Los Angeles-based 1844 Entertainment has acquired international sales rights and U.S. distribution for Jorge Cuchí’s 2020 Venice Critics’ Week player, “50 o Dos Ballenas se Encuentran En la Playa” (“50 (or Two Whales Meet on the Beach)”).
“50” stars young actors José Antonio Toledano as Félix and Karla Coronado as Elisa, two 17-year-olds who together embark on the 2016 social media phenomena Blue Whale Challenge together. In the “game,” players are assigned tasks over a 50-day period which start as trivial or innocuous activities, but eventually mutate into self-harm and, at its conclusion, suicide.
“When people decide to commit suicide it is not because they want to put an end to their lives, but because they want to put an end to their sadness,” explained Chuchí of the spark that ingnited his feature debut.
Describing his protagonists, he remembered that Felix and Elisa started as “two kids who came to life inside my...
“50” stars young actors José Antonio Toledano as Félix and Karla Coronado as Elisa, two 17-year-olds who together embark on the 2016 social media phenomena Blue Whale Challenge together. In the “game,” players are assigned tasks over a 50-day period which start as trivial or innocuous activities, but eventually mutate into self-harm and, at its conclusion, suicide.
“When people decide to commit suicide it is not because they want to put an end to their lives, but because they want to put an end to their sadness,” explained Chuchí of the spark that ingnited his feature debut.
Describing his protagonists, he remembered that Felix and Elisa started as “two kids who came to life inside my...
- 7/5/2021
- by Jamie Lang
- Variety Film + TV
Hari Sama’s “This Is Not Berlin” is a memory movie set in the art world and punk scene of Mexico City circa 1986, a world that is packed with visual detail and moments that are trapped in time by the camera.
The film moves very fast and takes in as much of this world as possible for us, offering it up both lovingly and satirically. There are many characters, but somehow what stands out are shots of Tabasco sauce poured on eggs, a cartoon program playing on a television set and smoke drifting in the air from cigarettes.
In one charged and lyrical scene here, best friends Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León) and Gera (José Antonio Toledano) are seen from above smoking cigarettes together, with a paper cup framed in back of them so that we can see the cigarette butts that have been discarded. Their faces are open to the pleasure of the moment,...
The film moves very fast and takes in as much of this world as possible for us, offering it up both lovingly and satirically. There are many characters, but somehow what stands out are shots of Tabasco sauce poured on eggs, a cartoon program playing on a television set and smoke drifting in the air from cigarettes.
In one charged and lyrical scene here, best friends Carlos (Xabiani Ponce de León) and Gera (José Antonio Toledano) are seen from above smoking cigarettes together, with a paper cup framed in back of them so that we can see the cigarette butts that have been discarded. Their faces are open to the pleasure of the moment,...
- 8/8/2019
- by Dan Callahan
- The Wrap
In the midst of Roma mania last awards season, a little film emerged at the Sundance Film Festival, also starring Marina de Tavira as a stalwart single mother: Hari Sama’s This Is Not Berlin. Led by newcomers Xabiani Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano as Carlos and Gera, they play two high schoolers growing up in Mexico City. Bored with his high school’s machismo soccer culture, Carlos joins the small but radical queer and leftist community, participating in public displays of nudity to protest FIFA officials. Gera wants to join but his personality doesn’t click with the group, so the boys grow apart as they stumble through class exploration and settling on their identities. The surprising fate of Sama’s characters makes the viewer reconsider everything they’ve seen. What seems like a natural telos for Carlos and Gera is worth closer examination.
We sat down...
We sat down...
- 7/22/2019
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
"I'm more of a spiritual guide." Samuel Goldwyn Films has debuted an official trailer for an indie film from Mexico titled This Is Not Berlin, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It also won a number of major awards, including a Special Jury Award and Best Cinematography, at the Málaga Spanish Film Festival this year. From Mexican filmmaker Hari Sama, This Is Not Berlin is described as a "thrilling and sexy clash of art, drugs, and punk music". Seventeen-year-old Carlos doesn't fit in anywhere, not in his family nor with the friends he has chosen in school. But everything changes when he is invited to a mythical nightclub where he discovers the underground nightlife scene: punk, sexual liberty and drugs. This stars Xabiani Ponce de León, José Antonio Toledano, Mauro Sanchez Navarro, Klaudia Garcia, Ximena Romo, Américo Hollander, and Marina de Tavira (seen in Roma). Looks vibrant & sincere.
- 6/21/2019
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Announced at the Cannes Film Market, L.A.’s Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired the North America rights to Hari Sama’s semi-autobiographical “This is Not Berlin.”
The deal was negotiated between Samuel Goldwyn Films’ Meg Longo, and Jason Ishikawa and Shane Riley from Cinetic Media on behalf of Madrid’s Latido films, which handles international sales.
Sama co-wrote the film with Rodrigo Ordóñez and Max Zunino, and co-produced with Ale García, Antonio Urdapilleta and Verónica Valadez P.
Having participated at a number of Latin American works in progress events, the film premiered to critical praise in Sundance, where Variety’s Dennis Harvey acknowledged it as “something special.”
Set in the politically contentious Mexico City of 1986, the film follows 17-year-old Carlos through a year of turmoil as he distances himself from his mother and childhood friends whose interests no longer align with his own.
Using his punk front-woman sister and acumen for fixing electronic equipment,...
The deal was negotiated between Samuel Goldwyn Films’ Meg Longo, and Jason Ishikawa and Shane Riley from Cinetic Media on behalf of Madrid’s Latido films, which handles international sales.
Sama co-wrote the film with Rodrigo Ordóñez and Max Zunino, and co-produced with Ale García, Antonio Urdapilleta and Verónica Valadez P.
Having participated at a number of Latin American works in progress events, the film premiered to critical praise in Sundance, where Variety’s Dennis Harvey acknowledged it as “something special.”
Set in the politically contentious Mexico City of 1986, the film follows 17-year-old Carlos through a year of turmoil as he distances himself from his mother and childhood friends whose interests no longer align with his own.
Using his punk front-woman sister and acumen for fixing electronic equipment,...
- 5/18/2019
- by Jamie Lang
- Variety Film + TV
There have been a lot of coming-of-age-in-the-punk-scene movies, not least because indie cinema really took off in the years immediately following the heyday of punk and New Wave, when the kids raised on that music were fresh out of film school. Still, Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.
“This Is Not Berlin” deploys the wisdom of the director’s now-middle-aged perspective to provide what’s not just a portrait of adolescent liberation, but a snapshot of a moment in middle-class Mexican life whose larger sociopolitical context is both present yet mostly kept in the background (as in Alfonso Cuarón’s recent “Roma”). In the foreground is a vivid, often giddy, but also perilous world of hedonism for art’s sake in which the emerging threat of AIDS is seldom openly addressed yet omnipresent. With a coolness factor off the charts,...
“This Is Not Berlin” deploys the wisdom of the director’s now-middle-aged perspective to provide what’s not just a portrait of adolescent liberation, but a snapshot of a moment in middle-class Mexican life whose larger sociopolitical context is both present yet mostly kept in the background (as in Alfonso Cuarón’s recent “Roma”). In the foreground is a vivid, often giddy, but also perilous world of hedonism for art’s sake in which the emerging threat of AIDS is seldom openly addressed yet omnipresent. With a coolness factor off the charts,...
- 2/3/2019
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
It opens in slow motion with teenage bodies wrestling and punching inside chaotic dust swirls, one boy (Xabiani Ponce de León’s Carlos) caught isolated in the middle of the frame. He’s not looking to hit any of the others. In fact he’s barely dodging out of the way when they come too close. It’s almost as though Carlos isn’t even there, his mind and body separated as two halves of the same conflicted whole. He knows he should be present with his friends to show his machismo and do Mexico proud like the soccer team soon to hit the 1986 World Cup pitch, but something is calling him in the distance that he can’t quite see. It’s punk metal versus new wave blues, hetero-normative conformity versus queer counter-culture.
Director Hari Sama’s opening scene to This Is Not Berlin is the perfect prologue for its rebellious themes.
Director Hari Sama’s opening scene to This Is Not Berlin is the perfect prologue for its rebellious themes.
- 1/30/2019
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
Writer-director Hari Sama’s fifth feature, “This is Not Berlin,” is set to world premiere at this month’s Sundance Film Festival. New York-based Cinema Tropical, a leading presenter of Latin American cinema in the U.S., has granted Variety exclusive access to the first trailer for the coming-of-age drama set in 1986 Mexico City.
Sama wrote, directed and his company Catatonia produced the semi-autobiographical feature, which impressed in works in progress sections at Impulso Morelia in October – where it scooped the Cinepolis Distribución Award and a special mention from the Jury – and Ventana Sur’s Copia Final in December.
The film boasts an ensemble cast led by two newcomers Xabiani Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano, along with “Roma” star Marina de Tavira and popular Mexican TV actress Ximena Romo. Sama himself makes an appearance as well.
In the trailer, we see the drug and art-fueled world of political...
Sama wrote, directed and his company Catatonia produced the semi-autobiographical feature, which impressed in works in progress sections at Impulso Morelia in October – where it scooped the Cinepolis Distribución Award and a special mention from the Jury – and Ventana Sur’s Copia Final in December.
The film boasts an ensemble cast led by two newcomers Xabiani Ponce de León and José Antonio Toledano, along with “Roma” star Marina de Tavira and popular Mexican TV actress Ximena Romo. Sama himself makes an appearance as well.
In the trailer, we see the drug and art-fueled world of political...
- 1/21/2019
- by Jamie Lang
- Variety Film + TV
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