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Exclusive: Utopia has acquired North American rights to Idiotka, the fashion comedy that premiered at this year’s SXSW and stars Anna Baryshnikov, Camila Mendes, Julia Fox, Owen Thiele, Benito Skinner, Gabbriette and Saweetie. Nastasya Popov directed the pic and penned the script.

“I’ve long admired Utopia’s eye for vibrant, distinctive storytelling, and I’m overjoyed to be joining the family,” said Popov. “We’re thrilled that audiences will get the chance to experience this wild ride of a comedy in a packed theater — and we guarantee it’ll be fun for the whole family, so bring everyone from your stylish grandmother to your chronically online little brother along.”

The film follows Baryshnikov as Margarita, an ambitious fashion designer who lives in a chaotic West Hollywood apartment with her Russian-Jewish family and enters a reality TV competition show called Slay, Serve, Survive in a desperate cash grab.

“Through Idiotka,...

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Amid a climate crisis that is seeing record heat temperatures broken around the globe, The Redford Center has announced the 12 filmmaking teams who are winners of its Environmental Impact Film grants for 2022-2023. The center — the environmental media nonprofit founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his late son James Redford — provides funding biannually to a select group of cinematic storytellers who focus on environmental justice, intersectional themes and solutions that improve the health of the planet.

“We view these artists as translators: humanizing the issues we so urgently need to address and giving voice to the frontline activists who are continually overlooked by the mainstream film and environmental sectors and who, quite frankly, are leading us out of the problem,” Jill Tidman, executive director of The Redford Center, tells The Hollywood Reporter of the winning teams, noting that the center is one of...

Exclusive: Samuel Goldwyn Film announced today that it has acquired North American rights to Casimir Nozkowski’s first feature film, The Outside Story. The film, starring Brian Tyree Henry, Sonequa Martin-Green, Sunita Mani and Olivia Edward, will premiere on-demand and digital on Apr. 30, 2021.

The deal was negotiated by Miles Fineburg on behalf of Samuel Goldwyn Films and Brian Newman of Sub-Genre Media on behalf of the filmmakers.

In The Outside Story, Henry stars as Charles Young, a broken-hearted video editor. Perceiving a betrayal of trust as a sign his girlfriend Isha (Martin-Green) is leaving him, Charles preemptively blows up his relationship and sequesters himself at home. The fates do not comply and Charles locks himself out of his apartment. Stumbling into a transformational, timely odyssey exploring his community, Charles meets a dynamic ensemble of previously avoided neighbors, who show him everyone’s got issues...

At the San Francisco Film Society’s Doc Stories, Samantha Power — aka President Barack Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — is a true star. “What a crowd,” she tweeted after a rousing standing ovation for Greg Barker’s HBO documentary “The Final Year,” which features her as part of Obama’s foreign policy team. “Huge thanks to SFFilm Doc Stories & to an incredibly engaged San Francisco audience who saw @thefinalyeardoc not as a retrospective, but as a call to action.”

The third annual Doc Stories (Nov. 2-5) was a rich weekend of nonfiction features and shorts that launched with the world premiere of Alex Gibney’s “Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge, Part I” (HBO) and closed with Chris Smith’s “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton” (Netflix).

It’s part of Sffilm executive director Noah Cowan’s...

At the San Francisco Film Society’s Doc Stories, Samantha Power — aka President Barack Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — is a true star. “What a crowd,” she tweeted after a rousing standing ovation for Greg Barker’s HBO documentary “The Final Year,” which features her as part of Obama’s foreign policy team. “Huge thanks to SFFilm Doc Stories & to an incredibly engaged San Francisco audience who saw @thefinalyeardoc not as a retrospective, but as a call to action.”

The third annual Doc Stories (Nov. 2-5) was a rich weekend of nonfiction features and shorts that launched with the world premiere of Alex Gibney’s “Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge, Part I” (HBO) and closed with Chris Smith’s “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton” (Netflix).

It’s part of Sffilm executive director Noah Cowan’s...

This year's Sffs Documentary Film Fund awards total $75,000 to support feature-length docs in postproduction. Esteemed past winners include Zachary Heinzerling's 2014 Oscar-nominated "Cutie and the Boxer," Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s 2013 Sundance winner "American Promise" and Jason Zeldes' "Romeo Is Bleeding," which just premiered at the Sf International Film Festival. The Fund has distributed over $450,000 to national filmmakers since 2011. The panelists who reviewed the 11 finalists’ submissions are Jennifer Battat, founder of the Jenerosity Foundation; Noah Cowan, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society; Lisa Kleiner-Chanoff, cofounder of Catapult Film Fund; filmmaker Dan Krauss; and Michele Turnure-Salleo, director of the Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program. Watch: Homegrown Bay Area Doc "Romeo Is Bleeding" Hits Sf Film Fest (Exclusive Clip) 2015 Documentary Film Fund Winners: "The Island...