Breaking News : Variety // Berlinale: Reel Suspects Acquires International Rights on ‘Black Hollow Cage’

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Berlinale: Reel Suspects Acquires International Rights on ‘Black Hollow Cage’

John Hopewell

Chief International Correspondent@john_hopewell

Paris-based upscale genre specialist adds to its European Film Market slate

PARIS — Reel Suspects, one of France’s few upscale foreign-language genre specialists, has acquired international sales rights to English-language sci-fi thriller “Black Hollow Cage,” a movie made out of one of the European countries with the biggest modern genre output – Spain.

Reel Suspects CEO Matteo Lovadina and his team will introduce the film to buyers during next week’s European Film Market at the Berlin Festival. Variety ha had exclusive access to its trailer.

“Black Hollow Cage” marks Spanish director Sadrac Gonzalez-Perellon’s second feature after “Myna Has Gone,” which won a Special Jury Recognition for acting at the 2009 Austin Film Festival.

Yoking two great Spanish film traditions – the dysfunctional family drama and genre auteur fantasy – “Black Hollow Cage” centers on Alice, a 13-year-old who has lost her mother and half of her right-arm in a car accident and so takes comfort in the company of Beatrice, a dog who can apparently talk via an electronic translation device, and whom Alice calls Mom. Alice discovers a large black cube in the woods via which she receives messages from a person who seems to be her future self, warning her of dire events that she must stop.

As the trailer suggests, unexpected runways, which Alice’s father takes in, further complicates Alice’s relationship with her father, whom she still blames for the accident. After another shattering tragedy, Alice determines to use the cube to go back in time and change the past.

Produced by Javier Aguayo and executive produced by Diego Rodriguez and Helena Altabas for Barcelona-based Asallam Films, which Altabas launched in 2015, “Black Hollow Cage” stars Julian Nicholson and Lowena McDonell (“Punta Escarlata”).

Describing “Black Hollow Cage” as a film about forgiveness, Gonzalez-Perellon followed two maxims when writing it, he said in a director’s statement: a story allowing for a “strenuous, beautiful mise en scène” which was sometimes technically complex; characters which avoid cliche.”

Lovadina called the film “an elegant mix between the cold and quiet horror of ‘Goodnight Mommy’ and the total breakdown of linear time proposed in films such as ‘Timecrimes,’” situating “Black Hollow Cage” on the sharp edge of a father-daughter relationship stoked by a feeling of guilt after a trauma.”

FILED UNDER:

  • Berlinale
  • Reel Suspects

Breaking Nws : THR // ‘We Are the Flesh’: Film Review

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‘We Are the Flesh’: Film Review

A startling debut viewing present-day Mexico through a violent, surreal lens.
1/13/2017

Two siblings take refuge in an increasingly bizarre hideout in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s horror-show allegory.

An innocent brother and sister find shelter with a madman in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are the Flesh, a debut whose quotient of sex and gore lives up to its English title. A violent allegory whose literal plot is largely up for grabs, it grows increasingly surreal as it goes, delving into a psychological state that greets societal collapse with more glee than despair. Viewers expecting a garden-variety horror flick will likely recoil, but those seeking new voices in Mexican cinema may well hail Minter’s effort. Repulsive as it is, this is a vision art houses would be wrong to ignore.

Noe Hernandez (Miss Bala) plays the devilish older man, who is squatting in a large abandoned building, violently destroying its furniture for firewood as he escapes whatever horrors — is it apocalypse, war, or merely poverty? — await outside. The siblings, eventually referred to as Fauna (Maria Evoli) and Lucio (Diego Gamaliel), make their way in, and he eventually agrees to let them stay — putting them to work, without explanation, on a large cardboard-and-packing-tape structure.

That convoluted space seems to have a life of its own, growing more convincingly cavelike as the unnamed man begins to christen it with transgressive acts. He coerces the brother and sister to start a sexual relationship (first observed in the hot pinks and yellows of thermal-imaging photography, then with pornlike frankness); later he will initiate a cannibalistic orgy with sacrilegious overtones.

While Evoli and Gamaliel negotiate their characters’ wavering acceptance of this environment, Hernandez supplies a mad conviction to match the director’s own: Staring into space with a demented kind of beatific smile on his face, he may be hiding from the end of the world, but seemingly intends to celebrate it as well, announcing that “this place is the last monument of a rotten society.”

About that society: Late in the picture, the protagonists capture a Mexican soldier, whose throat they slit ceremonially; that’s as explicit as the film gets in its reference to a real-world country awash in extreme violence and corruption. A producer’s note in press materials refers to ancient Aztec myths combining creation and destruction. Such myths lose most of their shock value when encountered in archaeological museums and textbooks; We Are the Flesh attempts, with some success, to resuscitate their horrors for our own terrifying times.

Distributor: Arrow Films
Production companies: Piano, Detalle Films, Sedna Films, Estudios Splendor Omnia, Simplemente
Cast: Noe Hernandez, Diego Gamaliel, Maria Evoli
Director-screenwriter: Emiliano Rocha Minter
Producer: Julio Chavezmontes
Director of photography: Yollotl Alvarado
Production designer: Manuela Garcia
Costume designers: Ana Maya Farthing-Kohl, Teresa Alvarado
Editors: Yibran Assuad, Emiliano Rocha Minter
Composer: Esteban Aldrete

In Spanish with English subtitles

Not rated, 79 minutes

Breaking News : Variety // Sweden’s Goteborg Festival Opens With ‘Tom of Finland,’ Celebrates the Best in Scandinavian Film, and Beyond

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Sweden’s Goteborg Festival Opens With ‘Tom of Finland,’ Celebrates the Best in Scandinavian Film, and Beyond

COURTESY OF PROTAGONIST PICTURES

On Jan. 27, as Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s “Tom of Finland” opens the 40th Göteborg Intl. Film Festival at the Swedish city’s Draken cinema, the whole province will participate, not just the 700 filmgoers in the theater.

“To celebrate the anniversary the whole ceremony, including the film, will be shown in 40 cinemas around Göteborg,” says the festival’s artistic director Jonas Holmberg, who is responsible for the program of 450 films from 84 countries that will unspool before the fest’s Feb. 6 wrap.

“What I love about Göteborg is the combination of a large, devoted audience and a high-profile, artistically ambitious program,” Holmberg says. “We will also continue to develop our market platform, the Nordic Film Market.”

Among the world premieres are U.K. director Elizabeth E. Schuch’s “The Book of Birdie,” Swedish director Manuel Concha’s “Blind Alley,” Icelandic director Erlingur Ottar Thoroddsen’s “Rift,” and “Eternity,” the new film by Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, who is also a jury member this year.

Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne will receive the festival’s Honorary Dragon Award. Their latest film, “The Unknown Girl,” will unspool along with a retrospective of their work. Danish writer-director Lone Scherfig will be honored with the Nordic Honorary Dragon Award.

The festival’s three special focus sidebars this year are on religion and faith; films from the Lapland (or Sápmi) region; and virtual reality.

“I am particularly proud of the film selection about the role of religion and faith in society,” says Holmberg. “It is an incredible controversial topic, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, and here filmmakers from widely varying backgrounds offer new perspectives of both perennial religious issues and current political occurrences. We hope it will bring a lot of thought and debate, also at the seminars [that] are part of [the selection].”

Films dealing with religion and faith include Egyptian director Mohamed Diab’s “Clash,” Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Student,” and U.S. director Ori Sivan’s “Harmonia,” which interprets the Book of Genesis in a concert-hall setting.

The festival has also organized guided tours to the Göteborg Cathedral, the city’s mosque and synagogue.

“Sámi films are currently hotter than ever,” says Holmberg, so new productions from the Arctic area of Lapland in northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia will unspool in the festival’s second Focus: Sápmi. Swedish-Sámi director Amanda Kernell’s “Sámi Blood” will have its Swedish premiere at the festival after its successful run in Venice and Thessaloniki.

“2016 was the first year when filmmakers started using virtual reality technology artistically,” Holmberg says. “We have collected some of the highlights to give the audiences a chance to see what is really going on inside those glasses.”

The festival will also debut the Nordisk Film & TV Fund Prize, worth $22,000, for the best Nordic script for a TV series.

“Göteborg introduced its TV Drama Vision platform before others, so it was obvious to choose the festival as a partner,” says the fund’s chief executive Petri Kemppinen.

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