The Film Verdict April 27, 2023

The Masters Are Still With Us

Weekly Critics’ Choice

THE FABELMANS

The Masters Are Still With Us

VERDICT: Steven Spielberg solidifies his legendary origin story playing with truth, fiction, and the magic of moviemaking.

Kevin Jagernauth, September 12, 2022

“Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth,” Michael Haneke once said. This is the surprising dichotomy at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s semiautobiographical The Fabelmans. Presented with the director’s trademark warmth, courtesy of regular collaborators Janusz Kaminski’s brightly lit, comforting cinematography and John Williams’ twinkling score, the aesthetics are illusive as Spielberg presents the truth of his life, refracted through the lens of fiction.

The Fabelmans are the nom de plume for the Spielbergs, with Paul Full Review

Spielberg

Time passes, legends fade and even immortal filmmakers inevitably depart for that great editing suite in the sky. But one glance at this year's Cannes film festival line-up suggests that the Old Masters are far from ready to go gentle into that good night. In May the glitzy Gallic gathering will host a stellar summit of heavyweight veterans including 80-year-old Martin Scorsese with his latest period murder thriller Killers of the Flower Moon, Harrison Ford in autumnal actionhero mode for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and 86-yearold Ken Loach presenting his new

social-realist sermon The Old Oak while 83-year-old Marco Bellocchio unveils his latest, Rapito. Looking positively youthful by comparison, 77-year-old German New Waver Wim Wenders will also premiere two films while perennial French provocateuse Catherine Breiillat, a relative baby at just 74, unveils her new taboo-trashing infidelity drama Last Summer.

The Film Verdict is itself a young publication with a special interest in rising stars and new directors, the kind of promising talent often

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Steven

THE MASTERS (Continued) overlooked by more mainstream industry magazines. Even so, over the last 18 months our pages have been full of glowing reviews for filmmakers in their 70s and 80s, many still at the peak of their powers, or at least still making impressively bold work in their autumn years.

These include European art-house auteurs like 73-year-old Pedro Almodovar, still winning Oscar nominations and critical raves for his recent releases Pain and Glory and Parallel Mothers. Or prolific French writer-director Claire Denis, who was showered with prestigious prizes last year for Both Sides of the Blade and Stars at Noon. Or 81-year-old Margarethe Von Trotta, whose historical bio-drama Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey Into the Desert was one of our Berlinale highlights back in February alongside two powerful documentaries, 81-year-old James Benning's Allensworth and 72year-old Nicolas Philibert's Golden Bear-winner On The Adamant.

Other notable old-timers still making fresh, engaging, highprofile work include 93-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman, Ridley Scott and Morgan Freeman, both 85, plus 80-year-old Werner Herzog, 77year-old David Cronenberg and 76-year-old Helen Mirren. But in a league of his own is Steven Spielberg, surely the most youthful 76-year-old in cinema, who followed his dynamic 2021 remake of West Side Story with last year's ravishing autobiographical retro-drama The Fabelmans, earning multiple awards and some of the warmest reviews of his later career. As noted in Kevin Jagernauth's

positive review in The Film Verdict, Spielberg remains every inch the passionate perfectionist today that he was in his youth.

“Even after five decades as one of the most influential filmmakers in history, every single time he looks through the camera lens, he’s still working to get it right.”

Also worth a mention here is 77year-old director David Lynch's show-stopping cameo in The Fabelmans as John Ford, one restlessly inventive veteran director paying inspired double tribute to two more. But for sheer indestructible longevity points, nobody in modern cinema can rival James Hong, the 93-year-old Chinese-American legend with more than 600 screen credits to his name, who was recently seen battling to save humankind from pan-dimensional evil in seventime Oscar-winning sensation Everything Everywhere All At Once. Old Masters never die, it seems. they just keep kicking ass across multiple parallel universes. – Stephen Dalton

Pedro Almodovar

David Cronenberg

Claire Denis & Javier Bardem

Wim Wenders

ON THE ADAMANT

VERDICT: French documentarian Nicolas Philibert’s latest feature, competing in Berlin, gives voice to the patients in a psychiatric day care centre floating on the Seine. Clarence Tsui, February 25, 2023 Moored on the right bank of the Seine, The Adamant is a day centre catering to the needs of people with mental disorders from the four central arrondissements of Paris. Resembling a hip riverside restaurant more than a psychiatric hospital, the floating wooden edifice was completed in 2019 after consultations between its designers and its therapeutic staff and, most importantly, its patients – a gesture that mirrors its approach in removing the usual border wall between caregivers and the cared-for.

This unorthodox, democratic vibe is central to On the Adamant, in which French documentarian Nicolas Philibert delivers incisive observations and intense interviews aplenty about this outlier of a psychiatric centre. Bowing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it is similar in its premise (and its subject) to Every Little Thing, Philibert’s 1996 documentary about a similarly unconventional psychiatric centre in provincial France.

The circumstances of these two films are, of course, very different. The La Borde clinic in the film from 25 years ago is more like a laid-back rural hermitage compared to the bustling vibe on board The Adamant. But what remains the same is Philibert’s knack for establishing a rapport with his subjects (a term he’d probably disagree with), and his ability to conjure powerful and insightful observations about a convention-defying, emancipatory institution.

Just like in Every Little Thing, On the Adamant sets out its stall by beginning with a patient’s powerful and very potent musical performance. In the former, a woman defies her frail physique by delivering a stunning, nearprofessional rendition of an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in a country lane; now, a man storms through a rousing rock’n’roll number chronicling the ebbs and flows of a once drug-addled and deranged life.

Full Review

ALLENSWORTH

VERDICT: James Benning’s latest, bowing in the Berlin Forum, offers a powerful comment on racial politics in the U.S. in a static-shot portrait of the first settlement to be founded and governed by AfricanAmericans.

Clarence Tsui, February 23, 2023

The key lies in the capital letters. For someone renowned for his understated, minimalist approach towards his art, James Benning has made his point loud and clear this time round with ALLENSWORTH, an hour-long tribute to the African-Americans who defied huge odds to fight for their deserved dignity in life in the pre-segregation U.S.

A montage of 11 five-minute-long static shots of landscapes and buildings that were once part of the

first Californian settlement to be founded, inhabited and governed by Black people – plus a solitary live shot of a young woman reciting poems by American literary icon Lucille Clifton – ALLENSWORTH ranks as one of Benning’s most overtly political statement in years, if not in his five-decade career. It easily surpasses the opaque hints of critique against colonialism and cultural appropriation in natural history, his 2014 documentary about the Vienna Natural History Museum, or any of the films from his Californian trilogy.

Making its international premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Forum, ALLENSWORTH should sustain a long run on the festival circuit, starting with a berth at Cinema du Reél in Paris next month.

Filmed across one calendar year, ALLENSWORTH invites the viewer to look, ponder and imagine the circumstances, context and compass of a town established by Colonel Allen Allensworth, a freed slave-turned-pastor, in California in 1908. The 20acre settlement offered African-Americans a safe haven to live in, and was also considered proof of how Black people could build and manage an independent, thriving community when freed from the shackles of racial bigotry of the day.

Full Review

Noir360, talks with Clement Virgo, a Canadian film and television writer, producer, and director.

Clement is the co-founder of the production company Conquering Lion Pictures, which has produced critically acclaimed films such as Poor Boy's Game and The Book of Negroes, a six-part miniseries based on the novel by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. The Book of Negroes received widespread praise for its compelling storytelling and powerful performances, earning several awards and nominations.

INGEBORG BACHMAN: JOURNEY INTO THE DESERT

VERDICT: Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply perceptive study of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, played by a dazzling Vicky Krieps, portrays the great writer’s struggle to combine freedom and commitment.

Deborah Yount, February 19, 2023

One of director Margarethe von Trotta’s most engaging biopics of famous women, thanks also to a magical yet believable performance by Vicky Krieps (Corsage) in the main role, Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert (Ingeborg Bachmann: Reise in die Wüste) takes the audience on a trip inside the female psyche and the anguishing dilemma posed by male-female relationships. Although the film is set in

a six-year period from 1958 to 1964, when women’s roles were much more rigidly defined than today, Bachmann’s shattering difficulty claiming her rightful space in love affairs rings a loud bell of truth.

Bowing in Berlin competition, the Match Factory release has the notable production values and sweeping locations, from European capitals to the desert, that should drive it beyond festivals and into theaters.

Perhaps the secret behind von Trotta’s success in making the biographies of intellectual women (Rosa Luxemburg in 1986, Hildegard of Bingen in 2009, Hannah Arendt in 2012) lies in her confidence that audiences are prepared to go beyond the standard biopic formulas and explore the minds and intellects of her subjects. Here it is so refreshing to listen to Bachmann reading her poetry or making a speech to a rapt audience – and being cool about it. When a man suggests to her, flirtatiously, that she is the only serious German poet, obviously expecting her to demur, she answers simply, “Yes.”

The man asking is Max Frisch, a Swiss playwright 15 years her senior. He has invited her to the opening night of his new play in London. With his imposing physique and heavy black glasses, Max (played by Ronald Zehrfeld of Barbara and Beloved Sisters)

Full Review

Taiwan, Ukraine, And Chile At The 2023 European Film Market

Each year, the European Film Market welcomes film professionals from different parts of the world to Berlin, Germany. This year was no exception and TFV's Matt Micucci sought the opportunity to record conversations about the current film and audiovisual industry scene of three different countries: Taiwan, Ukraine and Chile. This latest episode of the Showcast features conversations with: Chia-Hua Yeh, section manager of the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA); Polina Tolmachova, marketing director of FILM.UA; and Ashley Salman, international producer with CinemaChile.

FEST

Cannes 76th Edition announces Short Film & La Cinef Selections

Karlovy Vary IFF announces 2 Retrospectives

Selected from 4288 films, 11 shorts will be presented this year in Competition, coming from 12 countries :Argentina, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, the United Kingdom and Ukraine. The Short Film Palme d’or will be handed by the Jury chaired by Ildikó Enyedi, Saturday, May 27, during the closing ceremony of the 76th Festival de Cannes.

Additionally, La Cinef selected among 2000 films submitted by film schools from all around the world, 14 short fictions and 2 animated short films, among which 10 films are directed by women and 7 films by men. 13 countries from 4 continents are represented including Morocco, for the first time in selection. The Jury chaired by Ildikó Enyedi will give out 3 La Cinef awards, during a ceremony that will be followed by the screening of the awarded films, Thursday, May 25, in the Buñuel theatre.

To view all of the films selected for the Cannes Film Festival 2023, please click here

Festival runs May 16 - 2

Zinemaldia Startup Challenge

The San Sebastian Festival opens fifth call for the Zinemaldia Startup Challenge, a competition focused on Spanish and European entrepreneurs and startups whose projects include new technologies applied to the audiovisual field. a strategic commitment by the Festival in its aim to position itself as a space

Another Birth. Iranian Cinema, Here and Now

The 57th KVIFF celebrates independent Iranian cinema with a selection of singular works made in the past four years.

Collectively these works offer an insightful testimony of the burning creativity of Iran’s artists in face of the challenging reality. Nine mostly young filmmakers –urgent, unheard, voices – who palpably bear a spiritual connection to the previous generations of their country’s greats, tackle the current reality with a remarkable sensitivity and great inventiveness.

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for reflecting on technology and the audiovisual industry and for narrowing ties between both sectors.

Deadline to enter is June 1.For details and entry information, please click here

San Sebastian Fest runs Sept. 22 - 30

Melancholic dramas, comedies, war movies, sci-fis… films about love, and films within films. Together, these nine unique and intensely personal testimonies form a multi-dimensional mosaic that reflect the collective spirit and openness of Iran’s young cinema of today. For film titles and more information, click here

KVIFF Also Celebrates Iconic Japanese Filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura With a Career-Spanning Program

A towering figure of post-war Japanese cinema is the subject of the 57th Karlovy Vary International Festival’s forthcoming tribute program. Long neglected in most of the Western world, the zany films of Japanese filmmaker Yasuzo Masumura (1924 – 1986) have been gaining traction over the past decade, attracting new devotees and forcing critics and academics to reassess his ascribed position within the Japanese New Wave.Two decades after his work began to circulate across in Europe and the U.S., albeit in limited capacities, the films of Masumura now rank among the biggest film discoveries of the 21st century – a highly eclectic, unabashedly confrontational body of work with rebellious politics and highly distinctive aesthetics. For film titles and more information, click here

Kalovy Vary IFF runs June 30 - July 8

FEST

Sheffield Docs announces 2023 Meet Market Selection

The slate includes 48 documentary projects, in development or at production stage, to be pitched in one-to- one meetings to international and UK industry representatives and experts.

Drawn from over 500 submissions, new work will be presented from directors including: Rodrigo Reyes, winner of 2022 Sheffield DocFest International Competition; Ike Nnaebue of No U-Turn, a project developed as part of Generation Africa; Sean McAllister who will present a follow up work from the 2008 film Japan A Story Of Love And Hate and Victoria Mapplebeck’s long awaited Motherboard will be presented in the newly created addition of Rough Cut screenings.

The 48 projects in the 2023 edition encompass 34 countries of production/co-production: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland,

France, Georgia, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, USA, and Venezuela.

Lisa Marie Russo, Producer and Marketplace Consultant, says: “Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket is the centre of gravity for financing, networking and conspiring to change the world with ambitious and surprising documentaries. The 2023 slate of projects show filmmakers continuing to innovate, inspire and delight, with a range of energetic must-see stories from around the globe.”

MeetMarket event runs from June 15 & 16For more information, please click here.

Sheffield Doc Fest runs June 14-19

KVIFF (Continued)

A Trip to the Moon; Cesta na mesic

Cutler’s-Hall Batara-Indra-Soepraba

PARALLEL MOTHERS

VERDICT: Almodóvar's latest offers an exciting if not entirely smooth mix of new and familiar elements, including his muse Penélope Cruz. Boyd van Hoeij, September 1, 2021

Where do you go as a laureled filmmaker heading into the fifth decade of your career after making a semi-autobiographical masterpiece like Pain and Glory?

For Pedro Almodóvar, the answer is Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas), a film that takes some familiar ingredients the mother figure, a queer look at

relationships and families, stage acting, etc. and adds some surprising new elements. They include an interest in a dark chapter of Spanish history and a transition from the director’s beloved, normally omnipresent crimson red to an apparently newfound preference for a shade of green perhaps best described as jade.

Though the resulting concoction isn’t quite a home run, this does feel like an exciting new direction for Almodóvar, which, combined with the star power of his muse, Penélope Cruz, should translate to solid if not record-breaking theatrical returns, pandemic permitting. It is also his first work co-produced by Netflix, though it still seems primed for a theatrical release in most territories.

Full Review

WEST SIDE STORY

VERDICT: Spielberg uses every tool in his toolbox for this dynamic but emotionally limp restaging of the classic musical, whose themes he underscores for the Trump era.

Jordan Mintzer, December 15, 2021

By nature, musical comedies are often larger than life and over the top. They ask us to accept the reality of people singing their

thoughts, hopes, dreams and dilemmas aloud very aloud rather than speaking them, to watch them dance down the

street instead of walking, and to sometimes see them joining a flurry of fifty or a hundred other singing and dancing people in one great synchronous movement. In the best cases my personal preferences are The Band Wagon, It’s Always Fair Weather and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort the spectacle tends to speak for itself and the director has only to film it competently and gorgeously (by far no easy task), allowing the action to play out before our eyes as if we were watching it on a series of shifting stages, with the frame giving the performers adequate space to shine.

This was the case with Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story, a light-footed widescreen Technicolor rendition of the 1957 Broadway show conceived and Full Review

STARS AT NOON

VERDICT: CANNES GRAND PRIX - JOINTLY AWARDED, REVIEWED MAY 26 Set in Central America, Claire Denis’ second English-language film is more straightforward than most of her works but is unmistakably hers in the way she suspends her complex characters in the sweaty grasp of a tropical setting.

Jay Weissberg, May 29, 2022

Without reading Denis Johnson’s novel one still suspects that Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon sticks closer to the source material than previous adaptations such as The Intruder or even Let the Sunshine In. That’s not to say the film isn’t Denis’ through-and-through: her treatment of the Central American setting bears certain resemblances to her works shot in parts of Africa such as White Material, where outsiders who think they know more than they do have their senses both heightened and enervated by the heat. No one captures that sense of thick humidity like she does, suspending her characters in a sweaty grasp that goes together with an overall atmosphere of entrapment.

In Stars at Noon her themes are more straightforward than in some previous films and yet her Full Review

BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE

VERDICT: French screen heavyweights Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon trade bruising blows in this unusually straight but gripping love-triangle drama from veteran Gallic auteur Claire Denis.

Stephen Dalton, February 12, 2022

“When you love someone, it never really goes away.” It sounds like a trite romantic homily in the mouth of Juliette Binoche’s Parisian radio journalist Sara, the emotional heart of Both Sides of the Blade. But this is a Claire Denis film, so we already know the tortuous erotic journey ahead is not going to be so smooth. Competing for big prizes at the Berlinale, this prickly contemporary chamber drama feels unusually sober and conventional for Denis, but the lead performances are world-class while the plot paints an agreeably nuanced portrait of unchained, unashamed female desire. Star names in conjunction with a classic French love-triangle plot may even score the veteran director one of her rare international breakout hits.

Conceived during the Covid lockdown, Both Sides of the Blade finds Denis working on a fairly modest domestic canvas with a team of regular collaborators including Binoche, co-star Vincent Lindon and novelist turned screenwriter Christina Angot. The script is based on Angot’s 2018 novel Un tournant de la vie, though the film’s French title is actually the more punchy Avec amour et acharnement, which loosely translates as “with love and relentlessness.”

After 10 years together, middle-aged couple Sara (Binoche) and Jean (Lindon) plainly still share a lusty, tactile, tender chemistry. Even so, she is thrown into emotional confusion by a chance street sighting of François (Gregoire Colin), the old flame she abandoned to be with Jean. A former rugby player with inner demons lurking just below his taciturn

Full Review

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

VERDICT: Legendary cult director David Cronenberg's first film in eight years is an ambitious but unconvincing return to familiar body-horror themes.

Stephen Dalton, May 23, 2022

David Cronenberg always talks a good film. Trumpeting his much-anticipated return to the Cannes film festival’s main competition following an eight-year hiatus from directing, the 79-year-old Canadian cult auteur has been pitching Crimes of the Future as his most shocking work since Crash (1996) scandalised the Croisette. Reclaiming Cronenberg’s rightful place as a pioneering elder statesman of visceral “body horror”, this cerebral sci-fi thriller stars Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. It also features flesh-slicing close-ups, nudity, fetishistic sex and some mildly unpleasant violence against children. The director has even gleefully predicted walk-outs in the first few minutes.

There were indeed several walk-outs during the first Cannes press screening, but probably not for the reasons Cronenberg was hoping. In its promising first act, Crimes of the Future plays like a greatest hits medley of the director’s career, from its dystopian setting and quietly nightmarish tone to the pulsing, oozing, bio-mechanical production designs that hark back to his 1980s and 1990s psy-fi classics. There are even eroticised wound-licking sex scenes that pay knowing homage to earlier films like Videodrome (1983) and Crash. But this selfreferential slime symphony soon begins to drag and plod, recycling queasy obsessions that the director has probed more fully and convincingly before, adding little new to well-trodden terrain.

Indeed, this entire project is something of a retread. Crimes of the Future shares its title with one

Full Review

AWARDS

European Film Awards to change dates in 2026

Awards moving a month later to the beginning of the calendar year, European nominees and winners will be featured much more visibly within the international awards season including the Oscars®.

As the nominations for the European Film Awards will continue to be announced by mid-November each year, the date change will create a larger window for nominated films to be promoted. Academy members eligible to vote will be able to watch the films on the Academy VOD platform, or in cinema screenings if the nominated films are released during this period or a part of programmes the Academy organizes itself, the Month of European Film.

The European Film Awards, the European Film Academy’s annual award ceremony celebrating the best of European cinema, will move dates. After the 37th edition in December 2024, the 38th edition will take place mid-January 2026 and will celebrate the best European films from the previous year. The date change is a next step in the repositioning and rebranding process of the event and the work of the European Film Academy. With the European Film

With its new date, the European Film Awards will take their place within the international awards corridor among the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Oscars. The ceremony of the European Film Awards will take place in the weekend after the Golden Globes, and prior to the closing of the nomination voting for the Oscars. European films vying for one of the European Film Awards will be able to optimize promotion and marketing in Europe and beyond its borders for the international awards season, increasing their visibility in the same period of the year.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

VERDICT: Michelle Yeoh plays a kick-ass Chinese-American matriarch fighting the forces of darkness across multiple universes in this wildly inventive, prize-winning philosophical action comedy from writerdirector duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.

Stephen Dalton, March 13, 2023 (Originally published January 16, 2023)

A gonzo rollercoaster ride through a multiverse of madness, Everything Everywhere All at Once feels like a Marvel superhero

blockbuster scripted by Charlie Kaufman. This hugely entertaining maximalist mash-up of action comedy, sci-fi thriller, martial arts

fight-fest, existential art-house drama, Asian-American family saga and pro-LGBT message movie was written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as “Daniels”, who made their feature debut with the absurdist comic fable Swiss Army Man (2016). Released last year, Everything Everywhere All at Once has become blossoming left-field indie distributor A24’s biggest box office hit to date, earning over $100 million, and is now gaining a second wind as a major awards contender. Its lead actors, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, both took home Golden Globes last week. Yesterday at the Critics’ Choice awards, it won five major prizes including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. With multiple nominations for the upcoming BAFTAS, Screen Actors

Full Review

Netflix Expands Korea Investment

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in a Kafkaesque nightmare when he can’t find the exit of the hotel he just slept in. His attempts to get out only entangle him further with the hotel and its curious inhabitants.

American Film Market 2023 New location

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced that the streaming giant plans to spend $2.5 billion on Korean content. The announcement came during a meeting in Washington with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is currently in the US on a state visit.

“We were able to make this decision because of our great confidence in the Korean content industry, and we’ll continue to make great stories,” Sarandos said following the meeting at Blair House. “I have no doubt that our investment will strengthen our longterm partnership with Korea and Korea’s creative ecosystem,” he told Yonhap news agency.

The sum, Sarandos said, is twice the amount Netflix has invested in South Korea since it started there in 2016.

LevelK boards Mr. K

LevelK has boarded world sales on Dutch drama Mr. K starring Crispin Glover, which has wrapped filming and is now in post-production. Back To The Future star Glover plays the eponymous character, a travelling musician who finds himself

LevelK has released a first look. Paradiso will release the title in Belgium. Written and directed by Tallulah Schwab, Mr. K is a co-production between the Netherlands’ Lemming Film, Belgium’s A Private View, the Netherlands’ The Film Kitchen, Norway’s Take Film 53 and the Netherlands’ AVRO/TROS.

Marzenna Czubowic Joins 101 Films

101 Films, an Amcomri Entertainment company, has appointed Marzenna Czubowicz as Director of Acquisitions. Based in the UK, Czubowicz will acquire feature films for the leading UK & North American distribution company, focusing on commercially driven feature films of all genres and budgets. In her role, she will be heavily involved in acquisitions, casting and production for the groups global sales and production entities, 101 Films International and Amcomri Productions.

Highly experienced sales and content executive Czubowicz was most recently Acquisition Consultant at Sky and Sky Showtime. Her experience also extends into sales through her senior positions at Beyond Rights, BBC Worldwide and Alliance Atlantis among other television and film distribution companies.

AFM has moved to the Le Méridien Delfina in Santa Monica. CA. To take a virtual of the hotel, please click here.

Registration is now open for Exhibitors Offices and Meeting Spaces. Other upcoming key dates include:

June 26: Exhibitors Offices and Space Assignments

July 5: Buyer Accreditation, Industry Professionals and Hotel Reservations

July 18, Press Credentials

AFM is a global marketplace that offers a diverse range of perspectives and opportunities for collaboration and is your chance to connect and engage with key players from over 80 countries, to showcase, discover, and acquire 1000s of independent films and projects in development, and share knowledge, ideas, and resources to better navigate the current landscape. For more information and registration forms, please click here.

AFM takes place Oct 31 - Nov 5