The 4th selection committee of 2023 organised by Arte France Cinéma (steered by Olivier Père) has pledged to commit to co-producing and pre-purchasing four projects. Standing tall amongst these is Out Of This World, which will be the 9th feature film by Spanish director Albert Serra. The production brings together French firms Idéale Audience Group and Films du Losange with Latvia’s Forma Pro, Germany’s Pandora, Spain’s Andergraun Films and Portugal’s Rosa Filmes, and will be shot in Latvia.
Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov, whose latest feature, “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” premiered last week at the Cannes Film Festival, has lined up a star-studded cast for his first French-language film, “Après,” which is currently in production.
‘Out of This World’ is being represented internationally by Losange Films which is starting sales at Cannes Film Market.
Riley Keough has joined the cast of “Out of This World” directed by Albert Serra, the Spanish director whose 2022 film “Pacifiction” competed at Cannes and won a pair of Cesar Awards. Keough will star opposite F. Murray Abraham and Liza Yankovskaia (“Frau”).
“Minotaur,” the next film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, the two-time Oscar-nominated Russian filmmaker of “Loveless” and “Leviathan.”
“Minotaur,” with a plot that remains under wraps, is being described as a “powerful drama exploring the emotional and moral collapse of a businessman under the strain of personal and political crises.”
“I know that history is like this: Sometimes, people are dying in wars and the people who started the war have no responsibility,” the director tells Variety. “They just become the heroes of their nations.”
“Disappearance” nevertheless paints a damning portrait of Mengele in his final years, as he grows increasingly paranoid, rambling and delusional — an interpretation, the director admits, that is partly an effort to deliver a dose of poetic justice to a war criminal who was never tried for his crimes.
There’s a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart’s accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you. Adapted from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is challenging material, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse followed by years of vanishing — into addiction, sexual experimentation and self-destruction before the author found her voice by channeling her pain into writing.
Imogen Poots seizes the screen as Lidia Yuknavitch, who embraces swimming and sex and drugs and anger, all to make herself whole.
I’m always up for a movie directed by an actor I love. Often, that actor will turn out be good at directing other actors, and building a serviceable movie around that, and that’s about it. Yet there’s still an adventure involved when you feel like you really know an actor. I went into “The Chronology of Water,” the first movie directed by Kristen Stewart, with a heightened curiosity and a heightened hope. I’ve long felt that she’s a great actor and a great star. What would she reveal as a filmmaker?
https://variety.com/2025/film/reviews/the-chronology-of-water-review-kristen-stewart-1236400138/
Hollywood’s go-to Latvian production servicer Forma Pro Films, producer of Kristen Stewart’s Un Certain Regard entry “The Chronology of Water” – alongside Stewart’s Nevermind Pictures, the U.K.’s Scott Free and France’s CG Cinema – is upping its game in the Euro co-production space.
https://variety.com/2025/film/global/latvia-hollywood-forma-pro-films-euro-co-pros-1236399196/
With it being eight years since his last feature Loveless, we’ve long been awaiting the return of Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev. After recovering from a brutal bout with COVID-19, a few years ago it was announced he would return with Jupiter, which was to tell the story of a Russian oligarch’s reckoning with the harsh reality of his family’s future. That project has now been put on the back burner as a new feature has been unveiled today.
Zvyagintsev will next direct Minotaur, according to a new report from Arte France Cinéma (via IONCINEMA). Co-written by the director and Simon Liashenko, the film will follow Gleb, “a Russian company director about to fire his employees” and “who discovers that his wife is having an affair.”
With production set to kick off this September in Riga, Latvia, it’s described asan “intimate drama, shot in exile, [that] is anchored in the context of contemporary Russia, and asserts itself as a political fable somewhere between a crime thriller and a classic tragedy.”
Backed byMK Productions (France), CG Cinéma (France), Forma Pro Films (Latvia), and Razor Film Produktion (Germany) casting is currently underway and we’d expect a 2026 festival premiere.
