony on Sunday night. The film’s lead Frances McDormand was named Actress of the Year, while writer-director Chloé Zhao won Screenwriter of the Year.
Completely virtual for the first time, the 24th edition of New York International Children’s Film Festival (NYICFF) will open on March 5th with a premiere event for Elizabeth Ito’s new Netflix animated series City of Ghosts. The animated feature Nahuel and the Magic Book, directed by Germán Acuña, will make its North American premiere on March 6th as the 2021 Opening Spotlight program, and the Festival will conclude with a Closing Spotlight screening of Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon with an exclusive, live conversation with the film’s directors Don Hall and Carlos López-Estrada and appearances by lead voice cast member Kelly Marie Tran.
The world premiere of Corey McLean’s Havana Libre, documenting the fight to legitimize surfing in Cuba will open the 2021 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula. The festival will close with Ann Kaneko’s Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust, a documentary on a fresh interpretation of the Japanese American confinement site by examining the environmental and political history behind the World War II camp.
Magnolia Pictures released a new trailer for the documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, directed by Rodney Ascher, that premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in select theaters and on VOD on Friday, February 5th, 2021.
A24’s critically acclaimed horror film Saint Maud” the debut film from writer-director Rose Glass, will be available exclusively on EPIX starting on February 12, 2021.
The Palm Springs International Film Awards announced that Andra Day will be the recipient of the Breakthrough Performance Award for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.
IFC Films acquired Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ latest feature film, the steamy romantic drama Monday starring Sebastian Stan (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I Tonya) and Denise Gough (Colette, The Other Lamb). Monday is Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ fourth feature. Monday was an official selection at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival and 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. IFC Films will release the film on April 16th, 2021 in select theaters and on demand.
HBO today announced Allen v. Farrow, a four-part documentary series that goes behind decades of sensational headlines to reveal the private story of one of Hollywood’s most notorious and public scandals: the accusation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen involving Dylan, his then seven-year-old daughter with Mia Farrow; their subsequent custody trial, the revelation of Allen’s relationship with Farrow’s daughter, Soon-Yi; and the controversial aftermath in the years that followed. Once celebrated for their on and off-screen partnership, Farrow and Allen’s lives were irrevocably fractured and their sprawling family torn apart with the public disclosure of the abuse allegations and the vitriolic disputes that followed.
Questlove’s “Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” winner of the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, has landed with Searchlight Pictures and Disney General Entertainment’s BIPOC Creator initiative, led by Tara Duncan for theatrical release as well as exclusively streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and internationally on Star and Star+.