The Berlinale opens today to an industry thriving on EU funds. But where is the money going – and are audiences benefiting too?

European film is booming. Really. In spite of the disruption caused by the pandemic to production and release schedules, film productions on the continent have increased by more than 50% over the past decade. Some of these new films will premiere at the Berlin film festival, which opens today, or Cannes and Venice later in the year. Those who don’t manage to get a slot at the “big three” can still hope for red-carpet treatment: the submission platform FilmFreeway records more than 600 new European film festivals for this year alone.

There is a less shiny flipside to the golden decade of European film, however. Since 2011, the growth in film productions has not been matched by a similar growth in audiences, meaning fewer moviegoers per film. In economics, increasing choices through product differentiation – offering more options to cater to diverse tastes – usually boosts demand. But for European cinema, the increase in production has not translated into more ticket sales. The French director Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez feels like a symptomatic film in this regard, irrespective of the recent controversy around its star’s social media comments. It was a jury-prize winner at Cannes, hyped as an arthouse-to-mainstream crossover hit with a triumphant night at the European film awards – and has mostly left cinemagoers cold .

Moritz Pfeifer is a film critic and research fellow at Leipzig University’s Institute of Economic Policy

RPG Maker was launched in 1992 and has become increasingly complex, but it’s still a remarkably accessible way to make adventure games with no development experience

It is said that every 100 years, a small fishing village on the southern coast of an unknown fantasy realm holds a magical artisanal cheese festival. As an adventurer and fan of ethically produced dairy products, you are determined to attend the fabled event, arriving at the dock on a small boat with only a few gold coins and a dream. This is the backdrop to the worst role-playing adventure I have ever experienced – and, entirely coincidentally, the only one I have ever designed.

The game creation package RPG Maker has been around since 1992, the first version launching on the Japanese PC-98 computer. Since then, development has been passed from veteran Japanese developer ASCII to Enterbrain and then Chiyoda-based Gotcha Gotcha Games, and dozens of instalments have appeared. Although it has become increasingly complex over the years, RPG Maker remains a remarkably intuitive way to make adventure games with no development experience at all.

Fifteen films have been nominated in the categories of live action, animation and documentary – some cliched, some excellent and others truly powerful

Once again, the British-based Shorts streaming platform is doing a valuable service by packaging the short films which have been nominated for Academy Awards this year in three categories: live action, animation and documentary (15 pieces in all), and there are enough high points here to make up for some of the duller and more redundant moments.

In the live-action drama category, the most garlanded already is The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent from Croatian director Nebojsa Slijepcevic; it is the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for short film and is based on the true story of the 1993 Štrpci massacre during the Bosnian war , when Serbian paramilitaries stopped a train and demanded from each passenger who their family’s patron saint was (a way of telling who the Orthodox Serbs were); they took off 18 Muslims and one Croat to be murdered. The film is about the one man who stood up to them, and the film keeps the audience off-balance with an interesting misdirection about who that person is going to be and who is therefore the film’s hero. There is a real chill when the train finally shudders forward again and the people left aboard realise, with a mixture of relief and shame, that they are safe … because they remained silent.

A new exhibition celebrates the life and work of the maverick British artist beloved by Miro, Hemingway and Mondrian, who had to flee to Paris to realise her true artistic vision

Whichever art historian first had the chance to leaf through Paule Vézelay ’s personal archive after her passing in 1984 must have audibly squealed. The archive revealed that Vézelay, the British abstract painter who changed her name from Marjorie Watson-Williams shortly after moving to Paris in 1926, was on “chère amie” terms with Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and the Kandinskys. Ernest Hemingway addresses her as “Dear Madame Vézelay”, Alberto Giacometti simply as “Paule”. Henri Matisse regretfully declines her invitation to take part in a group show in London. An altogether brighter László Moholy-Nagy writes that he’s been to see her work: “I congratulate you,” he beams. “I visited your exhibition. I was delighted.”

Now the exuberant personality and the prodigiously creative output that cemented Vézelay as a 20th-century force to be reckoned with are being showcased at a new exhibition, Paule Vézelay: Living Lines, currently on view at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol.

Justin Audibert’s production with the Hamilton star is part of season including Top Hat, Natalie Dormer’s Anna Karenina and new play Safe Space

Since opening in 1962 under its first artistic director, Laurence Olivier, Chichester Festival theatre has hosted some of the world’s greatest Shakespearean actors. But surprisingly it has never produced its own version of Hamlet. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” says Justin Audibert, who in 2023 succeeded Daniel Evans as the theatre’s artistic director . “We’ve done three Antony and Cleopatras!”

Audibert is now preparing to direct Hamlet himself, with the tragic prince played by Giles Terera, who won an Olivier award when he starred as Aaron Burr in the London premiere of Hamilton. The play will open in September in Chichester’s smaller Minerva theatre. “We are imagining that Old Hamlet [the prince’s father] has let the kingdom decline,” says Audibert, whose production will explore the “leadership vacuum” that comes from an older generation “clinging on to power for a really long time”. Hamlet’s father “has definitely got some Biden vibes” says Audibert, and the director has also been reflecting on the succession of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad from his father, Hafez. Terera, who starred as Othello at the National Theatre in 2022, will play a Hamlet who is similar in age to his stepfather, Claudius.

Two boys on the brink of adulthood in 1990s Malaysia, in the opening volume of a Proustian quartet

Picture a farm that has been in a family for generations and can no longer be made to pay; there’s an orchard of beloved trees that may have to be chopped down. It’s a hot, dry summer and two estranged brothers decline into middle age while their adolescent children wait desperately for their lives to begin. This is a world we’d expect to find in a play by Chekhov, rather than a novel by Tash Aw, who has made his name with exuberant, heavily plotted portraits of life in Malaysia and China, the characters edging between makeshift grifting and actual criminality. But now he has distilled his vision of the novel into something smaller and more intense. The South takes place on a single farm in rural south Malaysia over a single summer in the 1990s, and shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness.

The book soaks us in bodily intimacy from the outset, opening with a description of two boys having sex for the first time in the orchard. Jay, who has longed for this for weeks, wants to draw out the moment, so that “whatever time they have together will feel like many hours, a whole day”, while Chuan seems to want “to accelerate each second and collapse time”. Aw is brilliant at compressing sociological insight into intimate scenes, and here the boys’ differences of wealth and education emerge implicitly. Jay’s father Jack was the legitimate son of their grandfather, who bought the farm as a young man. Jack is a relatively wealthy intellectual, a professor of mathematics in urban Malaysia, albeit a frustrated and disappointed man who has just lost his job. Chuan’s father Fong is their grandfather’s illegitimate son and has spent his life managing this farm he doesn’t own, leaving Chuan to grow up feral and barely schooled. Now the two families have come together for a summer after the grandfather has died and left the farm, quixotically, to Jay’s mother Sui, a once bright and ambitious woman subdued by marriage to Jack.

Slickly made high-school movie is packed with slow-motion corridor walks and flawless cheer-squad routines – but it’s hard to get caught up in a plot with so few surprises

Dallas (Siena Agudong) is a hot cheerleader with dreams of auditioning for CalTech. Drayton (Noah Beck) is a cute star quarterback whose dad is adamant he follow in his footsteps and attend his alma mater with a football scholarship. Surely this very well-matched chalk and chalk couple will never overcome their complete lack of differences and get together? Only time will tell.

A slickly made, nicely shot high-school movie adapted from a Wattpad story with an Instagram-ready cast, the biggest surprise here is James Van Der Beek popping up in a thankless role as the humourless dad. We know from The Rules of Attraction and Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 that Van Der Beek’s tastes are on the edgier side, but don’t tune in if you’re expecting any subversive humour; this is a straightforward and edge-free romance for younger teens. The script is laden with examples of what execs will be hoping is authentic Gen Z argot, though lines such as “I am sick and tired of your main character energy” sound like they’ve been plucked from A Handy Guide to Understanding Your Teen.

Atlanta was the birthplace of Martin Luther King, but is now falling victim to rapid gentrification. Photographer Joshua Dudley Greer went to look for its soul

The host embarks on a mission to discover the truth about history’s most famous explorers. Plus: the finale of cracking comedy Far North. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 5
James May’s new series is about the explorations of Christopher Columbus, Walter Raleigh and James Cook and their contentious legacies. May starts by taking the helm of his own sailboat in south-west Spain, where he discovers the origins of the stubborn young sailor Columbus, who dreamed of sailing to Asia but ended up on two continents previously unknown to Europeans. James’s visits to the Alcázar palace in Seville and St Barts back in London fill in details of a man driven by daring and greed. Hollie Richardson