Formed by
Bob Berney in 2005, Picturehouse was a joint venture created by
Time Warner subsidiaries
New Line Cinema and
HBO Films to acquire, produce and distribute independent films. Berney, who guided the acquisition, marketing and distribution of
Christopher Nolan’s
Memento,
Joel Zwick’s
My Big Fat Greek Wedding and
Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ, among other notable releases, has run the company from its inception. Over the next two years, Picturehouse released features such as
Robert Altman's
A Prairie Home Companion, starring
Meryl Streep and
Lily Tomlin;
Guillermo del Toro's ''
Pan's Labyrinth, which was acquired at script stage and went on to earn six Academy Award nominations and wins in three categories; La Vie en Rose'', which garnered
Marion Cotillard an
Academy Award for Best Actress; and
Sergei Bodrov's
Genghis Khan biopic
Mongol, a nominee for
Best Foreign Language Film. Time Warner's 2008 consolidation resulted in
Warner Bros. exiting the independent business to concentrate on big-budget "tentpole" releases. This prompted the closure of marketing and distribution operations at both New Line Cinema and Picturehouse, costing 70 employees their jobs. In 2013, Berney and his wife Jeanne acquired the Picturehouse logo and trademark from Warner Bros. and relaunched the label as an independent theatrical distribution company. Initial releases included
Adriana Trigiani's
Big Stone Gap, starring
Ashley Judd;
Grammy Award nominee
Metallica Through the Never, starring
Dane DeHaan; and
Adam Wingard’s
The Guest, an
Independent Spirit Award nominee starring
Dan Stevens and
Maika Monroe. In 2020, the company released the faith-based
drama Fatima, directed by
Marco Pontecorvo and starring
Joaquim de Almeida,
Goran Visnjic,
Harvey Keitel and
Sônia Braga. One year later, Picturehouse announced that it would release
Becoming Cousteau, a
documentary using previously unseen archival footage to chronicle the life and career of the adventurous oceanographer and filmmaker
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who coinvented scuba diving and foretold the impact of pollution on
climate change. Directed by
Liz Garbus, the film was released on October 22, 2021 and earned a 2022
British Academy Film Award for
Best Documentary, in addition to winning Best Science/Nature Documentary at the 2021
Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. Alex Pritz’s
The Territory, a 2022 documentary chronicling the struggle of Brazil’s indigenous
Uru-eu-wau-wau against farmers, colonizers and settlers whose deforestation encroaches on a protected area of the
Amazon rainforest, was shortlisted for the
95th Academy Awards in the
Best Documentary Feature category and won the award for
Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking at the
75th Emmy Awards. In 2024, Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s
Porcelain War, which documents the experience of Ukrainian artists facing the
Russian occupation in Ukraine, won the U.S. Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize at
Sundance and was later
Oscar nominated in the
Best Documentary Feature Film category. == Filmography ==