New films by Stefan Haupt and Katharina Otto-Bernstein are among a raft of international titles that will make their world premieres at this year’s edition of the Munich International Film Festival (Filmfest München), which runs from June 27-July 6 in Germany.
Swiss director Haupt’s adaptation of the Max Frisch classic novel I’m Not Stiller, produced by C-Films AG with Munich-based W2 Walker + Worm Film and Studiocanal, will world premiere as part of the CineCoPro competition which offeres a top prize of €100,000.
International rights are being handled by Studiocanal whose German distribution arm will release I’m Not Stiller on October 9, with Ascot Elite Entertainment planning to open in Swiss cinemas a week later.
Haupts credits include 2014’s The Circle, the winner of the Teddy Award and the audience award in Berlin’s Panorama section.
Greta-Marie Becker’s second feature documentary Germaine Acogny - Romancing The Shadow is also making its world premiere in the CineCoPro competition.
The film is a portrait of 80-year-old Acogny, who is described as the “mother of African contemporary dance” and regarded as one of Africa’s most influential artists. Autlook is handling international sales on teh German-French-Senegalese co-production.
CineCoPro audiences will also be the first to see Michael Kofler’s debut feature A Land Within, produced by Munich-based Starhaus Filmproduktion with Italian and Austrian partners.
Set in South Tyrol in 1961 against the backdrop of a series of separatist bomb attacks, the drama centres on the free spirit Paul who eventually has to choose between following his dream of studying painting in Munich or standing up to violence and his fugitive terrorist brother Anton.
Weltkino is releasing the film in German cinemas later this year.
Meanwhile, the festival’s Spotlight sidebar will be presenting world premieres of Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s The Last Spy, the biography of the late CIA spymaster Peter Sichel which is being sold by Dogwoof. Otto-Bernstein’s director credits include documentaries Absolute Wilson and Beautopia, and she is a producer of films such as Joyland and Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures.
Also in the Spotlight section is the world premiere of HBO series Oxygen Masks Will (Not) Drop Automatically, by Brazilian filmmakers Marcelo Gomes and Carol Minêm’s, about the AIDS era in Latin America in the late 1980s.
The CineMaster Competition dedicated to new works by master directors from all over the world will show The Exposure, the latest feature film by the veteran Swiss filmmaker Thomas Imbach. The Swiss-UK co-production between Okofilm Productions and Prestige Films is billed as the first Swiss film with entirely in-camera visual effects and using virtual production technology in a studio in Basle for a unique take on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else.
The CineRebels Competition will host the world premiere of A Whale Can Be Torn Apart Like a Samba School by Brazilian filmmakers Marina Meliande and Felipe M. Bragança. The festival described it as “an impressive cinematic experiment composed of fragments of the present and the past, developed as part cinema, part art installation in the tropical setting of Rio”.
Bragança and Meliande were previously in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded section in February with the 29-minute documentary Zizi (Or Praying to a Fabulous Tree).
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