Syrian prison documentary The Other Side of the Sun, directed by Tawfik Sabouni, has been selected as Syria’s submission for the best international feature film Oscar at the 99th Academy Awards.

The decision marks the country’s first entry since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Andana Films, which is handling worldwide sales to the film, also unveiled that Icarus Films has acquired U.S. rights to the film.

The international Oscar submission was decided by Syria’s newly formed committee accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), underscoring a new chapter in the country’s participation in the international awards landscape.

“The selection of The Other Side of the Sun comes within a distinctive cinematic and humanitarian context,” the country’s General Organisation for Cinema said. “The film explores the experience of imprisonment in Saydnaya Prison, one of the most prominent detention sites associated with Syria’s recent history and collective memory during the previous decades of rule. It does so through the experience of director Tawfik Sabouni, who was previously imprisoned there, alongside four other survivors of detention.”

For The Other Side of the Sun, which premiered at Berlin, director Sabouni returned to Saydnaya Prison with four fellow survivors to retrace the places and experiences that shaped their years of imprisonment. “Blending testimony with reenactment, the film gives tangible form to memories long confined to silence, capturing the enduring impact of incarceration in ways that spoken accounts alone cannot fully express,” press notes highlight. “As the country reassesses its recent past, cinema is playing an increasingly important role in documenting lived experiences, preserving collective memory, and ensuring that stories once kept from public view can finally be heard.”

Said Sabouni: “I am deeply happy and moved by this selection. This moment is the culmination of years of hard work, years during which I carried this film on my own, despite the doubts, the obstacles and the weight of such a responsibility. To see this project come to fruition today and find its place on such a stage is an immense personal and collective victory.”

He added: “But beyond the artistic journey, the true significance of this selection lies in the voice it gives to those whom others have sought to silence. The stories of the men and women who lost their lives in the prisons of the Assad regime will never be forgotten. Their memory, their suffering and their dignity will be forever etched in our minds and presented to the eyes of the world. It is to them, above all, that this selection belongs.”

Syria has never been nominated for the international Oscar.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will unveil the 15 films on the best international feature film shortlist on Dec. 15. The five nominees will be announced Jan. 21, 2027. The 99th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 14, 2027.

With Clown Panic and The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story, documentary producer Lightbox is leaning into horror for the first time and switching on Frightbox.

Jonathan Chinn and Simon Chinn’s London and LA-based label counts Apple TV’s Twisted Yoga and Ryan Coogler exec-produced Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time for Nat Geo among recent credits and the pair told Deadline why they are getting into horror.

“It’s not a genre that we’ve worked in before, there are real opportunities there,” Jonathan Chinn said. “It’s about how do documentaries crack the horror genre, which is incredibly popular, especially amongst a younger audience. So, for this Halloween season, Lightbox is actually becoming Frightbox.”

The Lightbox logo morphs into Frightbox at the end of Clown Panic and The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story and Frightbox could even become a full-fledged sub-label if the move into horror pays off.

Clowns Cause Panic

Clown Panic was the first Lightbox/Frightbox project to be announced. The Hulu feature doc will play as part of Huluween. It revisits the hysteria caused after a spate of reported clown sightings. Billed as darkly funny and unsettling, it tells the story of the media frenzy and moral panic caused as the story spread.

“It was a story that that was just so weird, but also was very revealing about human psychology and geopolitics,” Jonathan Chinn said. “Basically, it’s the anatomy of a moral panic.

“It happened during the Trump-Clinton election campaign, the North Korea nuclear crisis, during some race riots in the U.S. All these things were happening, and when society starts to freak out, it tends to find a scapegoat. In this case, it was the clowns’ turn.

“It’s quite a delicate needle to thread because there were real-world, and some tragic consequences in the story, but it’s certainly something that wears itself somewhat lightly as a film. It plugs into a kind of comedic horror genre that’s quite popular at the moment.”

Simon Chinn noted that the doc was created from the ground up, rather than being based on pre-existing IP. “There’s no book, there’s no article, it was genuinely built from original research and stitched together,” he said. “It was not an easy film to make in that respect.”

Pet Cemetery

The Pet Cemetery Murders: A Ghost Story starts out as a three-part cold case story about the 1985 murder of Dorothy Lou Thompson, who owned a pet cemetery that was situated on a site that was said to be cursed. Detective John Doran reopens the investigation, following up on old leads and digging into the case files. A witness comes forward with a terrifying tale of Dorothy’s ghost which compels him to come forward with information. Three years later, a second witness claims to be haunted by the murdered woman seeking vengeance.

“Doran becomes increasingly obsessed with the precinct, and starts getting into the history, and discovers that [the cemetery] was the scene of a massacre, and prior to that, of an indigenous burial” Simon Chinn explained. “It becomes, in a way, a story about America’s violent past. The thing starts as this true crime story and becomes something else. It becomes spiritual and paranormal and historical.”

The setting was also fitting for an HBO show. “It all takes place in the bayous of New Orleans, of course it’s got a little True Blood vibe to it,” Jonathan Chinn said.

Documentary Picture

The documentary business is tough and Simon Chinn said Lightbox “definitely felt the market downturn in 2024, and had to slightly regroup and strategize about how we did development.”

With offices in London and LA, Lightbox naturally gravitates towards UK-U.S. coproduction. “We’re always looking for those opportunities because of our position as a UK-U.S. production company, we’re really well positioned to find the stories that the BBC or Sky might want to co-produce with an HBO or a Hulu.”

Having refocused and with moves into new genres such as horror, Lightbox said it has eight projects in various stages of production and new projects for Nat Geo and Netflix among others, including a big-ticket sports series for the streamer.

“We do our best not to do the obvious version of something, and hopefully that’s appealing to buyers and distributors,” Jonathan Chinn said.

“We also work with talent outside of the documentary business, whether it be Guy Ritchie (The Diamond Heist), Sam Mendes (What They Found) or Ryan Coogler (Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time), people who are at the top of their game who inspire us, and I think that that maybe separates us a little bit.”

EXCLUSIVE: Here There Are Blueberries, the acclaimed play and Pulitzer finalist by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, has found its lead cast for its limited run on Broadway, producers announced today.

The ensemble cast includes (in alphabetical order), Scott Barrow (The Laramie Project Cycle), Michelle Beck (A Raisin in the Sun), Michael Cerveris (Assassins), Kathleen Chalfant (Angels in America), Delia Cunningham (national tours of Here There Are Blueberries), Brandon Flynn (Kowalski, 13 Reasons Why), Montego Glover (Memphis) and Conrad Ricamora (Oh, Mary!).

Understudies for the production include Jeanne Sakata, Anna Shafer, Marrick Smith and Grant James Varjas.

Longtime company members Scott Barrow, Frances Uku, Grant James Varjas, Amy Marie Seidel, and the members of Tectonic Theater Project devised the play. Other Tectonic company members include Chalfant, Cunningham, Sakata, Shafer, and Smith.

Here There Are Blueberries will play a 10-week engagement with previews beginning Monday, November 2 at the Barrymore Theatre (243 West 47th Street) in a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse. Opening night is set for Monday, November 9. The run ends Sunday, January 10, 2027.

Here There Are Blueberries begins with an extraordinary real-life mystery.

In 2007, an album of Nazi-era photographs arrived at the desk of a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist. The photographs weren’t like any that had been seen before. As curators unraveled the truth behind the images, the album soon made headlines and ignited a debate that reverberated far beyond the museum walls. Based on real events, Here There Are Blueberries tells the story of these historical photographs – what they reveal about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, and our own humanity.

The Here There Are Blueberries creative team includes two-time Tony Award winner Derek McLane (scenic design), Tony Award winner Dede Ayite (costume design), two-time Tony Award nominee and Drama Desk Award winner David Lander (lighting design), Bobby McElver (sound design), two-time Tony Award nominee and OBIE Award winner David Bengali (projection design), Stephanie Yankwitt, CSA (casting director), Amy Marie Seidel (dramaturg), and Erin Albrecht (production stage manager).

In addition to being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the original New York production won two Lucille Lortel Awards including Outstanding Play and was nominated for Outstanding New Play by the Outer Critics Circle Awards and Drama League Awards.

Here There Are Blueberries had its first workshop production at Miami New Drama and received its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 2024, as a co-production at New York Theatre Workshop.

Here There Are Blueberries is produced by Tectonic Theater Project (Moisés Kaufman, Founder & Artistic Director; Matt Joslyn, Executive Director), Brian & Dayna Lee, Bruce Roberts, Sue Vaccaro, & Ricky Stevens, and Executive Producer 101 Productions, Ltd./Chris Morey. The general manager is Evan Bernardin Productions with production management by Sightline Productions. Here There Are Blueberries is a co-production with La Jolla Playhouse and is produced in association with Michael Hormel and Midnight Theatricals.