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Saltburn composer Anthony Willis leads the pack in the second wave of nominations for the World Soundtrack Awards (Wsa) 2024.

As well as his previously announced nomination in film composer of the year, Willis is also up for the discovery and the public choice award.

The winners will be announced on October 16 at the Wsa ceremony and concert, held during Belgium’s Film Fest Ghent.

In discovery, Willis battles it out alongside Jerskin Fendrix for Poor Things; Carlos Rafael Rivera for Ezra; Caroline Shaw for Julie Keeps Quiet; and Diego Baldenweg for In The Land Of Saints And Sinners.

Willis and...

Though Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel raked in a billion dollars at the box office, the follow-up to her 2019 blockbuster seemed to have missed the mark. The team-up film The Marvels released last year to a terrible opening weekend and was a box office disaster. Despite also featuring heroes such as Monica Rambeau and Ms. Marvel, the film was a flop.

An X user pointed out that three all-female superhero team-up films had bombed at the box office and had received terrible responses from audiences. Apart from The Marvels, the user mentioned Birds of Prey and Madame Web to be the worst superhero films of all time. However, fans seem to disagree.

Brie Larson’s The Marvels Gets Clubbed With Two Other All-Female Superhero Team-Up Flops A still from The Marvels | Credits: Marvel Studios

The superhero genre has taken over Hollywood ever since Marvel hit it big with the shared universe strategy.

France’s Indie Sales has picked up Come Back, the directorial debut from Flemish brothers Jan and Raf Roosens starring Veerle Baetens and her real-life daughter Billie Vlegels.

The film is in post and Indie Sales is launching it at the European Film Market later this month. Kinepolis Film Distribution is handling the Belgian release.

Vlegels plays the teenage daughter of a once-successful techno DJ couple, living with her father after her parents’ divorce. When her mother (Baetens) sets off to make an international comeback, her daughter is thrust into the nocturnal club scene world and finds herself torn between...

“The number of talents and good films is amazing,” says Renata Santoro, head of programming at Giornate Degli Autori.

Connext, Flanders Image’s annual film and TV showcase, taking place from October 9-10 in Antwerp, is fast growing its reputation on the international stage.

Paolo Bertolin, a member of the selection committee of the Venice Film Festival, visited the Antwerp-based showcase for the first time in 2022 with a simple ambition to meet Belgian talent and discover the best up -and- coming projects from the region.

Among the projects he saw was Fien Troch’s Holly, a then work-in-progress about a...

The debut feature from The Broken Circle Breakdown star Veerle Baetens is an uncompromising adaptation of Lize Spitz’s novel Het Smelt (It Melts), which tells the story of a woman confronting the trauma of her past. The story unfolds over two time periods as the adult Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne) prepares to travel back to the small town where she grew up. Action in the present is interwoven with what happened to her one fateful summer as a child.

We caught up with the Belgian director over Zoom to chat about the film. The very spoiler-averse may want to wait until after they have seen the film before reading the second half.

Reading the press notes, it seems...

Without spoiling anything, there’s a particularly horrifying and disturbing scene that happens near the end of the film When It Melts involving the younger version of the main character, and the way that scene plays out left me incredibly uncomfortable and disturbed and will forever haunt me.

The use of a hand-held cam and the performances from all the child actors in that scene really enhanced this terrifying moment and was probably the most scared I’ve ever been in a film that is not technically labeled as horror. However, it is because of this one scene that I feel frustrated about When It Melts because as powerful as that scene was, the rest of the film does not even closely match that level of quality.

When It Melts is the directorial debut of Belgian actress Veerle Baetens and follows the story of Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne), a lonely...

A couple of times over in “When It Melts,” the directorial debut of Belgian actor Veerle Baetens, Eva, played as a morose, withdrawn adult by Charlotte De Bruyne, looks at a photograph of herself as a 13-year-old. In the picture, child Eva (Sundance prizewinner Rosa Marchant) is grinning a lopsided, optimistic tomboy grin, unaware of the violent end of innocence lying in wait for her. The space between these two Evas — a vast gulf not just temporal but scarringly psychological — is territory painstakingly mapped out by Baetens, whose grip on the tone of gathering dread is sure, until it becomes suffocating. As the story pivots back and forth between its two timelines, as though hoping one will hold the key to the other’s release, it grows oppressive, as hard to witness as a cornered bird battering itself helplessly against one window, then the next.

Eva is a shy photographer’s assistant,...

The feature film debut from actress Veerle Baetens, When It Melts follows Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne) as she returns to her hometown for a childhood friend’s funeral with an ice block stashed in the back of her car. As the bitter winter rages on (and the ice block slowly begins to shrink) Eva recalls via flashback a sweltering summer from her adolescence that forever altered her life and identity. Cinematographer Frederic Van Zandycke discusses his previous collaboration with Baetens, working with the young actors of When It Melts and the film’s most emotionally challenging scene to shoot. See all responses […]

The post “From the Beginning I Knew This Film Was About Performance”: Dp Frederic Van Zandycke on When It Melts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The feature film debut from actress Veerle Baetens, When It Melts follows Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne) as she returns to her hometown for a childhood friend’s funeral with an ice block stashed in the back of her car. As the bitter winter rages on (and the ice block slowly begins to shrink) Eva recalls via flashback a sweltering summer from her adolescence that forever altered her life and identity. Cinematographer Frederic Van Zandycke discusses his previous collaboration with Baetens, working with the young actors of When It Melts and the film’s most emotionally challenging scene to shoot. See all responses […]

The post “From the Beginning I Knew This Film Was About Performance”: Dp Frederic Van Zandycke on When It Melts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Actress Veerle Baetens’s feature debut When It Melts, adapted from Lize Spit’s novel The Melting, follows Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne) as she returns to her hometown for a funeral with an ice block packed in the back of her car. While she waits out this frigid winter (and as the ice block slowly shrinks), she recalls a scorching summer during her adolescence that forever altered the course of her life. Editor Thomas Pooters shares his experience cutting Baetens’s film, a process that entailed many Post-it notes and enlightening conversations about gender. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews […]

The post “Post-it Notes Always Are a Huge Help”: Editor Thomas Pooters on When It Melts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Actress Veerle Baetens’s feature debut When It Melts, adapted from Lize Spit’s novel The Melting, follows Eva (Charlotte De Bruyne) as she returns to her hometown for a funeral with an ice block packed in the back of her car. While she waits out this frigid winter (and as the ice block slowly shrinks), she recalls a scorching summer during her adolescence that forever altered the course of her life. Editor Thomas Pooters shares his experience cutting Baetens’s film, a process that entailed many Post-it notes and enlightening conversations about gender. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews […]

The post “Post-it Notes Always Are a Huge Help”: Editor Thomas Pooters on When It Melts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Film will world premiere in Berlin’s Encounters selection.

Paris-based sales company The Party has acquired world rights for Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography ahead of its world premiere in Berlin’s Encounters selection, and has unveiled the first trailer (watch above).

Writer, philosopher and curator Preciado’s film blurs the lines between reality and fiction with a personal interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography a century after its publication. The director concludes that the book’s character has become real, and that the world is becoming increasingly Orlando-esque. He held a viral street...

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival, the festival’s first in-person competition since 2020, has revealed its award winners.

The big winners included Maryam Keshavarz‘s The Persian Version, which earned both the Audience Award and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, and A.V. Rockwell‘s A Thousand and One, which took home the Grand Jury Prize in the same category.

The Persian Version explores an Iranian-American family’s past as its patriarch gets a heart transplant while A Thousand and One centers around a mother who kidnaps her son from the foster care system in order to find a path toward redemption.

Other winners include Festival Favorite Radical directed by Christopher Zalla and Grand Jury Prize winner for U.S. Documentary, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.

The festival has highlighted 101 different features and 64 shorts. These films were selected from a total of 15,856 submissions. Most of...

Vengeance on a Wet Afternoon: Baetens Prepares a Fatal Reckoning in Grim Debut

Home is most certainly not where the heart is in When It Melts, the directorial debut of Belgian actor Veerle Baetens, adapted from the celebrated novel by Lize Spit. Baetens has long been a recognizable force in Belgian cinema over the past two decades, appearing in slick genre fare, like Erick Van Looy’s Loft (2008), Robin Pront’s The Ardennes (read review) and Oliver Masset-Depasse’s Mothers’ Instinct (2018), while most renowned for Felix Van Groeningen’s searing 2013 drama The Broken Circle Breakdown (read review). She’s chosen a troubling, and perhaps somewhat familiar approach in this trauma induced thriller, which features a disturbed, complex characterization deftly performed by two actors portraying the central character.…...

Festival runs through January 29.

A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand And One took the 2023 Sundance U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic prize and Charlotte Regan’s UK entry Scrapper earned the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2023 Sundance awards ceremony on Friday.

Audience award winners included Maryam Keshavarz’s The Persian Version in U.S. Dramatic Competition, Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia in U.S. Documentary, Mstylav Chernov’s 20 Days In Mariupol in World Cinema Documentary, and Noora Niasari’s Shayda in World Cinema Dramatic.

Sundance Institute CEO Joana Vicente said the selection “demonstrated a sense of...

A Thousand and One took the jury prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, with Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project taking the top prize in the U.S. Documentary Competition section.

A Thousand and One is directed by A.V. Rockwell and follows a mother who kidnaps her six-year-old son Terry from the foster care system, a secret that threatens their way of life as Terry gets older. The Focus Features title stars Teyana Taylor, Josiah Cross and Will Catlett.

“When I was writing this film, I was thinking about mother and son relationships. I was thinking about Black women and Black men relationships. I was thinking about marginalized people and their relationship to their homes,” said Rockwell, accepting the award. “Thank you to everyone for seeing all of those groups and for seeing me.” A tearful Jeremy O. Harris, who was a part of the dramatic jury,...

A Thousand and OneU.S. – DRAMATICGrand Jury PrizeA Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell)Directing PrizeSing J. Lee (The Accidental Getaway Driver)Audience Award The Persian Version (Maryam Keshavarz)Special Jury Award: ActingLio Mehiel (Mutt)Special Jury Award: Creative VisionMagazine Dreams (Elijah Bynum)Special Jury Award: Ensemble CastTheater Camp (Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman)Waldo Salt Screenwriting AwardMaryam Keshavarz (The Persian Version)

Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project U.S. – DOCUMENTARYGrand Jury Prize Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (Joe Brewster, Michèle Stephenson)Directing Prize Luke Lorentzen (A Still Small Voice) Audience Award Beyond Utopia (Madeleine Gavin)Jonathan Oppenheim Editing AwardDaniela I. Quiroz (Going Varsity in Mariachi)Special Jury Award for Freedom of ExpressionBad Press (Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, Joe Peeler)Special Jury Award: Clarity of VisionThe Stroll (Kristen Lovell, Zackary Drucker)

ScrapperWORLD Cinema – DRAMATICGrand Jury Prize Scrapper (Charlotte Regan)Directing Prize Marija Kavtaradze (Slow)Audience AwardShayda (Noora Niasari)Special Jury...

Back in Park City, Utah, for the first time since 2020, the Sundance Film Festival concluded with an in-person awards show. The U.S. dramatic grand jury prize went to the Focus Features release “A Thousand and One,” from debut writer-director A.V. Rockwell, one of eight women in this year’s female-led competition.

Jeremy O. Harris, a member of the three-person U.S. dramatic jury at Sundance, choked back tears as he presented the award to Rockwell, admitting that he left the director’s premiere screening and cried on the street, as the film unearthed “all the feelings I’ve learned to mask in public spaces.”

Rockwell’s film is set in an unforgiving New York City in the late ’90s, where a single mother moving from shelter to shelter kidnaps her 6-year-old son from foster care. As they improbably forge a life and bond, their darkest secret threatens to disrupt what they’ve built.

As the first in-person Sundance Film Festival since 2020 draws to a close, it’s time to see which films are taking home the festival’s most coveted awards. While there are many ways to measure success at Sundance — and many filmmakers are certainly more interested in a big sale than a trophy — the awards are nevertheless an important way of measuring which films resonated with the Park City crowd.

Friday’s award ceremony is the culmination of what has already been a very eventful festival. Despite the multitude of changes that the independent film world and the streaming industry are currently undergoing, this year’s festival still featured its share of buzzy premieres and splashy acquisitions. One of the most talked about movies in Park City has been Chloe Domont’s erotic thriller “Fair Play,” which sold to Netflix for a reported price of 20 million. The festival also featured some...

Best known for playing a bluegrass-singing mother with an ill daughter in the Oscar-nominated “The Broken Circle Breakdown” and a relentless cop on the television show “Code 37,” actress Veerle Baetens donned a director’s cap for her feature debut “When it Melts.”

Based on Lize Spit’s novel “The Melting,” the film premiered in this year’s Sundance World Feature Competition. The actress-turned director and Rosa Marchant — who plays the film’s protagonist in her childhood years — joined Sharon Waxman to discuss the picture’s unflinching, uncompromising look at the lingering impact of childhood trauma with TheWrap’s Portrait and Video Studio at The Music Lodge.

Explaining the film’s cryptic title, Baetens argued it’s about how the protagonist isolates herself after a childhood incident, and how such trauma makes her a frozen person. “It’s a beautiful metaphor for people who have experienced trauma to be in a frozen state of mind,...