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As awards season heats up, From Ground Zero, Palestine’s Oscar entry that’s on the short list for Best International Feature, debuts at about 70 AMC locations in top 20 markets and select arthouses including the Quad in New York and Laemmle Royal in LA.
The documentary from Watermelon Pictures is a series of 22 video diaries by Palestinian filmmakers commissioned and assembled by Gaza native Rashid Masharawi that show what it’s like on the ground in Gaza trying to survive and keep families safe, fed and sheltered amid Israeli bombardments. Mostly shying away from politics, it’s a view of life in hellish conditions that also finds hope in small moments of normalcy. Filmmaker Masharawi, who currently lives in France, set up a fund to produce the doc.
Watermelon Pictures and parent MPI Media took a risk opening soon after Oscar shortlists were unveiled not knowing if it would be included. Oscar voting starts next week.
The market is crowded with studio and indie fare but AMC has abundant screens and is open to working with smaller films if there’s flexibility around the number of showings. Justin DiPietro, the longtime distribution executive who joined MPI last summer as EVP, is overseeing the launch. Opening weekend locations are in New York, LA and communities with large Palestinian populations like Chicago and Detroit. The film played TIFF and Palm Springs among other fests.
From Ground Zero is at 93% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes (13 reviews).
Also new in theaters, horror-thriller The Damned from Vertical – the feature directorial debut of Thordur Palsson (The Valhalla Murders) – opens on 732 screens. Stars Odessa Young (Mothering Sunday, The Staircase) as Eve, a 19th-century widow who faces an impossible choice when a ship sinks off the coast of her isolated Icelandic fishing outpost during an especially cruel winter. With provisions running low, Eva and her close-knit community must choose between rescuing the shipwrecked crew or prioritizing their own survival. Facing the consequences of their decision and tormented by guilt, the inhabitants wrestle with a mounting sense of dread and begin to believe they are all being punished for their choices.
Also stars Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders, A Small Light), Turlough Convery (Killing Eve, Belfast), Lewis Gribben (Somewhere Boy, Generation Z), Francis McGee (KIN, The Tourist), Mícheál Óg Lane (The Guard, Calvary). With Rory McCann (Game of Thrones, Slow West) and Siobhan Finneran (Happy Valley, The Stranger).
Vertical acquitted the film in advance of its Tribeca 2024 world premiere. Playing major circuits with LA locations including AMC Grove, Regal Sherman Oaks (former Arclight), Regal LA Live and AMC Burbank. In NYC, it’s at the AMC Empire, AMC Kips’s Bay, AMC 34th Street, Regal Union Square and Regal Battery Park. It’sat 84% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes (31 reviews).
The new entrants join Oscar hopeful indies from A Complete Unknown to Nosferatu and Babygirl to The Brutalist and smaller films like Los Frikis, Vermiglio, Santosh and more still in theaters.
AI on your mind? NYC’s Film Forum is starting a three-week retrospective of futuristic fare with lots of robots and HAL called’ From Metropolis to Ex Machina … or How the Movies Have Been Warning Us for Nearly 100 Years’. Runs today through Jan. 23. Programmed by Film Forum Repertory Artistic Director Bruce Goldstein, who said he’d been inundated by AI ads. “These commercials are everywhere. You can’t avoid them,” he tells Deadline.
“I don’t really know much about AI. All I know is that the propaganda about it has been intensifying over the last two years,” he said, joking (sort of) that it’s “to the point where you think that AI is creating it. I really believe that AI is creating how great it’s going to be for all of us.”
This is a festival of 30 movies that helped introduce the world to the concept of artificial intelligence, some well before the term was first coined in the 1950s, he said, starting with Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis, which broke new ground in science fiction storytelling with the creation of Maria, a robot designed to look human and control the workers in an underground city.
Gort, a massive robot that serves as enforcer for an alien peace mission in Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), provided an early example of a machine with a higher purpose. Five years later, Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet defined what a robot looked like for generations. Lovable movie robots include Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, R2D2 in the Star Wars movies, and Wall-E in the Pixar film. The “Emerac” computer in the Tracy-Hepburn comedy Desk Set is also less malevolent, merely threatening to take jobs away from humans – probably the first film to raise that possibility.
Goldstein said he’d originally thought about calling the festival “’Artificial Intelligence, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To love AI’, after the subtitle of Doctor Strangelove [How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb]. But then I realized that is not the message these movies have been promoting over the years. The message is the malevolence of AI for the most part. In fact, it’s always surprising when the AI is not malevolent.”
The 1964 Stanley Kubrick was followed four years later by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick would later acquire the rights to Brian Aldiss’ short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long, eventually filmed by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
The 2000s started a cycle of movies, he noted featuring sentient, anti-human A.I. characters from Colossus: The Forbin Project to Westworld, The Terminator and Blade Runner.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Star Wars 4 – A New Hope (1977) are represented at the fest with The Stepford Wives (1975), Alien (1979), The Matrix (1999), Total Recall (2009), Her (2013) and more.
