Cinetic Media is launching sales in Cannes on “Anita,” a documentary about actor-model Anita Pallenberg, which premieres in the Cannes Classics section.
In “Anita,” which includes never-seen-before Super 8mm home movies and family photographs, Pallenberg’s words from her unpublished memoir are voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
The first-look photo (above) shows Pallenberg and Keith Richards in 1967 in Cannes, where Volker Schlöndorff’s “Degree of Murder,” in which she starred, premiered in competition. Her other screen credits included “Performance,” alongside Mick Jagger, and “Barbarella.”
“Anita” is directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, and is produced by Charlie Corwin, Bloom and Zill for SK Global Entertainment.
The project was brought to the directors in 2020 by Marlon Richards, the son of Pallenberg and Richards, who “wanted his mother’s story to be told in all its complexity,” the directors said in a statement. They added that the film embraces “both the bitter and the sweet, the heartbreak as well as the triumph.” The directors said they “approached this film as an act of historical reclamation: putting the female perspective back in the official narrative of rock ‘n’ roll, making what’s so often invisible, visible again.”
Anita Pallenberg with Brian Jones and Volker Schlöndorff in Cannes
Bloom won the Producers Guild of America Award in 2014 for feature documentary “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” which was also nominated for a BAFTA. In 2017, she was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming, and an Emmy for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking for “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds.” She also directed “Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes,” and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2019.
Zill has worked as a producer for renowned documentarians such as Alex Gibney, Errol Morris and Morgan Spurlock. She worked as a consulting producer for the Academy Award nominated “Cutie and the Boxer,” which also won an Emmy.
The executive producers are Marlon Richards, Sidney Kimmel, Jo Henriquez and Brian Kornreich.