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Italian director Nanni Moretti has cast Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca in his next film, love story Succederà Questa Notte (It Will Happen Tonight), and is set to start filming this September.

The Palme d’Or winning director has adapted a book of short stories, Legami, by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo. Moretti previously adapted a Nevo novel for his 2021 film Three Floors. He has collaborated with Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella on the script. It marks his first feature since suffering a heart attack in April.

“We have intertwined some stories from the book to create a unique story,” said...

Recovering from his health scare back in April, Nanni Moretti is moving back into the director’s chair for Succederà questa notte (“It Will Happen Tonight”). Variety reports that production will begin sometimes this autumn with the backdrops of Spain and Italy and the good news is he managed to lasso the likes of Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca (who was part of 2001’s The Son’s Room and 2006’s The Caiman). Angela Finocchiaro, Elena Lietti, Antonio De Matteo, Andrea Lattanzi, Hippolyte Girardot, Pietro Ragusa, and Paolo Sassanelli are also cast. Despite his recent output – 2023’s A Brighter Tomorrow bombed as a competition film in Cannes (read review), Moretti will likely return to the Croisette and likely be aiming for a competition slot.…...

Palme d’Or-winning Italian auteur Nanni Moretti (“The Son’s Room”) is set to soon return behind camera on the romantic drama “Succederà questa notte” (“It Will Happen Tonight”), starring French star Louis Garrel and Italian A-lister Jasmine Trinca.

The 71-year-old idiosyncratic director, actor and screenwriter, who suffered a heart attack in April but rapidly recovered, is expected to shoot the film in Spain and Italy this fall. “It Will Happen Tonight” is loosely based on the short story collection “Hungry Heart” (Lev Raev) by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo. Plot details are being kept under wraps. Moretti adapted Nevo’s short story collection together with frequent co-screenwriters Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella.

Moretti previously adapted Nevo’s novel “Three Floors Up” in the 2021 film “Three Floors.”

Trinca, who was on the Cannes jury in 2023, made her feature debut in Moretti’s “The Son’s Room” in 2001. This will be their first collaboration...

Palme d’Or-winning Italian director Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room, We Have a Pope) is teaming up with French star Louis Garrel (Little Women, The Dreamers) and Italian actress Jasmine Trinca (The Gunman) for his new film, the romantic drama Succederà questa notte (It Will Happen Tonight).

The feature, loosely based on the short story collection Hungry Heart (Lev Raev) by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, is set to begin shooting in Spain and Italy this fall. Moretti adapted Nevo’s novel Three Floors Up as the 2021 film Three Floors.

Trinca made her feature debut in Moretti’s The Son’s Room in 2001, but this will be their first collaboration since The Caiman in 2006. The Italian actress has been splitting her time between features, including Léa Todorov’s Maria Montessori and Ildikó Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife (2021), and TV work, appearing in acclaimed Italian series La Storia and The Art of Joy...

Editors note: This review was originally published May 18 after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where it co-won the Jury Prize. It opens in New York theaters Friday.

After breaking out internationally in 2012 with his Oscar-nominated drama The Broken Circle Breakdown, and making his Hollywood debut in 2018 with Beautiful Boy, Felix van Groeningen makes his Competition debut in Cannes with The Eight Mountains, perhaps the most understated film of his career so far.

This is a gentle tale of a decades-spanning friendship that seems a little out of its depth in such a heavyweight showcase. With terrific cinematography and two engaging leads, it’s easy on the eye — as well it should be at two hours and 27 minutes — but it’s lackluster in its telling and pales next to Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, which covered similar themes of adolescence and young adulthood last awards season.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to Cannes Jury Prize winner “The Eight Mountains” by Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.

The Italian-language film, which tracks the decades-long friendship between two Italian boys named Pietro and Bruno — one from the city, the other a shepherd boy from the Alps — was praised as “quietly magnificent” by Variety critic Jessica Kiang.

Kiang also praised the pic’s “slow, gradual accretion of detail that builds to a spectacular vista across the ridges and troughs, the spires and valleys of a lifelong, life-defining friendship.”

The drama about friendship, mountains, growing up, and our changed rapport with the planet in the wake of the pandemic stars Italian A-lister Luca Marinelli (“Martin Eden”) and Alessandro Borghi (“Devils”) — respectively as Pietro and Bruno — as well as Filippo Timi (“Vincere”) and Elena Lietti (“Three Floors”).

Based on an Italian novel of the same title by Paolo Cognetti,...

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Sideshow and Janus Films have nabbed the North American rights to The Eight Mountains, the Cannes Jury Prize winner.

The film stars Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi as unlikely friends whose lives are inextricably linked to the Alpine village of Aosta where they met as boys in this retelling of Paolo Cognetti’s novel. Sideshow and Janus Films plan a theatrical release at the end of the year.

Sideshow and Janus Films said: “We fell in love with The Eight Mountains, a sweeping, deeply moving film about friendship filled with heart and featuring tremendous performances by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. We are thrilled to collaborate with Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch, Mario Giannani and Lorenzo Gangarossa to bring this special film to North America,” Sideshow and Janus Films said in a joint statement.

The Eight Mountains is written and directed by van...

Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch co-directed and co-wrote epic tale of friendship.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to Cannes jury prize winner The Eight Mountains directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.

The story about a friendship spanning a lifetime in the Italian Alpine valley of Aosta is based on Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel of the same name and stars Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi, Filippo Timi, Elena Lietti and Elisabetta Mazzullo. Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch co-wrote the screenplay.

Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa produced for Wildside in co-production with Belgium’s Rufus and Menuetto,...

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to Cannes 2022 Jury Prize winner The Eight Mountains for a theatrical release at the end of the year.

The New York-based distribution partners had a busy Cannes this year also acquiring Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, which shared the Jury Prize with The Eight Mountains; and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Tori And Lokita, which won the 75th Anniversary Prize at Cannes.

The Eight Mountains is written and directed by Oscar-nominated Belgian director Felix van Groeningen and his long-time collaborator and life partner Charlotte Vandermeersch.

Adapted from Italian writer Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, the work follows the life-long friendship of two men from very different backgrounds against the backdrop of a remote valley in Italy’s mountainous Aosta Valley region. One is a boy from the city, the other the last child of a forgotten mountain village.

In adulthood,...

Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out, co-written with Nicola Guaglianone, starring Franz Rogowski, Aurora Giovinazzo, Pietro Castellitto, Giancarlo Martini, Claudio Santamaria, and Giorgio Tirabassi opens Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s 21st edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema

Giuseppe Bonito’s A Girl Returned; Paolo Taviani’s Leonora Addio (The Demise Of Luigi Pirandello); Laura Bispuri’s The Peacock’s Paradise (Il Paradiso Del Pavone) starring Dominique Sanda, Alba Rohrwacher, Carlo Cerciello, and Maya Sansa; Chiara Bellosi’s Swing Ride (Calcinculo) with Gaia Di Pietro and Andrea Carpenzano; Nanni Moretti’s Three Floors with Margherita Buy, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Riccardo Scamarcio, Paolo Graziosi, and Rohrwacher, and Gabriele Mainetti’s Freaks Out, co-written with Nicola Guaglianone, starring Franz Rogowski, Aurora Giovinazzo, Pietro Castellitto, Giancarlo Martini, Claudio Santamaria, and Giorgio Tirabassi are six highlights of Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà’s 21st edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.

Mountains are not formed in an instant. Tectonic plates may buckle like the crumpling hoods of crashing cars, but it’s a collision that takes thousands of millennia to play out, and on a human timescale, seems infinitesimally slow. An inch here, a millimeter there, even the most imposing ranges were built in increments; rocky peaks rising pebble by pebble. It’s just one way that the vast, vertiginous landscapes of northwestern Italy so well suit Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s quietly magnificent “The Eight Mountains”: The film, too, is a slow, gradual accretion of detail that builds to a spectacular vista across the ridges and troughs, the spires and valleys of a lifelong, life-defining friendship.

Based on the award-winning Italian bestseller “Le Otto Montagne” by Paolo Cognetti, the movie is novelistic in the best sense. It immerses you in the world of its characters – both human...

Friendship, mountains, growing up, and our changed rapport with the planet in the wake of the pandemic are the main elements in Cannes competition title “The Eight Mountains” by Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen (“Beautiful Boy”) and Charlotte Vandermeersch. (Watch the trailer above.)

The film is based on an Italian novel of the same title by Paolo Cognetti. It has won multiple awards in Italy and France and is also the author’s first book published in the U.S.

“The Eight Mountains” is a coming-of-age tale set over three decades about two young Italian boys — one, named Pietro, who is the son of a chemist, the other, Bruno, of a stonemason — who spend their childhoods together in a secluded Alpine village roaming the surrounding peaks and valleys before their paths diverge. Many years later, they reconnect in the same place.

The film marks the first foray into Italian-language filmmaking for Van Groeningen who,...

AMC+ is solidifying itself as one of the best providers of original content.

Thursday, November 18, marks the series premiere of the new drama series, Anna.

The streaming services describes Anna as "a dystopian story of a ravaged world destroyed by a virus which kills adults but spares children."

"Set amongst parched fields and mysterious forests, the crumbling hulks of shopping malls and abandoned cities pierce deserted wide-open spaces on an island reclaimed by nature and run by savage communities of survivors, most of whom are children," the logline continues.

"Anna only has one guide: a book left by her mother with instructions on how to survive."

"But, with each passing day she discovers that the old rules no longer apply, and instead must make up new ones as she goes along."

It is an impressive hook for the series, and we have an exclusive clip from Anna Season 1 Episode 1, created by Niccolò Ammaniti.

A car is knocked off-course on a quiet suburban street and crashes fatally into the front room of a well-furnished apartment. In the flurry of bricks and wall plaster, it lands inches from the feet of a young girl who stares the wreckage down with a cool, deadpan expression. If this is your classic “inciting incident” for a full-bodied, conventionally structured drama, its oddly comic denouement––coupled with the main characters all appearing to survey the outcome in little, rhythmic intervals––mark Three Floors as a work by Nanni Moretti, who never met an instance of bourgeois life he couldn’t mischievously ironize.

This irony, self-awareness, and self-referentiality may elude viewers of this new ensemble drama: there’s no obligation to always keep a director’s prior work in mind, but have they forgotten Moretti’s influence from psychoanalysis, its invocation to scope “what lies beneath”? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,...

It’s been exactly 20 years since Nanni Moretti won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with “The Son’s Room,” a graceful, humane and often surprisingly witty drama about a family regathering itself in the wake of shattering tragedy. That’s a long time ago, and it feels longer by the minute as you watch the Italian writer-director’s latest, “Three Floors,” a film clearly conceived to hit the same bittersweet notes as his 2001 triumph, but scarcely recognizable as the work of the same filmmaker.

Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature. Pedigree alone has secured this misfire a Cannes competition slot and healthy international sales, though we certainly won’t be thinking about it in two decades’ time.

There are powerhouse performances and queasily effective scenes in this story of a man who suspects his neighbour of abuse, but it’s a soapy shadow of The Son’s Room

Nanni Moretti has come to Cannes with this watchable and tautly structured soap-operatic ensemble movie about four families living in the same apartment building, adapted from the popular bestseller Three Floors Up by the Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, and transplanted from the original Tel Aviv setting to Rome.

There is an element of emollient sentimentality, especially in the way the plot lines are neatly tied up, but a good deal of storytelling gusto and ingenuity, and there are also echoes (perhaps deliberately engineered) of Moretti’s greatest film and Cannes Palme d’Or winner, The Son’s Room, from 2001.

Lucio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Sara (Elena Lietti) are a stressed professional couple with an infant daughter for whom they often need a...

Belgian director Felix van Groeningen (“Beautiful Boy”) and Charlotte Vandermeersch have started shooting in the Alps on “The Eight Mountains,” an Italian drama based on a bestseller about male bonding set against a mountainous backdrop.

Vision Distribution will launch international sales of the film at the upcoming Cannes virtual market.

The film will be released in France by Pyramide Distribution and in Benelux by Kinepolis Film Distribution and Dutch FilmWorks.

Pic marks the first foray into Italian-language filmmaking for Van Groeningen who prior to “Beautiful Boy,” his English-language debut, broke out with Oscar-nominated “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” which is in Dutch, followed by “Belgica” winner of a prize at Sundance.

Van Groeningen has teamed up on “Eight Montains” with Vandermeersch, his partner in life, an actor and writer now making her directorial debut. They previously collaborated professionally on “Breakdown” on which she served as a co-writer.

“Bringing this deeply human,...

Hotly anticipated TV series “Anna,” the Sky Studios Original centered on a 13-year-old girl who must contend with a viral contagion that kills off all adults on the island of Sicily, is set to launch on Sky in Italy on April 23.

Directed by novelist-turned-director Niccolò Ammaniti (“The Miracle”), who co-wrote with Francesca Manieri (“Daughter of Mine”), the show was forced to halt production in March 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak. Ammaniti subsequently completed principle photography, returning to Sicily in July after a decision was made to reduce the number of episodes from eight to six. Variety has been given exclusive access to its final international trailer.

“Anna” is a Sky Original series commissioned by Sky Studios for Sky Italia produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli with Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside, a Fremantle company, in co-production with Arte France, The New Life Company, and Kwaï.

Following its Italian launch the skein,...

Italian director Paolo Virzì has begun shooting in Rome on apocalyptic drama “Siccità,” set amid a protracted drought in the Italian capital and featuring an A-list local cast comprising Monica Bellucci, Sara Serraiocco (“Counterpart”) and Silvio Orlando (“The Young Pope”).

Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa are producing for Wildside, the Fremantle-owned company behind “The Young Pope,” “My Brilliant Friend” and “We Are Who We Are.” Vision Distribution, which is jointly operated by Comcast’s Sky Italia and five prominent Italian production companies, will distribute in Italy with plans for a theatrical release.

The film follows a group of characters from all walks of life who are tied by a single tragic, mocking thread as each one seeks their redemption.

The story treatment was penned by Paolo Giordano (“We Are Who We Are”) in tandem with Virzì, whose English-language “The Leisure Seeker,” with Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, was released in the U.

Tre Piani

Italian auteur Nanni Moretti should be set to unveil his thirteenth narrative feature in 2021, Tre Piani, co-written by Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella. As usual, Moretti is part of the cast, joined by a formidable ensemble including Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Denise Tantucci, Alessandro Sperduti, Anna Bonaiuto, Paolo Graziosi, Tommaso Ragno and Stefano Dionisi. The project is lensed by Dp Michele D’Attanasio.

Moretti won the Palme d’Or in 2001 for The Son’s Room. He competed in 1978 with Ecco Bombo, 1994 with Dear Diary (winning Best Director), 1998 with Aprile, 2006 with The Caiman, 2011 with We Have a Pope and in 2015 with Mia Madre (winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize).…...

Javier Krause, one of Argentina’s key sales agents and co-founder of Kaflims Argentina, has crossed the Atlantic and started Kafilms Suisse, a new Swiss production company where he is taking the reins to create new content for international audiences, including two new Italian co-productions which Krause has announced in exclusivity with Variety.

Joined by Maurizio and Manuel Tedesco of Italy’s Baires Produzioni, backers of Filmax-sold “Tomorrow’s a New Day” from Simone Spada and WWI drama “Il destino degli uomini,” Kafilms will co-produce “The Eye of the Rabbit” from debut feature filmmakers Valentina and Francesca Bertuzzi and “L’Arminuta,” – currently in production – written by Monica Zapelli in collaboration with the author of the eponymous novel on which the film is based, Donatella di Pietrantonio.

“The Eye of the Rabbit” turns on Liz, the eldest daughter of a middle-class Roman family who discovers a mysterious hole that, night after night,...

Tre piani

Italy’s Nanni Moretti breaks a five-year hiatus (from feature films) with his thirteenth narrative, Tre piani, which is also the director’s first adaptation. Moretti assembles a high profile cast including Riccardo Scamarcio, Margherita Buy, Alba Rohrwacher, Adriano Giannini, Elena Lietti, Denise Tantucci, Alessandro Sperduti, Anna Bonaiuto, Paolo Graziosi, Tommaso Ragno, Stefano Dionisi and himself. Cinematographer Michele D’Attanasio lensed the feature, produced through Sacher Film, Fandando, Rai Cinema and Le Pacte. Moretti has competed seven times in Cannes, with 1978’s Ecco Bombo, 1994’s Dear Diary (winning Best Director), 1998’s Aprile, 2001’s The Son’s Room (which won the Palme d’Or), 2006’s The Caiman, 2011’s We Have a Pope and 2015’s Mia Madre (winning the Ecumenical Jury Prize).…...