FREE STREAMING Freely, the new free streaming service backed by Britain’s public service broadcasters (PSBs) that delivers live TV over broadband, has launched. The initiative is from Everyone TV, the organization which runs free TV in the U.K. and is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Paramount Global’s Channel 5. Announced last year, the...

Berlin-based sales agency Picture Tree Intl. has acquired the supernatural crime thriller “The Osha Rule,” and will start seeking distribution partner at the Cannes Film Market. The film will start principal photography in August 2024. “The Osha Rule” blends crime with supernatural horror and revolves around a young Latino gang member forced into a...

“Joyguru,” a fictionalized account of the life of Indian mystic artist and music icon Parvathy Baul, will launch sales at the upcoming Cannes Film Market. Parvathy Baul is a leading exponent of the syncretic Baul minstrel music tradition that is hugely popular and culturally influential across eastern India and Bangladesh. Written and directed by actor-turned-filmmaker...

A distinctive, dynamic R&B vocalist who seemed on the verge of major stardom through the 1960s, Jackie Shane disappeared soon after — so completely that many fans and former associates assumed her dead. It was a riddle rendered all the more mysterious by her singular status within that field as a more-or-less “out” transperson, her […]

“Daughter of Genghis” has been billed as a portrait of a nationalist gang leader at this year’s Hot Docs Film Festival. And while it follows Gerel Byamba, the leader of an entirely-female, ultra-nationalist Mongolian group called Gerel Khas, it is also a surprisingly poignant documentary portrait of a widow and her orphaned son trying to […]

A film that pivots around a court case about its own making, buried treasure documentary “A Band of Dreamers and a Judge” features hints of allure that eventually wane. Shot in Iran, where unauthorized excavations remain illegal, Hesam Eslami’s chronicle of a group of treasure hunters is an occasionally intense process piece that often loses […]