Month: September 2021

Saudi Arabia’s nascent Red Sea International Film Festival has revealed 14 Arabic feature films selected to receive production and post-production funding from its Red Sea Fund. The announcement was made at the Venice Film Festival where the Red Sea festival and Saudi Arabia’s fledgling film industry have a substantial presence. Among the beneficiaries of the

“The Bridge” creator Hans Rosenfeldt is set to adapt Astrid Lindgren’s bestselling book “Ronja the Robber’s Daughter” into a fantasy series for NENT Group. The Swedish-language series will be directed by Lisa James Larsson (“Victoria”), and produced by Bonnie Skoog Feeney and Mattias Arehn (“Beartown”) at Filmlance, a Banijay company. Sara Askelöf for NENT Group

“Mister Crocodile,” “Corgi, A Royal Family” and “Piggy Builders” are among 84 TV series animated projects set to unspool at the 2021 Cartoon Forum which takes place in Toulouse, southern France, over Sept. 20-23 in an entirely in-person format. 21 countries from Europe will introduce animated projects at pitching sessions and industry networking, the backbone of

“Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho, this year’s Venice jury president, famously accepted his 2020 Golden Globe for best foreign film by assuring audiences that “once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” This is especially true at this year’s festival, where in addition to the

Premiering out of Venice’s Horizons Extra sidebar on Tuesday, ”My Night” marks the feature debut of Antoinette Boulat, a leading casting directors behind recent films like “The French Dispatch,” “Bergman Island” and “Non-Fiction,” now making the jump behind the lens. A veteran of the French industry, Boulat co-wrote and directed this intimate character study that

Lorenzo Vigas, who made film festival history by being the first Venezuelan-born filmmaker to snag the Venice Golden Lion in 2015, is back on the Lido with “The Box” (“La Caja”), the final part of a trilogy that began with his Cannes Critics’ Week short “Elephants Never Forget” and continued with his Venice-winning feature debut,

In Donbass, young Ukrainian soldiers still fight against pro-Russian separatists. Loup Bureau’s “Trenches,” world premiered in the Out of Competition strand of the Venice Film Festival, is a fascinating journey into their troubled existences. Variety spoke to the French journalist about the challenges posed by the making of this complex war documentary. Bureau started developing

Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s debut feature, “Labour of Love,” bowed at Venice Days in 2014 where it won the Fedeora Award for best director of a debut film, en route to winning several international awards and at home in India. He’s back on the Lido with “Once Upon a Time in Calcutta,” his third feature, which

Lebanese director Mounia Akl’s long-gestating first feature, “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” which screens in Venice Horizons, is about her relationship with Beirut and Lebanon “and the complexity of this love/hate relationship that is becoming more and more complicated as our country is falling apart,” she says. The country’s complications came literally crashing into the pic’s production

French sales and co-production company Charades has forged an alliance with Italy’s I Wonder Pictures to jointly seek out projects by under-the-radar Italian cinema directors that they can board as co-producers and distribute in Italy and around the world. The pact between Charades, a prominent Paris-based indie outfit headed by veteran sales agent and former

“Madeleine Collins,” a psychological thriller headlined by “Benedetta” star and Venice jury member Virginie Efira, has been sold by Charades to a raft of buyers. The movie had world premiere in the Venice Days section on Saturday and was warmly received by critics across the board. Helmed by Antoine Barraud, “Madeleine Collins” stars Efira as

Film Movement has acquired U.S. rights to Italian director Mario Martone’s “The King of Laughter” (“Qui Rido Io”) ahead of its world premiere Tuesday in competition at the Venice Film Festival. The film, being sold internationally by Italy’s True Colours, toplines Toni Servillo (“The Great Beauty”) as popular and prolific early 20th century Neapolitan actor

Emerging Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang has a deep personal connection with the White Building, an iconic structure that was demolished in 2017. Neang’s fiction film “White Building” has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons strand, and the filmmaker has also explored the subject in the Rotterdam-winning documentary “Last Night I Saw You

“Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” opens where any good stylishly ironic demon-out-of-water fairy-tale thriller should: in an insane asylum. That’s where Mona Lisa (Jeon Jong-seo), a catatonic waif, is seated on her knees in a straitjacket. We see right off how miserable she is; it’s there in her aura — and besides, who in

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” wastes no time in getting right to the exciting martial arts action. And just as in recent action hit “Nobody,” the intense combat plays out on a city bus. In the sequence, Shang-Chi, aka Shaun, played by Simu Liu has yet to learn about his past and

Until watching Kenneth Branagh’s wistfully autobiographical “Belfast,” I don’t think I realized that one of Britain’s greatest living actors — a talent who’s embodied everything from Henry V to Hercule Poirot, Kurt Wallander to Laurence Olivier — had been born in Northern Ireland. Maybe that’s because his family got out and moved to Reading, England,

A weeklong shoot in France in October 2019 for “Julia,” the documentary we directed about Julia Child, was the piece de resistance of our filming experience. On the sidewalks of Paris’ 7th arrondissement, where Julia and her husband Paul spent their early years together, cafes pulsed with voracious patrons. Inside the classrooms at Le Cordon

Jason Momoa took to Instagram on Sunday to reveal a new Aquaman suit for the upcoming superhero sequel, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.” In addition to the classic Aquaman costume seen in the first film, Momoa posted a first look at his character’s so-called “stealth suit.” The skin-tight metallic suit features hints of dark blue

Herding cattle is a woman’s work in Emelie Mahvadian’s meditative “Bitterbrush,” a picturesque documentary that embraces the sweeping tradition of the Western genre. The brawny job comes naturally to the nomadic Hollyn Patterson and Colie Moline, two close friends who are seasonal range riders for hire in the remote American West, cowgirling their way from

In the span of a year when everyone’s been on edge, prolific Mexican director Michel Franco managed to nuke our comfort zones not once, but twice, delivering separate provocations at back-to-back editions of the Venice Film Festival. In 2020, he won the Silver Lion for powder-keg thriller “New Order,” and now, he returns with the