Month: May 2019

Launched just over 50 years ago by Marin Karmitz and now headed by his sons, Nathanael and Elisha, Paris-based MK2 films accomplished a double deed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Not only does it have five movies playing in competition for the second consecutive year, it represents in international markets three of the four

CANNES  —  Loic Magneron’s Paris-based Wide, a production-distribution boutique, has acquired international sales rights to “Il Signor Diavalo,” the latest -and 40th – feature from Italian horror icon Papi Avati, Avati is best known for 1976’s “The House with Laughing Windows” and 1983’s “Zeder” which crowned him as  a master of Italian giallo horror-thriller cinema.

Santiago Segura and Maria Luisa Gutierrez’s production labels, Madrid-based Bowfinger and Amiguetes, are joining Uruguay’s Mother Superior, headed by Gustavo Hernandez and Ignacio Cucovich, to produce a Spanish remake of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Israeli genre film “Big Bad Wolves.” Its working title is “Lobo Feroz” (Ferocious Wolf). The 2013 original made an impression

Tom Quinn, the founder of the indie studio Neon, thought that Netflix was making a big mistake. After seeing “Okja,” Bong Joon-ho’s eccentric creature feature, he believed passionately that the the offbeat visuals and ambitious story of girl’s bond with a super pig needed to be seen on the big screen. So began a six-month

May 18, 2019 12:53PM PT Writer-director Dekel Berenson has set his first feature, “Adva.” Berenson is at Cannes with “Anna,” which is garnering buzz and plays in the Short Film Competition at the festival. “Adva” will go into production next April. The film is about a Adva, a 19-year-old woman in Tel Aviv who works

For those raised on a diet of hot dogs and hamburgers, think back to the first time you ever heard of sushi, and the idea of eating raw fish. Werner Herzog’s “Family Romance, LLC” extends a comparably otherizing attitude to Japan’s niche rent-a-relative phenomenon, exposing for Western eyes a peculiar Tokyo-based company that caters to

May 18, 2019 12:03PM PT Sydney-based sales agent Odin’s Eye has picked up international rights to Harvey Keitel-starring action feature “Live Fast, Die Laughing.” The film is directed by Timothy Linh Bui (“Green Dragon, Powder Blue”) and produced by Los Angeles-based Convergence Entertainment. Scripted by Tim Tori (“Dragon Eyes,” “Hysteria”), the film is the story

May 18, 2019 11:57AM PT Arnold Schwarzenegger was assaulted by an unknown man Saturday at his Arnold Classic Africa event in Johannesburg, South Africa when the man took a jump kick into the 71-year-old actor’s back. In video posted to Twitter, Schwarzenegger can be seen filming some children skipping rope in what appears to be

Director of Cannes’ Marche du Film Jerome Paillard highlighted a need for better mutual understanding to bridge the cultural differences between France and China at a press conference organized by the Shanghai International Film Festival on the sidelines of the market. “The truth is that the exchange between China and the rest of the world

Chloë Sevigny may have starred in HBO’s “Big Love,” but her association with the premium cable channel isn’t strong enough to help her out of a jam. She’s desperate to watch the series finale of “Game of Thrones” while she’s at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to promote Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die.” “What

Women are making strides toward parity in the film business but there’s much more progress to be made, panelists at the Kering Women in Motion talk said Saturday. While women are gaining more visibility on-screen — 40% of movies were led or co-led by females in 2018, according to USC professor Stacy L. Smith –

There’s an interesting story — or a couple of them — itching to get out of “Parallel Love: The Story of a Band Called Luxury,” a documentary about a struggling ‘90s indie-rock group from the South that soldiered on before and after three of its members became Orthodox priests. Who could resist the story of

The Doha Film Institute, which is at Cannes as a co-financier of Elia Suleiman’s competition entry “It Must Be Heaven,” has announced the 37 projects receiving its Spring Grants, roughly half of them to be directed by women. The latest batch of mostly Arabic fare set to tap into support from the DFI, a key

May 18, 2019 8:37AM PT “I knew the sound was part of the foundation of what the movie was going to be,” George Lucas explains in this exclusive clip from Midge Costin’s “Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound.” Ben Burtt, sound designer on “Star Wars,” goes on to explain how the team originally created

May 18, 2019 6:53AM PT Palme d’Or winning director Claude Lelouch has unveiled the trailer for his latest film “The Best Years of A Life,” which will world premiere in the out-of-competition section at the Cannes Film Festival. Sold by Other Angle, the movie marks Lelouch’s follow-up film to “A Man and A Woman,” the

SND has closed a flurry of deals on Nicolas Vanier’s (“Belle et Sebastien”) “Spread Your Wings” following the movie’s market premiere at Cannes. The lavishly-lensed family adventure follows an ornithologist who sets off to teach orphaned white-fronted geese how to migrate with his and uses his airplane to guide them all the way to Norway.

May 18, 2019 4:05AM PT Bursting with energy and likable femme-centric characters, Mounia Meddour’s debut frustratingly misjudges its narrative acumen. Terrific lead characterizations and edgy camerawork hold their own against a problematic script in Mounia Meddour’s feature debut “Papicha.” This is a film designed to be championed by everyone wanting to support a woman’s right

In an equitable world, Levan Gelbakhiani, the lead actor in the Tbilisi-set “And Then We Danced,” would be thrust to stardom for his extraordinary performance as a dancer who finally acts on his gay desires. But this is far from an equitable world, and though the uneven film is likely to get significant attention from

Rufus Sewell, Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams have joined Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman in the cast of Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” the feature film adaptation of his award-winning stage play, Variety has confirmed. Embankment represents worldwide sales, excluding France. CAA, UTA and Embankment co-represent the U.S. In “The Father,” Hopkins plays the

In a dingy clinic, a newborn child is whisked away from her exhausted mother, supposedly for routine health checks, and is never returned; in short order, the clinic vanishes into thin air too, leaving the stolen baby’s bewildered, impoverished parents with no recourse. The premise of “Song Without a Name” is at once fact-based and