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A new Star Wars fan film called Alone has been released on YouTube, and after watching it, you’ll never look at Ewoks in the same way again. Although there are already a ton of Star Wars fan films on YouTube, […]

The post Watch An Ewok Eat A Stormtrooper in Disturbing New Fan Film Star Wars: Alone appeared first on Dread Central.

The most defining and far-reaching decision made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her 15 years in office is the focus of a new film making its debut at Berlin’s European Film Market.

“Merkel — Anatomy of a Crisis,” directed by Stephen Wagner, stars Imogen Kogge as the German leader during the dramatic days leading up to her decision in 2015 to allow nearly a million refugees, mostly from war-torn Syria, to enter Germany.

“We can consider this the most important political weeks of Angela Merkel’s life as chancellor,” says Alexander van Dülmen, who produced the film with Wagner via their Potsdam-based company Carte Blanche International.

Penned by Florian Oeller, “Merkel” is based on journalist Robin Alexander’s 2017 bestselling book “The Driven Ones” (“Die Getriebenen”) and examines the political wrangling among Merkel’s cabinet members and European actors like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as they struggle to deal with a...

Stefan Ruzowitzky, director of the Oscar-winning “The Counterfeiters,” and “The Grudge” screenwriter Stephen Susco have boarded “Alone,” a remake of the 2007 supernatural Thai thriller by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom.

The new film follows conjoined twin sisters from an Asian family in Boston whose loving relationship is tested when one of them befriends a boy, leading to her demand for a surgical separation from her sibling. During the operation, the forsaken sister dies. Years later, the deceased girl’s vengeful ghost returns to haunt her twin.

Former 20th Century Fox exec Paul Higginson and Alexander van Dülmen and Stephan Wagner of Berlin-based Carte Blanche Intl. are producing the film. Budgeted at between $5 million and $10 million, “Alone” is set for a targeted 2021 Stateside shoot on the East Coast as a U.S.-European co-production.

Van Dülmen said he was a big fan of the original film and also acquired distribution rights...

Netflix has picked up an untitled docuseries starring tennis star Naomi Osaka, from Uninterrupted and Film 45.

The coming-of-age docuseries follows the two-time Grand Slam champion, who became the first Asian player to reach the number 1 singles ranking after winning her first Grand Slam at the U.S. Open in 2018 and second at the Australian Open in 2019.

Featuring unprecedented access to Osaka, the documentary will cover her pivotal year, from the U.S. Open in August 2019 and on tour as she plays in each of the Grand Slams and prepares for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

With a Japanese mother and a Haitian father, Osaka emigrated from Japan to the U.S. as a child. Spending time with her during a hectic training and travel schedule, the crew explores the immense pressure she’s under, her journey of self-discovery, and off-season time, digging into her interests and her well-known, quirky and honest personality.

“Pictures are for entertainment — messages should be delivered by Western Union.” The line has been variously attributed to half a dozen old-school Hollywood producers, from Samuel Goldwyn to Frank Capra, but no matter who said it, the sentiment captures how classic studio types endeavored to separate political statements from popular cinema. In recent years, however, pundits have been pressuring the Academy to do just the opposite — to become more activist through its awards — and rather than actually changing, the organization seems to have realized that the documentary shorts category is the easiest way to take a stand, typically awarding important messages over exceptional moviemaking. Sometimes the two coincide. , although it’s unlikely that anyone would mistake them for entertainment.

Certainly, the folks at Netflix don’t have any such illusions about John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson’s wrenching kids-in-peril short “Life Overtakes Me,” whereas the film’s “Oscar-worthiness” was almost...

Sixty years. That’s how long a Louisiana judge sentenced Rob Richardson to serve for armed bank robbery. Garrett Bradley covers more than a third of that term in “Time,” and the cumulative impact — boiled down into an open-minded and deeply empathetic 81 minutes — will almost certainly rewire how Americans think about the prison-industrial complex.

Bradley interweaves the day-to-day struggle of Rob’s seemingly tireless wife Fox Rich in the present with nearly two decades of home movies that Rich recorded over the span of her husband’s incarceration. The videos were the last ingredient to fall into place (Rich entrusted them to Bradley only after principal shooting had wrapped), but they’re incorporated beautifully and absolutely define the unconventionally structured result, which earned Bradley the best director prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

No one is arguing for Richardson’s innocence — Fox pleaded guilty, too, and served more than three...

As audiences embrace documentaries for their gripping and bingeable truths, another trend has developed in parallel: Oscar-winning documentary directors who launch studios devoted to producing multiple high-quality nonfiction works. There’s Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Prods., Morgan Neville’s Tremolo Prods., and now there’s Concordia Studio, launched by Davis Guggenheim (“Waiting For ‘Superman'”) with Jonathan King (and backing from Laurene Powell Jobs’ social impact-focused Emerson Collective).

However, filmmakers who have worked with Concordia say the company is unique: Its principals have such faith in directors’ vision, skill, and instincts that they will back riskier documentaries that can’t promise what the movie will be when they’re done.

“We said, ‘Look, we’ve got these great kids but we don’t know what’s going to happen in this one-week experience,’” said Jesse Moss (“The Overnighters”) who co-directed “Boys State” with Amanda McBaine. Their documentary focused on three...