Dual Oscar nominee Eskil Vogt, a co-screenwriter on Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in the World has received backing for his next film as a director.

Vogt received a $1 million (NOK 10 Million) grant from the Norwegian Film Institute to go towards the production of Untitled, a psychological thriller about “art, power and the blurred boundaries between memory and truth.” Vogt will write and direct.

Untitled will be Vogt’s third feature as a director, following Blind (2014), and The Innocents (2021). He’s a two-time Oscar nominee, for writing on both Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in the World.

“Untitled is an ambitious project that builds on Eskil Vogt’s distinctive artistic vision,” said Kjersti Mo, CEO of the Norwegian Film Institute.” Eskil Vogt is a filmmaker with a strong artistic voice and a significant international profile, and with his third feature as a director, he continues to develop and challenge himself artistically.” Mo said the grant showed the institute’s commitment to “strengthening creators and their careers.”

Though best-known for his writing collaborations with Trier — the two childhood friends have written all of Trier’s films together — Vogt’s high-concept solo attempts have been well-received. Blind, which follows a writer whose loss of sight sharpens her creative imagination, premiered in Sundance and Berlin. The Innocents, a low-tech supernatural horror film about children with powers and violent tendencies, screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard.

Maria Ekerhovd and Lars Thomas Skare of Norway’s Mer Films, producers of Sentimental Value and the Oscar-nominated The Ugly Stepsister, are producing Untitled. The film’s total budget is pegged at $11 million. Mer Films’ latest, the Renate Reinsve-starrer Butterfly (2026), premiered at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Accept My Plea for Burial is a social drama/thriller set in Somalia. And it was among the works-in-progress presented at the 2026 edition of Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival‘s co-production platform and talent development program for filmmakers from equity-seeking communities and regions where artistic expression is at risk.

The story from director Mohammed Sheikh (Barni, 2025) is produced by Kadir Harbi of Somalia’s
Aleel Films.

The project, presented during the second edition of Open Doors with a focus on films from Africa, is a co-production between Djibouti, Somalia and Qatar. At the Locarno Open Doors program, Accept My Plea for Burial was one of the two main winners of the Open Doors Grant .

THR has compiled highlights about the movie and insight from Sheikh about the project and the themes it explores.

Synopsis
In a remote Somali pastoral village, 12-year-old boys, Waasuge and Warmooge, spend their days herding goats and playing games. Their playful rivalry turns tragic when Warmooge dies after falling into a steep dry riverbed during a game. No one sees exactly what happened, and the only witness, a mentally unstable man, gives conflicting accounts that deepen the uncertainty 

As the village gathers, grief hardens into accusation. Warmooge’s mother, Saluugla, refuses to bury her son without justice, believing burial without accountability would erase his death. The elder, Alamagan, attempts to resolve the conflict through customary law and religious counsel, but the absence of truth fractures the community. Rituals are performed, oaths proposed and broken, and tensions escalate as the unburied body decays. Despite Waasuge’s age and the lack of evidence, the village demands resolution. Understanding what the adults cannot admit, Waasuge makes a choice that ends the conflict. 

Director’s note
I am drawn to stories that stay with the audience long after the credits roll, films like Yiyi, 12 Angry Men, and A Separation, where ordinary people are placed inside moral conflicts with no easy answers. These films don’t rely on spectacle; they rely on tension, silence, and human contradiction. With Accept My Plea for Burial, I want to explore that same territory through a Somali lens that is rarely seen with this level of intimacy and restraint. 

This film is not about proving guilt or innocence. It is about what happens when truth cannot be fully known, yet a community still demands resolution. In many societies, especially close-knit rural ones, peace often matters more than facts. I am interested in how grief distorts reason, how tradition both protects and fails people, and how children inherit the consequences of adult decisions. The story reflects that political reality. 

What was the inspiration for you to want to make this film?
The inspiration for this film is very personal. I grew up in a community similar to the village in the film, and I experienced an incident very close to the one that happens to Warmooge. I was fortunate that I survived, but the experience stayed with me.

How universal are the themes of the film, and why should people outside Somalia see it?
Although the film is about a specific Somali pastoral community, the emotions and questions at its center are universal. The film explores loss, grief, love, family, justice. What does justice mean when the truth is uncertain? How far can grief take us? And can a community choose peace when revenge feels easier?

What is the next step for you and your collaborators after Open Doors?
I already have an advanced draft, and the next step is to find the right co-production partner and co-production country to help bring the film into production.

EXCLUSIVE: International sales and distribution agency Lightdox has acquired Giuseppe Schillaci’s documentary Auber 89 ahead of its world premiere at the Giornate degli Autori‘s Notti Veneziane (Venetian Nights), a sidebar of the Venice Film Festival.

The nonfiction feature examines the experience of Fatsah Bouyahmed, a French Algerian actor who suffered memory loss after an accident. When the filmmaker discovered archival footage of Bouyahmed from his childhood and youth in the Aubervilliers social housing estate outside Paris, he invited him to view it and that triggered a process of reconnecting Bouyahmed with his past.

“As Fatsah revisits the footage forty years later, memories of family, friendship, music, and daily life resurface alongside the social tensions of the time: rising racism, inequality, and exclusion,” notes a synopsis. “Moving between past and present, Auber 89 revisits a fleeting moment of hope before disillusionment reshaped the Parisian suburbs, while the textures of television and VHS ground the story in the sensory world of the 1980s.”

Auber 89 premieres September 10 at Giornate degli Autori, where it will be followed by a Q&A.

“Auber 89 is a rare kind of film, where one man’s fractured memory becomes a way into the buried history of an entire community,” said Lightdox founder Anna Berthollet. “Giuseppe Schillaci takes a remarkable archival discovery and turns it into something urgent and deeply human, carried by Fatsah Bouyahmed’s extraordinary journey back to himself. This is a film that gives the French suburbs their complexity back, beyond the clichés that have long defined them.”

Auber 89 is produced by Label Vidéo (Véronique Holley and Raffaele Ventura) in France, in co-production with Revolver (Paolo Maria Spina) in Italy, Via93 (Sylvain Poubelle and Bruno. Niepceron), and E2P (Pierre-Jean Bartheye) in France. Lightdox is handling international sales.

Schillaci, born in Palermo, Sicily and based in Paris, is a novelist and filmmaker. His 2024 feature documentary Bosco Grande also premiered in the Giornate degli Autori in Venice and went on to win the Grand Prix at the National Competition at FIPADOC Biarritz. His additional directing credits include Tranzicion – art et pouvoir en Albanie (2017), L’ombra del padrino (2016), Apolitics Now! (2013), and The Cambodian Room: Situations with Antoine D’Agata (2009), co-directed by Tommaso Lusena.

In a director’s statement, Schillaci recalled sharing the archival video of Bouyahmed with his protagonist.

“He came to my editing studio, sat down in front of a screen, and I showed him the footage of his youth,” Schillaci writes. “The screen became, in the truest sense, a machine for recovering memory: frame by frame, something reawakened within him. From that day on, this encounter between a man and the ghosts of his own youth became the film’s driving force, its backbone.”