After Disco Boy [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Giacomo Abbruzzese
scheda film] in 2023, French international sales company Charades (launched in 2017) will have one of its titles competing in the Berlinale for the second time in the firm’s history. In keeping with the Paris-based outfit’s proven knack for unearthing talent, the film in question is another debut feature, but an animated work on this occasion, entitled A New Dawn [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film] by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya and co-produced by Japan (Asmik Ace) and France (via Emmanuel-Alain Raynal and Pierre Baussaron on behalf of Miyu Productions, who turned heads with Chicken for Linda! [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], Dandelion’s Odyssey [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Momoko Seto
scheda film], and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Pierre Földes
scheda film], among other works). The film centres on young Keitaro who lives in an abandoned factory once surrounded by a lush forest but now redeveloped with solar panels. His wish, before the factory is demolished, is to set off his late father’s fireworks with his brother and his friend in order to turn the page…

Unspooling within the 76th Berlinale, the European Film Market (12 - 18 February) will also see the team comprising Yohann Comte, Carole Baraton and Pierre Mazars banking on another Japanese title in post-production: Kokurojo: The Samurai and The Prisoner by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

The jam-packed post-production film slate similarly boasts the Italian-Belgian animated film I’m Still Alive by writer Roberto Saviano and Ivan Cappiello (read our interview with producer Carlo Stella) and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning by British director Clio Barnard (Ali & Ava [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Clio Barnard
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intervista: Clio Barnard
intervista: Clio Barnard
scheda film]), which centres on four childhood friends entering their thirties (Anthony Boyle, Joe Cole, Jay Lycurgo and Daryl McCormack) as the future they imagined slowly slips away from them.

Likewise in post-production, we’ll find Swedish thriller Bloodsuckers by Elin Grönblom (produced by Mylla Films and Nonstop Entertainment) and a handful of enticing French titles with their sights set on the Croisette, namely Between Now and Then by Mikhael Hers (read our article – starring Alba Rohrwacher, Bastien Bouillon and Jonathan Pryce), La Chaleur by Stéphane Demoustier (article) and A Place to Heal by Cédric Kahn. Further announcements are being kept under wraps in order to stoke the fires of this year’s EFM where Charades is determined to make sparks fly.

Also worth noting are market premieres for The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Louis Paxton (which has just won the NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance) and for the Japanese animated feature The Keeper of the Camphor Tree by Tomohiko Ito. Comédie Française by Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau, which opened the Unifrance Meetings in Paris in January, is likewise set for a market screening.