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Exclusive: German drama series I Am Scrooge has landed homes in North America, Europe and Australia ahead of its world premiere at Seriencamp in Cologne this week.

Beta Film has sold the Rtl miniseries, which is from the German producer-distributor’s subsidiary Zeitsprung Pictures, to Mhz in the U.S. and Canada, Sbs in Australia, Dr in Denmark, Tet in Latvia and Rtl in Hungary. Launching on Rtl+ in Germany later this year, it will open Seriencamp tomorrow (June 5).

I Am Scrooge is set in West Berlin in 1988, following Arno Funke, a man operating under the alias ‘Scrooge McDuck’ who becomes the center of one of the most spectacular extortion cases in German criminal history. Funke, a failing artist, uses his talent to build bombs in his kitchen, detonating them overnight at high-end department stories as leverage for extortion. Detectives are soon on the cases, as Funke bags more than...

Germany’s impressive crop of crime drama, mystery, suspense, apocalyptic catastrophe, royal intrigue and tales of the supernatural is certain to attract buyers at this year’s MipTV in Cannes.

The selections of series, TV movies and unscripted shows offer a wide range of content but also remain heavy on crime — a favorite German genre.

Among the new offerings is Beta Film’s fact-based title “I am Scrooge.” Produced by Zeitsprung Pictures, the Cologne-based company behind the hit Netflix spy thriller “Kleo,” “I am Scrooge” chronicles the true story of Arno Funke, a frustrated artist who found fame as a bombmaking extortionist in the early 1990s.

Identifying himself as Dagobert Duck — the German name for the Disney character Scrooge McDuck — Funke targeted some of Germany’s biggest department stores, beginning with Berlin’s KaDeWe in 1988, while continually outwitting police and even becoming a local folk hero. The six-part series stars Friedrich Mücke,...

Kosovo has selected Visar Morina’s “Exil” as its official entry in the International Feature Film category of the 93rd Academy Awards, while Georgia has chosen Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “Beginning.” It follows submissions by Bhutan, Taiwan, Ukraine, Bosnia, Ivory Coast, Luxembourg, Poland and Switzerland.

“Exil” had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition and also screened at the Berlinale as part of the Panorama section. The film won the Heart of Sarajevo, the top prize of Sarajevo Film Festival.

The film centers on Xhafer (played by Misel Maticevic), a Kosovan expat in Germany, who finds himself the subject of relentless xenophobic bullying. Sandra Hüller, the star of “Toni Erdmann,” plays his German wife, who slowly distances herself from what she perceives as his paranoia.

In his review for Variety, Guy Lodge describes the film as “painfully exact in dramatizing the quiet xenophobia (Xhafer) experiences on a daily basis,...

After being forced to pivot entirely online last-minute due to a Covid spike, Bosnia’s Sarajevo Film Festival is coming to a close and has unveiled its prize winners for this year’s edition.

A jury chaired by Michel Hazanavicius and featuring Berlinale director Carlo Chatrian, actress Jadranka Đokić, director Srdan Golubović and the Morelia Film Festival’s Andrea Stavenhagen, awarded the festival’s top prize, the Heart of Sarajevo, to Visar Morina’s Exile. The pic stars Misel Maticevic and Sandra Huller in the story of a chemical engineer of foreign origin who plunges into an identity crisis. It debuted at Sundance this year.

The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Director went to Ru Hasanov for The Island Within, while Best Actress went to Marija Škaričić for Mare, and Best Actor went to Vangelis Mourikis for Digger. You can see the list of awards below, as well as the festival’s industry winners.

Ceremony took place remotely, after festival shifted online week before opening.

Psychological thriller Exile has won the best film prize at the 26th Sarajevo Film Festival, which took place online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Scroll down for full list of winners

In a virtual awards ceremony, streamed on the festival’s VoD platform, Kosovo-born writer-director Visar Morina accepted the Heart of Sarajevo prize via a video message after jury president Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) made the announcement from his own home in France. The award includes a prize of €16,000.

Exile, first seen at Sundance and in the Berlinale’s Panorama strand,...

"Where are you from again?" The Match Factory has debuted the first official promo trailer for the indie drama Exile, also titled just Exil. This is a German film produced and made in Germany, but it's directed by a Kosovan filmmaker named Visar Morina. The film just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and is playing at the Berlin Film Festival now, seeking international distribution at the market. The sweltering (literally) drama is about a Kosovan man who now works as a chemical engineer in Germany. He starts to feel discriminated and bullied at work, plunging him into an identity crisis. Starring Misel Maticevic and Sandra Hüller, along with Rainer Bock, Thomas Mraz, Flonja Kodheli, Stephan Grossmann, and Nicole Marischka. It's a complex, fascinating examination of how biased perspectives can warp the truth. Here's the first promo trailer (+ promo poster) for Visar Morina's Exile, direct from Tmf's YouTube:...

In the very first scene of The Social Network, Rooney Mara memorably informs Jesse Eisenberg that he may go through life thinking that girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but “that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” That line rang through my head all through Visar Morina’s Exil, the first time Komplizen Films has brought a world premiere to Sundance, and was finally directly echoed near its end by Sandra Hüller, star of Komplizen co-founder Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, here the long-suffering wife of Albanian immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), who’s spent the whole movie convinced he’s being discriminated […]...

In the very first scene of The Social Network, Rooney Mara memorably informs Jesse Eisenberg that he may go through life thinking that girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but “that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” That line rang through my head all through Visar Morina’s Exil, the first time Komplizen Films has brought a world premiere to Sundance, and was finally directly echoed near its end by Sandra Hüller, star of Komplizen co-founder Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, here the long-suffering wife of Albanian immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), who’s spent the whole movie convinced he’s being discriminated […]...

★★★☆☆ The second film in the German Dreileben trilogy, Dominik Graf's Dreileben 2: Don't Follow Me Around (2011) is a very different creature to Christian Petzold's Beats Being Dead (2011), taking a more straightforward, politically-informed approach to narrative storytelling. Whilst Petzold's effort focused on the lives of Dreileben's youth, Graf's contribution to the project explores the love lives of three affluent middle-class individuals, whilst the hunt for the fugitive sex offender Molesch (Stefan Kurt) continues.

This time around, the focus lies on single mother Johanna (Jeanette Hain), a police psychologist brought in to help in the search for Molesch. Staying with her old university friend and Dreileben resident Vera (Susanne Wolff) and her novelist husband Bruno (Misel Maticevic), their nights soon turn into wine-fuelled reminiscing sessions. It quickly transpires that the two friends were once both infatuated by the same man, and an unconventional love triangle soon re-emerges from the girls' past.

Year: 2010

Director: Thomas Arslan

Writer: Thomas Arslan

IMDb: link

Trailer: Na

Review by: Marina Antunes

Rating: 8 out of 10

From Germany comes yet another film of bad men doing bad things right after they get out of jail however, unlike The Robber (review) Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows works at every turn.

The film opens with Trojan walking out of jail. His first stop: the home of a man who we presume to be the organizer of whatever plan landed Trojan in prison to begin with. After collecting a small portion of the money owed to him and ruffling a few feathers to collect the rest, Trojan sets off to find his next gig. A careful planner, he bails on the first job offered because his accomplices are unreliable rendering the job too risky but he finds what he’s looking for with the help of his lover Dora, a corrupt lawyer.

Above: Yasujiro Shimazu's 1937 film, The Lights of Asakusa.

Arriving for the last few days of this year’s Berlinale, at first I thought my being late to the party was why I didn’t find any new films that blew me away (as opposed to last year’s stellar yield of Everyone Else, By Comparison, Beeswax, and The Milk of Sorrow). But reports of the first week, such as those of fellow Auteurs correspondents, led me to believe that I hadn’t missed that much, what with World on a Wire, a restored 1973 Fassbinder TV miniseries, drumming up the most critical excitement.

Germany’s present-day cinema made a strong showing, with Angela Shanalec’s Orly and Thomas Arslan’s Im Schatten (In the Shadows) drawing raves on this site and elsewhere. I was able to catch up with the Arslan and if anything, it’s an incredibly pleasurable film to watch,...

Above: Yasujiro Shimazu's 1937 film, The Lights of Asakusa.

Arriving for the last few days of this year’s Berlinale, at first I thought my being late to the party was why I didn’t find any new films that blew me away (as opposed to last year’s stellar yield of Everyone Else, By Comparison, Beeswax, and The Milk of Sorrow). But reports of the first week, such as those of fellow Auteurs correspondents, led me to believe that I hadn’t missed that much, what with World on a Wire, a restored 1973 Fassbinder TV miniseries, drumming up the most critical excitement.

Germany’s present-day cinema made a strong showing, with Angela Shanalec’s Orly and Thomas Arslan’s Im Schatten (In the Shadows) drawing raves on this site and elsewhere. I was able to catch up with the Arslan and if anything, it’s an incredibly pleasurable film to watch,...