International insider: The back of Berlin; Get “Tees” from Netflix Slate; recharge scheme and studio control provisions; The BBC’s “Grenfell” drama

Hello and welcome back to your weekly international insider. Berlin is back and with most of our team based in the German capital, it’s Jesse Whittock bringing you the latest news from the world of TV and film.

Berlin sensation

“I’m shaking a little”: Straight to Zac Ntim with this entry from the first night of Germany’s best film festival: Kristen Stewart, Sean Penn and Anne Hathaway were among the big names who attended the opening of the 73rd Berlin Film Festival on Thursday evening. This year marks the festival’s full return from the pandemic and celebrations began early Thursday morning when the festival jury, led by Kristen Stewart, was presented to the press. “In all fairness, I’m shaking a little bit,” Stewart said when asked about her duties as a first press judge. She was accompanied by co-judges Golshifteh
Farahani, Valeska Grisebach, Radu Jude, Francine Maisler, Carla Simon and Johnnie To. The evening’s opening film was the latest film by American filmmaker Rebecca Miller, she came to mewith Peter Dinklage, Hathaway and Marisa Tomei all walking the festival’s red carpet.

Difficult situation: However, the process was briefly interrupted when a few climate activists arrived to stick themselves to the carpet in front of the Berlin Palace. Student activist group The Last Generation said they were behind the protest, according to Reuters. Our Melanie Goodfellow took a photo of the protest here. A protest also took place on the red carpet, led by Iranian actresses Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Melika Foroutan and Jasmin Tabatabai, who held up banners reading “Women Life Freedom”. This political spirit continued throughout the evening as guests at the Zoo Palace were virtually welcomed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The politician delivered a powerful live video message to those in attendance, urging the filmmakers to “not stay silent” in response to looming global politics a year after Russia invaded his country. Zelenskyy, who has made several video appearances at prominent film events such as Cannes and Venice, received a standing ovation from festival audiences. After Zelenskyj’s message, the festival opened with Millers she came to me, a contemporary rom-com that Deadline’s Stephanie Bunbury described as “light but sharp.” “This is a perfect opening film,” she wrote.

What’s going on?: There was no shortage of big deals struck at Berlin’s EFM Industrial Market this week – check out some of them in our Essentials section below. Deadline published stories of the biggest package deals, acquisitions, launches and casting calls, including a groundbreaking film about celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, the latest action film from Kiefer Sutherland and the vivid action survival pic from Zoe Saldaña and AGBO the bluff. Read them all here and we have all the other news, reviews and press reactions here. Berlin runs from February 16 to 26.

“Tees” has been pulled over on Netflix slate

Banerjee is stunned: Liz Shackleton had an interesting scoop on Tuesday when she revealed that Netflix India has no plans to release Dibakar Banerjee’s cross-generational social drama discount. Originally announced in 2019 as Freedom, discount focuses on a middle-class family in three time periods struggling with social unrest, housing problems and a dystopian future. It was in limbo for months before Netflix finally confirmed that it would not be showing the film. The streamer has agreed to let director Banerjee sell it elsewhere, but won’t allow him to screen it in Rotterdam this year, creating a chicken-and-egg situation in which he can’t reach interested buyers. Netflix India has not commented on why the film was pulled, and some murmur that it doesn’t fit the current management team’s content strategy, but a bewildered Banerjee believes an increasingly hostile political environment for creatives in India in question here. He compared the situation to that of tandem, the 2021 Hindi-language Prime Video series that angered officials so much that criminal cases were filed against the cast and crew. The charges were dropped when drivers agreed to help with an investigation. Streaming platforms are subject to self-censorship in India under the guidelines of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Read more here.

Restart your engine – if you can

“Screaming in the Vacuum”: When then UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled the £500m program to restart film and television production in the summer of 2020, the industry cheered. The cameras didn’t roll for months, in part because private insurers refused to cover damage caused by Covid. The scheme promised to step in and do it. But more than two years later, Diana and Max revealed at an inquest on Tuesday that all is not as it seems. Producers adhering to protocol are waiting months for their claims to be settled (one describes the feeling as “shouting into a vacuum”), which has forced them to throw off their entire production costs, while some of a process which moves at a snail’s pace was roundly rejected. Meanwhile, the system is currently running with a surplus of liquidity and has incredibly taken in more premiums than it has paid out. Add to that a mysterious missing £6 million that has not been accounted for by the UK government at the time of writing, and you get a fuller picture of how things played out with this self-government success story. Grab a cup of tea and read on.

Crisis time for UK studios

Stressful issue: After trying to sell privately owned Channel 4 and making the BBC’s production a permanent target in recent years, Britain’s Conservative government has not exactly loved the British production community. Our investigation into the restart scheme’s mess revealed more issues, and Jake followed that report with another disturbing development. Production sites such as Pinewood and Twickenham face a so-called “studio tax” after the Valuation Office Agency, an ominous-sounding government agency, recreated studios’ “rateable values” – essentially an estimate of how much the sites would charge if they be on the open market. The higher the rateable value, the higher the tax, as Jake put it nicely. Pinewood’s rates will rise from around £4 million ($4.8 million) to more than £16 million ($19.1 million), while Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden will see a fivefold increase to £25.3 million (30.2 million US dollars). When you consider that production in the UK has exploded, with investment from players topping almost £5.5 billion ($6.5 billion) by 2022, you can understand why studio bosses wonder why civil servants look like an industry that the excellent recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The VOA claims that investment in streaming services and the attractiveness of UK manufacturing has led to a rise in rental values, noting that it is “consulting with industry officials on the valuations”.

The BBC’s “Grenfell” drama

Sensitive approach: The BBC has recently shown a tendency to tackle difficult issues through scripts (see Jimmy Savile biopic The exam) and the strategy was accelerated this week with the announcement of a Grenfell Tower drama written by BAFTA winner Peter Kosminsky. Grenfell will “shed light on the human stories of those involved in the tragedy” that left 72 people dead after a tower block in west London burned down in 2017. As a landmark public inquiry into how Grenfell happened has yet to be reported, the announcement has received mixed reactions. While Kosminsky, the BBC and producer The Forge stress that an in-depth investigative process has taken five years so far and will continue, we understand that a campaign group was caught off guard by the press release and that several Grenfell residents have since contacted the group . about their dissatisfaction to communicate. Any factual drama about a tragedy that remains so raw in the collective public needs to be handled with the utmost sensitivity, and the BBC will no doubt be aware of that. But don’t expect to watch Grenfell soon Max revealed yesterday that Kosminsky is waiting for the results of the study to be published before he can even start writing, and it will probably be a few more years before they hit the big screen.

The most necessary

🌶️ Hot: Richard Ayoade directs and stars The Simplica Girl Diaries. Big-name stars look set to join the picture.

🌶️ Other: Oscar nominee Whit Stillman is working on a European rom-com adventure series The beautiful affinitiesto the Earl of Max.

🔥 More fire: Andrew reveals Blinded by the light‘s Viviek Kalra co-stars with Samantha Ruth Prabhu in the cross-cultural rom-com Chennai history.

🔥 fire baby fire: Rupert Friend and Evanna Lynch star in James Joyce James and Lucia.

🤞 Another happy thing: Anna Maxwell-Martin and Shaun Evans star in ITV crime drama Delia Balmer (working title). Jake with it.

⬆️ increase: Alice Damiani, who will be head of film sales at Newen Connect, revealed Mel.

🗣️Interview: More news from Newen as we introduced Rodolphe Buet at EFM.

🏪 Close shop: As I reported yesterday, this is the unscripted UK arm of Paramount Global.

🛑 Near: In a bad week for British Unscripted, Youngest Media was also quiet.

⚽ Work: DAZN has completed the acquisition of sports streaming competitor Eleven Group and Team Whistle.

🇨🇳 “Essential investment”: The BBC defended the creation of glossy ads for Chinese companies and state media following Jake’s investigation in December.

Zac Ntim and Max Goldbart contributed to this week’s Insider