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Exclusive: A biopic devoted to legendary Italian Rome, Open City and The Rose Tattoo actress Anna Magnani is in development at Indiana Production, the Milan and Rome-based company behind Netflix’s upcoming period drama The Leopard.

Entitled Anna, the production will be directed by Alessio Cremonini (On My Skin), who is also co-writing the screenplay with actress Olivia Magnani, grand-daughter of the late actress and daughter of her only son Luca Magnani.

The feature will focus on Magnani in a pivotal period of her life between the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the actress’s son was coming of age and she was embracing a new role as a mother in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 drama Mamma Roma.

Filming for Anna is scheduled to begin in 2025, with casting in the early stages for the role of Magnani and the many other famous figures from Italy’s film and artistic...

Pierfrancesco Favino as submarine Commander Salvatore Todaro in Edoardo De Angelis’s intense and humanistic Comandante

Edoardo De Angelis’s Comandante, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, was the Opening Night selection of the 23rd edition of Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s exceptional program, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York. Other highlights included Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So; Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo (Franz Rogowski); Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror (Mi Fanno Male I Capelli with Alba Rohrwacher mirroring Monica Vitti); Piero Messina’s Another End; Stefano Sollima’s Adagio; Laura Luchetti’s The Beautiful Summer; Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow (Il Sol Dell’Avvenire with Nanni, Margherita Buy,...

Pierfrancesco Favino as submarine Commander Salvatore Todaro in Edoardo De Angelis’s intense and humanistic Comandante

Edoardo De Angelis’s Comandante, starring Pierfrancesco Favino, was the Opening Night selection of the 23rd edition of Cinecittà and Film at Lincoln Center’s exceptional program, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York. Other highlights included Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So; Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo (Franz Rogowski); Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror (Mi Fanno Male I Capelli with Alba Rohrwacher mirroring Monica Vitti); Piero Messina’s Another End; Stefano Sollima’s Adagio; Laura Luchetti’s The Beautiful Summer; Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow (Il Sol Dell’Avvenire with Nanni, Margherita Buy,...

Edoardo De Angelis’s The War Machine (Comandante), starring the commanding Pierfrancesco Favino, opened the 23rd edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema in New York and the Venice Film Festival. Photo: courtesy of Cinecittà

Edoardo De Angelis’s The War Machine; Roberta Torre’s In the Mirror (Mi Fanno Male I Capelli with Alba Rohrwacher mirroring Monica Vitti); Piero Messina’s Another End; Stefano Sollima’s Adagio; Laura Luchetti’s The Beautiful Summer; Nanni Moretti’s A Brighter Tomorrow; Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow; Alain Parroni’s An Endless Sunday; Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So; Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo...

While Luca Guadagnino is reigning supreme this summer with “Challengers” and Cannes-premiered “Queer” both opening, Film at Lincoln Center is celebrating all Italian auteurs for the 23rd edition of annual festival “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.”

This year’s festival takes place from May 30 through June 6 and includes North American, U.S., and New York premieres, with appearances and discussions by several of the filmmakers. Co-presented by Cinecittà, “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema” serves as a showcase of the best in new Italian cinema.

“I think we have an especially strong lineup at this year’s ‘Open Roads,’ which is nothing if not an encouraging sign of things to come as we continue to move forward from the production pauses and shutdowns wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Dan Sullivan, Flc Programmer, said. “A satisfying mix of the familiar and the new, of low- and higher-budget movies, of fresh takes on...

Italy’s True Colours has unveiled a raft of sales on its slate including a US deal for Laura Luchetti’s The Beautiful Summer and a UK and Ireland acquisition of Edoardo de Angelis’ Venice opener Comandante.

Film Movement has taken North American rights to 1938-set romance drama The Beautiful Summer, which world premiered last year in the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival. The film has also sold to Scene and Sound for South Korea and Zeta Film for Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, adding to previously announced international deals last year.

Meanwhile, Bulldog Film Distribution has taken...

The champagne may be flowing at the kickoff for the 27th Annual Sonoma International Film Festival – for more reasons than one.

This year’s event in California’s wine country will open with the U.S. premiere of Widow Clicquot, directed by Thomas Napper, a narrative feature about the Grande Dame of Champagne. Actress Haley Bennett stars in the titular role of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, “who against all odds advanced her late husband’s techniques to create the recipe for modern-day champagne.”

Siff, running from March 20-24, will showcase 43 narrative features, 16 documentary features, and 48 short films representing more than 25 countries, according to a release.

Maya Hawke in ‘Wildcat’

The festival’s Centerpiece Film is Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter Maya Hawke as renowned Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor. The Closing Night Film is Luc Besson’s crime drama Dogman, starring Caleb Landry Jones. A Closing Night...

Last Feb. 14, actress Valentina Bellè walked the red carpet at the Critics Choice Awards for The Good Mothers, the Disney+ series directed by Julian Jarrold and Elisa Amoruso that was nominated for best foreign series after bowing last year in Berlin, where it won the fest’s first Berlinale Series Award. And it is to Berlin that the 31-year-old Bellè will return this year, chosen as the Italian face of European Shooting Stars, an annual award given to up-and-coming talent.

“I am extremely honored,” Bellè says. “I can’t wait to meet my wonderful colleagues from all over Europe, all these incredible talents. And I can’t wait to be in Berlin to exchange ideas and experiences. And to find out where it all started for them.”

Her beginning took place on the stage of her elementary school’s theater. “A confined space in which to abandon the idea of yourself for a while,...

“Bird,” Andrea Arnold’s first narrative feature in almost a decade, has been picked up by Cornerstone Films with the company set to launch the feature at the upcoming European Film Market in Berlin.

Little is known about the film, except that it was shot in the U.K. around the Kent area last summer and, like much of Arnold’s work, examines life on the fringes of society. It also stars two of the buzziest actors on the circuit: Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski.

Keoghan is currently on a phenomenal run that began with his BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated supporting role in “The Banshees of Inisherin” and has continued with a BAFTA-nominated lead turn in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” as well as a major part in the recently launched Apple TV+ drama “Masters of the Air.” He reportedly joined “Bird” after leaving the cast of Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Gladiator” sequel,...

European Film Promotion has revealed the 10 emerging actors who will take part in the 27th edition of European Shooting Stars program, which promotes European acting talent. Past Shooting Stars have included Carey Mulligan, Alicia Vikander, Maisie Williams and Riz Ahmed.

From Feb. 16-19, the actors will be presented to the international press and industry, and the German public at the Berlin Film Festival. One of the highlights will be the Shooting Stars Awards Ceremony on Feb. 19 at the Berlinale Palast.

The Shooting Stars for 2024 are Belgium’s Thibaud Dooms, Bulgaria’s Margarita Stoykova, France’s Suzy Bemba, Georgia’s Salome Demuria, Germany’s Katharina Stark, Ireland’s Éanna Hardwicke, Italy’s Valentina Bellè, Lithuania’s Džiugas Grinys, Poland’s Kamila Urzędowska and Sweden’s Asta Kamma August.

The jury that selected the actors comprised of Austrian director, screenwriter and producer Barbara Albert, Lithuanian producer Živilė Gallego, Irish actor Moe Dunford,...

We’re once again proud to be a partner in the European Film Promotion’s celebration of the very best of European talent with the announcement of the 2024 Efp European Shooting Stars.

It has been a pleasure to highlight and get to know some of the brightest new stars in the sky. As before, we will look to catch up with the entire cohort to get to know them better at the 74th Berlinale next year, so check back for those interviews.

Until then, here’s a closer look at the ten Shooting Stars for 2024.

© Wil Coban Éanna Hardwicke / Ireland

Éanna Hardwicke’s first professional credit was as a child actor in Conor McPherson’s 2009 horror film The Eclipse. Before graduating from The Lír Academy in 2018 he was cast in Vivarium, which premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week 2019. In 2023, a busy year for Hardwicke, he was named a Screen International Rising...

10-strong line-up includes Italian actress Valentina Bellè and Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke.

European Film Promotion (Efp) has revealed the ten young European talents selected for the 27th edition of European Shooting Stars, its initiative to showcase promising on-screen talent from the continent.

Efp has selected seven actresses and three actors who will be presented to international press, industry, and the public during the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.

The line-up includes Italian actress Valentina Bellè who starred in two competition films at Venice this year: Michael Mann’s Ferrari and Lubo by Giorgio Diritti. She also plays the leading role in Disney + series The Good Mother,...

Rotterdam Film Festival Sets ‘Head South’ As Opening Film

Jonathan Ogilvie’s post-punk, coming-of-age comedy Head South has been announced as the opening picture of the 53rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), running from January 25 to February 4. The festival has also teased a handful of early selections. They include Indian filmmaker Ishan Shukla’s dystopian, sci-fi animation Schirkoa: In Lies We Trust and U.S. director Billy Woodberry’s biodoc Mário, about African independence activist Mário de Andrade, which will both world premiere. Further confirmations include European premieres for Amanda Kramer’s So Unreal and Ann Hui’s Elegies as well as Omar Hilal’s Voy! Voy! Voy!, which is Egypt’s Oscar entry this year. The festival will unveil its full line-up on December 18.

Paul Schrader To Be Feted At Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Avellino Festival

U.S. director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will be honored with a Lifetime...

The Cinema Heritage festival announces the 9 films in the International Competition after more than 500 films were viewed. Costa Gavras and Cristian Mungiu will be the guests of honour on the closing night.

Eva Peydro, Barbara Lorey de Lacharrière and Philip Cheah, who make up the Selection Committee for the first edition of the Cinema Heritage festival, have viewed 500 films from 56 different countries and are presenting the finalists.

The International Competition comprises 9 films:

– The Winter Within by Aamir Bashir India, France, Qatar / 2022 / Paris Premiere

– The Echo by Tatiana Huezo Mexico, Germany / 2023 / French premiere

– Muyeres by Marta Lallana Spain / 2023 / Paris Premiere

– Behind The Haystacks by Asimina Proedrou Greece, Germany, Macedonia / 2022 / French premiere

– The Promised Land by Nikolaj Arcel Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany / 2023 / French premiere

– Lubo by Giorgio Diritti Italy, Switzerland / 2023 /French premiere

– The Land Where Winds Stood Still by Ardak Amirkulov Kazakhstan / 2023 / French premiere

– Esimde (This Is What I Remember) by Aktan Arym Kubat...

Valladolid International Film Week’s Independent Film Market saw Spanish distributors showcase acquired films to local streamers, TV networks and exhibitors.

Merci, Valladolid International Film Week’s Independent Film Market, enjoyed a 20% rise in the number of professionals attending this year.

Merci, which ran from October 25-27, provides an opportunity for Spanish independent distributors to meet with platforms, TV networks and distributors, and to show them selection of their recent acquisitions.

Among the 24 titles being screened by distributors at Merci Valladolid this year were Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot Au Feu, Ken Loach’s The Old Oak, Aki Kaurismäki...

Film starring Sami Bouajila and Julie Gayet started shooting this week in Northern France.

Snd, the film arm of French broadcaster M6, has teamed with prolific French production company Empreinte Cinema for Juan Carlos Medina’s upcoming race-against-the-clock cop thriller The Chase (Abime) starring Sami Bouajila and Julie Gayet.

Snd has international rights for the film and will kick off sales at AFM for the murder mystery meets action film. Snd and Empreinte produce with Paris-based Once Upon A Time on board as co-producer.

The Chase stars Bouajila as a police officer who failed to find the murderer of a young girl 11 years earlier.

Cast also includes Ellie Bamber, Jonah Hauer-King, Rafe Spall, Emily Beecham, Jonathan Pryce and Ben Kingsley.

Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on Nick Hamm’s English-language feature William Tell, based on the classic story of the crossbow warrior who shot an arrow through an apple on his son’s head and launched the struggle for Swiss independence.

Written and directed by Hamm, William Tell stars Claes Bang as Tell alongside Connor Swindells, Ellie Bamber, Golshifteh Farahani, Jonah Hauer-King, Rafe Spall, Emily Beecham as well as Jonathan Pryce and Ben Kingsley.

Beta Cinema and production companies Free Turn Films and...

Cast also includes Connor Swindells, Ellie Bamber, Golshifteh Farahani, Jonah Hauer-King, Rafe Spall, Emily Beecham, Jonathan Pryce and Ben Kingsley.

Beta Cinema has boarded international sales on Nick Hamm’s English-language feature William Tell, based on the classic story of the Swiss crossbow warrior.

Written and directed by Hamm, William Tell stars Claes Bang as Tell alongside Connor Swindells, Ellie Bamber, Golshifteh Farahani, Jonah Hauer-King, Rafe Spall, Emily Beecham as well as Oscar nominee Jonathan Pryce and Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley.

Beta Cinema and production companies Free Turn Films and Tempo Productions have also released a first look of...

Italian sales agent reports sales for summer festival slate.

Italy’s True Colours has unveiled sales on a string of its summer festival titles including Venice competition films Lubo and Comandante as well as Locarno world premiere The Beautiful Summer.

Edoardo de Angelis’s WWII drama Comandante, which opened Venice, has secured distribution in Japan with Aya Pro, in Spain with Alfa Pictures, in Portugal with Outsider Films, in former Yugoslavia with Stars Media, in Bulgaria with Beta Film and in Australia/New Zealand with Palace Films. Starring Pierfrancesco Favino, the co-production between Indigo Film, ‘O Groove and Trump Limited...

Italy’s Indiana Production – which has just become part of pan-European studio Vuelta Group – is staying true to its roots with production kicking off this month on gender swap movie “Romeo is Juliet,” directed by quality comedy specialist Giovanni Veronesi, just as the company expands its horizons.

This latest title in Indiana’s slate stars A-lister Sergio Castellitto and Pilar Fogliati (“Romantiche”) who plays an actress named Vittoria who after being brutally rejected by a cynical stage director when she auditions to play Juliet in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” decides to reinvent herself as a man to audition for Romeo and gets the part. The film’s lead actors and director are pictured above.

“Romeo is Juliet” is being produced by Indiana, co-produced by Capri Entertainment, and will be distributed in Italian theatres by Vision Distribution. The movie will start production in September.

Founded in 2005, Indiana over the ensuing...

Clean, green Switzerland, land of chocolate, cuckoo clocks and direct democracy, is revealed to have a history of racial abuse as ugly as any other in Giorgio Diritti’s rolling epic Lubo, showing in competition at the Venice Film Festival. German actor Franz Rogowski plays the title character, a street performer and paterfamilias who is part of Switzerland’s community of Jenisch, a nomadic people originating in Germany. Lubo’s story is a dramatically terrible one – his wife is killed in a spat with heavy-handed police and his children are taken away, all while he is being marched off to serve time in the army – but it speaks to the truth.

Nobody knows exactly how many Jenisch children were taken from their families by Swiss authorities, but the current estimate is 2000. Lubo opens during the Second World War. Between the 1930s and 1973, when the practice was officially dropped, these children...

In Giorgio Diritti’s film “Lubo,” based on Mario Cavatore’s novel “Il seminatore,” Franz Rogowski seduces as Lubo, a Yenish traveling performer, father and husband, who has to join the Swiss army in 1939. He is one hell of a charmer, although his passion has dark undertones.

“Our take is more playful, but the book put more emphasis on the fact that this man impregnated over 100 women in Zurich. He wanted to make sure his people would survive,” says Rogowski.

In the film, Lubo finds out that while he was away, his wife died trying to save their children, taken away in accordance with the infamous national “re-education” program for “Children of the Road.”

“He is a passionate man. But it’s also his revenge, in a way,” he adds.

“Many people have been describing my acting as very physical and my roles as ‘experimental,’ and I have been exploring sexuality before.

Children of a Lesser God: Diritti Highlights Swiss War Crimes in Prolonged Drama

The actual history being explored in Giorgio Diritti’s three-hour drama Lubo is fascinating, and on paper would promise to be an exceptionally agonizing and important recuperation of victimization in Switzerland during WWII (especially as it’s balanced on the shoulders of Franz Rogowski). Unfortunately, Diritti’s penchant for old fashioned storytelling drifts a bit languorously across a twenty year time period in Mario Cavatore and Freda Valla’s somewhat standard script. As a member of the nomadic Jenisch population in 1939, Grisons, Rogowski excels as a father hopelessly searching for his abducted children, relocated by officials set on exterminating his people through sinister eugenics programs while the Nazis’ rampage billows hatred across the border.…...

For around half of the entire last century, there was a semi-official policy enacted by the Swiss state to forcibly separate the children of “itinerant” parents from their families. The program, known as “Kinder der Landstrasse” (“Children of the Road”), was ostensibly designed for the protection of such children from the perils of vagrancy and criminality which the state imagined rife among the traveller population. In retrospect, of course, the practise, which was discontinued in the 1970s, has been revealed for what it actually was: an unjustifiably cruel abrogation of the human rights of various minority populations, among them the Yenish, the group to which Franz Rogowski’s Lubo Moser, the focus of Giorgio Diritti’s sprawling, overlong “Lubo,” belongs. Nobody could deny that such a historical injustice merits a moving and epic cinematic investigation. It’s just a shame that while the three-hour-long “Lubo” probably contains that very film,...

Production in Italy has boomed in recent years, and so too have budgets and international investment.

Cast an eye over the titles vying for a Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival and one thing stands out – the number of Italian films in the main competition.

Six of the 23 films in the main competition are Italian, an increase from the usual three Italian titles that are programmed in the section. While the step change could be a result of the writers and actors’ strikes leading to fewer US productions making the trip to Venice, each of the selected...

When Franz Rogowski tries to pinpoint the moment he went from being a struggling unknown to an in-demand art house star — the 37-year-old German actor is still basking in critical acclaim for his performances in Ira Sachs’ Passages alongside Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well

as Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin festival sleeper Disco Boy and will be walking the Lido red carpet with Giorgio Diritti’s Venice competition title Lubo — he goes back to Berlin 2018.

“That was the year I had a double pack: Two films in competition, with [Christian Petzold’s] Transit and [Thomas Stuber’s] In the Aisles,” says Rogowski, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via a shaky Zoom connection from France, where he’s spending a few days after wrapping his latest, Bird from American Honey director Andrea Arnold.

“I was also one of the European Shooting Stars that year. So it was a bit of a turning point.

Lido red carpets may be star-deprived this year, but that didn’t stop the Venice Film Festival from arranging a gorgeous constellation of new movies from supernova directors. (The full lineup is here.)

The SAG-AFTRA strike work stoppage means, of course, that competition directors like Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), David Fincher (“The Killer”), Sofia Coppola (“Priscilla”), Ava DuVernay, Saverio Costanzo (“Finalmente L’Alba”), and Michel Franco (“Memory”) will have to do the talking at press conferences and attend step-and-repeats without their actors, if they’re willing. It’s tricky for multihyphenates like Bradley Cooper, who directs and stars as Leonard Bernstein in Netflix’s “Maestro;” IndieWire hears he will sit this festival out.

Among the Venice film stars who will not be waving to the paparazzi from water taxis are Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Carey Mulligan, Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Penelope Cruz, Jacob Elordi, Aunjanue Ellis, Lily James, Joe Keery,...

The Venice Film Festival sails on in Italy — even with much of Hollywood at a standstill.

The annual cinema celebration hosted by La Biennale di Venezia and directed by Alberto Barbera runs from August 30 through September 9. Despite already having lost Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” from its opening night slot due to its SAG-AFTRA talent including star Zendaya being unable to accompany the world premiere due to strike work stoppage orders, Venice has plenty of movie goodness in store for its 80th edition.

Competition highlights include Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” Ava DuVernay’s “Origin,” Luc Besson’s “Dogman,” Michel Franco’s “Memory,” Pablo Larrain’s “El Conde,” and many more. Out of competition, Venice will screen new films from Harmony Korine, Richard Linklater, Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Roman Polanski, and William Friedkin.

New films by top U.S. directors including David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Michael Mann, Bradley Cooper and Wes Anderson will be launching from the Venice Film Festival alongside a robust roster of European, Latin American and Asian auteurs, in a clear sign that disruption caused by two ongoing labor strikes in Hollywood is less than some expected.

Though Venice was forced a few days ago to pull its originally planned opener, Zendaya-starrer “Challengers,” due to promotional complications from the SAG-AFTRA strike, the fest’s complete lineup, announced on Tuesday, has certainly not suffered a mass exodus of Hollywood titles. On the contrary, the Lido’s firepower as an awards season pistol seems to have outgunned the probable scarcity of stars that will be on the red carpet for U.S. films, though even this aspect remains to be seen.

“This past week has been a bit turbulent...